O Abyss Beneath, Beyond, and Within All Flux 

[“Out of the depths I have cried to You, O Lord. Lord, hear my cry!” (Ps 130:1)]

O Lover,

While preparing for Mass on the 10th Sunday of ordinary time I was channeled by St. Olaf College’s “Sing for Joy” FM program to the “Out of the Deep” segment of John Rutter’s autobiographical choral Requiem. Upon hearing the text of that piece (Ps 130) an hour later in the Basilica liturgy, I detected the scent of synchronicity. Since then the plot has been thickening further thanks to Roland Murphy’s take on the term “depths” in the Psalter: “Chaos and the sphere of death and the nether world, away from God.” In short, I had collided with what is becoming my image for the day and the era.

Too much death, there has been too much death! I have recently traveled to Pennsylvania for the reunion of approximately thirty graying Mennonite Central Committee volunteers in the Middle East across the last sixty-five years. The memories arising from that aggregate were in constant dialogue with the present horrors in Palestine and Israel.  Furthermore, this last week I learned of the deaths of two important sojourners in the backstretch of my own life: Charles (“Chez”) Moline, my Lutheran pastor (1971-76) in Jerusalem’s Old City; and the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann via whose The Crucified God and subsequent lectureship at the seminary where I was teaching You drew me through and beyond a precarious Central America experience in the early 1980s. More recently the deaths of others of my peers continue relentlessly as we octogenarians, harrowed by chrónos, actuate that “all flesh is grass” (Is 40:6). Add the most recent massacre in Gaza and and our own ominous domestic stupor . . . well, You get the picture: “[seemingly] . . . away from God.”

So much of what I experience these days appears antithetical to You, O Lover. The almost human voice of the solo cello’s obligato in Rutter’s “Out of the Deep,” oxymoronically yet hauntingly both Gregorian and modern, turns out to be my own. Indeed, I am a moan, a lamentation, a dirge, the raw and lacerated cry of one in the clutches of inundation. There is a train wreck in Your garden, O Viríditas; trouble has seemingly proliferated, erupting now in large and frightening clumps. And I am in straits . . . .

But wait! Even this bleak tableau, one seemingly in the tradition of You being addressed with “My God! My God! Why have You abandoned me?” (Mt 27:46), need not be the final word. Rather than absence, abandonment or deist exit, are You not precisely the Depth of Reality Itself, You to whom “darkness and light are alike” (Ps 139:12), You of the irrevocable Self-binding from the Flaring Forth into the “eternity of the eternities” (Apoc 1:18)? Does not the conclusion of Psalm 130 include the words: “For with [You] there is lovingkindness [hésed]” (vs 7)? Do I not look in vain for asterisks of qualification in the margin of Julian of Norwich’s “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well”? Is not the final segment of Rutter’s Requiem the Lux Aeterna? Do You not eat clouds for breakfast?

Or to borrow yet another tack, why do I resist this cosmic recycling encompassing both life and death which I suspect to be Your M.O.? Why this “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” (Dylan Thomas [1914-53])? Might my offendedness in fact be an index, often unbeknownst to me, of my astonishment at, and gratitude for, the shimmering preciousness of all You have wrought? In the words of The Hound of Heaven by Francis Thompson (1859-1907): “Is my gloom, after all, Shade of [Your] hand, outstretched caressingly?” 

So then, not knowing of what all I speak, I choose yet again both to name and to trust You, O Depth, O Abyss beneath, beyond, and within all flux.