Requiem “for the God . . . [Who] No Longer Exists”
[John Welch, OCarm, When Gods Die: An Introduction to John of the Cross. NY: Paulist Press, 1990.]
[In 1991 Thomas Keating, OCSO, sixty-eight and on the threshold of what Juan de la Cruz called the Dark Night of the Spirit, wrote the poem “Twilight of the Self” (#4 of an octet entitled “The Secret Embrace”). The poem concludes with these lines: “For the God I thought I knew / No longer exists.” (See Cynthia Bourgeault’s Thomas Keating: The Making of a Modern Christian Mystic. Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2024, p. 74).]
O Lover,
I have never before raised a lamentation, whether in thought or word, on the occasion of Your rumored demise. Pardon: the demise of who I had thought You to be. And yet here I am doing precisely that. Indeed, I now recognize that relinquishing constructs of You has been incremental, protracted, lonely, occasionally excruciating, and still incomplete. But it was Keating’s couplet which intensified what I now intuit as Your drawing long aborning, and it is this which I acknowledged to You.
My antecedents for Keating’s “good trouble,” to pilfer John Lewis, were both early and edgy. In early 1965 I read John A. T. Robinson’s Honest to God which first confronted me with the god-talk of Paul Tillich: “the God above the God of theism”; “the God who appears when God has disappeared”; God as “Ground of Being” rather than a being, however greatest. In my 1972 dissertation on Bonhoeffer’s Ethics I revisited such issues, but generally centered on the theme of “religionless Christianity.” In the 1990s I encountered related implications in Juan de la Cruz’s transition from the kataphatic to the apophatic, from You as dispenser of consolations to You as the Abyss of the Dark Night of Spirit. Yet later the cases for unítas and theósis in the early Renaissance Beguines and Eckhartians raised major implications for language about You. Most recently, my “trouble” has been exacerbated by Keating, often via Bourgeault.
Throughout the above evolution in my view of You, but particularly beginning with Juan, I became increasingly aware of a tension. On the one hand, most of the above pattern found me increasingly in the precincts of what I call the “minority report” of Christian theology, a place to which I warmed only gradually and ambivalently. I now see that I feared that supplantation of my ideas of You might result in the death of my faith. On the other hand, I was simultaneously finding myself increasingly aware of the relentless drawing of Your Love. The Christ’s embodiment that You are Love Itself in passages like the parable of the Loving Father (Lk 15:11-32) and the Synoptics’ Great Commandment was now being enriched both across two millennia of Christian mystics and my own experience.
In the face of critiques that language like “the God beyond god” was impersonal and a syncretistic abstraction, I found myself longing for You and wanting to reciprocate Your Love more purely and unconditionally. With a little help from my friends (e.g., Bourgeault of late), the rumored incompatibility between You as Eckhart’s Grunt (“Ground”) and thus “No-thing,” for example, and the experience of Your Love as relational, personal, intimate, and tsunamic, continued to fall away. Yes, opening myself to You beyond my idea of You, while intimidating, has also become both unavoidable and recurringly sweet.
For me the title of the concluding opera in Wagner’s Ring (Götterdämmerung [“Twilight of the Gods”]), not unlike Juan’s writings on the Dark Nights, repeatedly hints of the painfulness of relinquishing my fabricated gods. It is that loss of which Keating, still years before his nanogenarian apotheosis, writes in his “Twilight” poem. That costliness and the non-negotiability of continuing to respond thus to Your drawing, these I have found to be subject to my own consent. Here and now in Your Presence I respond to both, employing the memorable word of Dag Hammarskjöld: “Yes!”
