The Decisive Turn
(2/22/23)
[“And I fear God no more; I go forward to wander forever / in a wilderness made of His infinite mercy alone” (Jessica Powers, OCDS, SPJP, 1).]
O Lover,
Over the years I have periodically revisited this question: what has been the major, the decisive transition of my life? Having long since become aware that life is developmental, that change is a constant, and that I have experienced that change more as growth than as status quo maintenance and/or entropy, I have sought to name the core, the definitive (for me) dimension of that greening. How do I communicate to others, as I am seeking to do in this post, that shift which is seemingly the undergirding substratum of all else?
Whether for better or worse, I have been engaged in varied aspects of faith and/or spirituality across my entire life-span, my own responses including seasons of assent, indifference, reaction, gratitude, and amazement. As such, my introductory question has almost always had to do with You, O Lover, in one way or another: it has been You with whom I have had to do. Whether to my consternation or my rapture, You have in one way or another been seemingly “hemming me in” (Ps 139:5).
Thus responding to my original question requires a penultimate one: who is the “You” with whom I, a la Jacob (Gen 32:24-32), have repeatedly found myself wrestling? From my earliest moments of awareness of You there was the seeming giveness of immutability, the self-evidency of fixity. My solid Mennonite moorings and the perceived settledness of the Eisenhower era were among the elements shaping my cosmos. It is thus not surprising that both You and our perceiving of You—the two then being synonymous—were presumed to be static. After all, “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Heb 13:8) was ultimately a statement about You. Furthermore, I early on presumed Your “sameness” to include remote holiness, unfulfillable demand, and terrifying judgment.
My transition into theological studies would in time challenge both the immutability (change) and impassibility (feeling, suffering) notions of You. In 1965 John Cobb’s Whiteheadian process theology might have been the first to throw down the gauntlet regarding my perception of You as both inaccessibly static and juridically punitive. I recall a night in 1969 when I, standing on my bed and emboldened by new-found alcohol and profanity, desperately cried out that if You loved me it would have to be “as is.” The latter experience unfolded amid a course on Luther where You were ambushing me with a vision of Your grace hitherto vastly too good to be true. Only in retrospect is it clear that You had long since taken me up on my “as is” dare.
In the second half of my life awareness of Your exquisite beauty, gravity-like pull, and relentless love would blossom and occasionally deposit me somewhere beyond both euphoria and discombobulation. Rather than remote, I was increasingly coming to experience You as the immanent Depth (Eckhart’s Grunt) of the cosmos, Your venue; as a participant in all the suffering in the creation (Sölle’s “no alien sorrow”); as the viridítas (a la Hildegard) ubiquitously characterizing Your Grand Mystérium (Eph 1:10). Whereas I had experienced You as terrifying in the stolid and secure years of my youth, my present anecdotage was paradoxically laced throughout with a longing for union with You despite my crisis-ridden world, society and church. While I experience this shift as simultaneously ironic, oxymoronic, and counter-intuitive, most of all I simply revel in it.
It is thus not surprising that this turn in my experiencing of You has necessarily impacted my perception of the cosmos, Your finite garden, of which I am a part. Not only has Your “plot” become more immeasurable, scientifically more mesmerizing, aesthetically more enchanting, and sacramentally more “pregnant with [You],” in the words of Angela of Foligno, but, most importantly, it is ultimately a benevolent venue harking back to Julian’s “all will be well” as well as the peaceful garden imagery in both Genesis (2:8-17) and the Apocalypse (e.g., 5:11-14; 22:1-9). Contrary to any empirical assessment these days, the Risen Christ repeatedly articulated, and articulates, Your “fear not!”
The decisive turn in my life encompasses all of this, and vastly more. Indeed, flowing out of You and enveloping the entire cosmos, it is the decisive, and irrevocable, transition in my life. Counter to restorationist claims of the immutability of dogma, the Rubicon I continue to cross re-presents the Christian faith itself as an unfolding discovery, an ever-expanding exploration, a pilgrimage into Reality itself who is You, O Kenotic Lover. Transformed images of You invariably result in the metamorphosis of both the cosmos and the faith itself. To allow You, the Great Iconoclast, to shatter our fabricated household deities can be the first step toward a new perception of . . . everything, of what beguine Hadewijch of Brabant refers to as the “Totality.”
In the words of Discalced Carmelite poet Jessica Powers: “I fear [You] no more.”
