The Abyss

After Rich Mullins died, fellow singer-songwriter Amy Grant had this to say about her friend:

I think about the shoeless man taken to an extreme. You know, most of us love the first spring day that you can kick your shoes off. But nobody had calluses on their feet like he did. And he was that way with spiritual things too. Most of us, we kinda have a brush with God, and we're enamored and frightened. But it's always kinda that barely leaning in. And Rich just had a way of running headlong into the unknown that was frightening to most of us. But in his own unique way, it seemed he always was able to find the edge and look into the abyss and come back and write a song about it and tell us what he'd seen.

Joseph Conrad in his novella The Heart of Darkness considered the depths of the human heart. Conrad saw three characters there.  Kurtz exemplified the extreme selfishness and utter depravity of man, who cried out at his soul’s death, “the horror, the horror.” And then there was his Intended: “She had a mature capacity for fidelity, for belief, for suffering.” She saw no wrong in her evil lover and could not face the truth of who he was. She worshiped him. The third character is Marlowe who takes this journey into the heart of darkness of self. He sees there “the fascination of the abomination – you know. Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.” But here is what I believe allows Marlowe to escape the abyss, as Kurtz was not.  Marlowe says:

I would not have gone so far as to fight for Kurtz, but I went for him near enough to lie. You know I hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavor of mortality in lies which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world – what I want to forget….I became in an instant as much of a pretence as the rest of the bewitched pilgrims. (p. 30)

Theology of the Body shows us the heart of man and it can be a horror. It can exist for self or, similarly, it can worship other humans. But we see a deeper truth there also: “In the beginning, God.” He didn’t make all men pure, but as we’ve learned about original solitude,  He did make us bent outwards. He made us with the capacity for devotion to God and others—only through leaning into this can we escape the horror. But still it was “not good.” And God gave us the capacity for original unity—another human to sacrifice our self-centered lives for and with. The together-path of this sacrifice is seen in original nakedness—holding fast transparency and truth in the inward parts and clinging to the greatest Lover of all.

Friday He saw the death-abyss

dove descending

and breathed out that Holy Ghost.