Depth

"If I wish to preserve myself in faith I must constantly be intent upon holding fast the objective uncertainty, so that in the objective uncertainty I am out 'upon the seventy thousand fathoms of water,' and yet believe."

—Søren Kierkegard

A little over nine years ago, I moved to Los Angeles. Sometime during my first year there, as I was struggling to find my bearings, I wandered into a bookstore. In the "local interest" section, my eyes fell upon a book with a loud yellow color entitled Depth Takes a Holiday: Tales from Lesser Los Angeles. Something about that title, with its tongue in cheek celebration of the shallowness that everyone thinks of when they think of Los Angeles, and the fact that I had come here to teach spirituality—a subject with depth written all over it—made me laugh out loud. I bought the book of course. Its wry send-up of the shallowest place in America helped me begin to locate myself in my new home. It also helped me, in ways the author might have found surprising, to begin understanding the spiritual climate of the place. Nor was this book all about surface and image and ambition. It described a place of endless creativity, a sharp sense of irony, diverse cultures clashing and morphing into something as yet to be determined, a certain quality of light. With the help of her pointed observations about the shifting currents of life in Los Angeles, I began to discover the particular character—the soul—of this wildly beautiful, diversely populated and politically contested place. I began to feel its life, its depth.

How often this seems to happen, the unexpected appearance of depth in our lives. Just when we have decided that there isn't any, we begin to see beneath the surface to what lurks below. Was it there all the time? Is it just a matter of a shift of perspective within us? Or does reality itself ebb and flow, like the tides lapping up against the shore?

Questions about depth surface everywhere in the Christian spiritual tradition. How far down into ourselves, our world, God, are we called to go? Why is our experience of ourselves often so impossible to fathom? What is this remarkable, endless joy arising within us?

Often these questions arise in response to an experience of profound disorientation, when all that had previously held one afloat seems to have disappeared. "I have taken the pit as my home/and made my bed in the dark," declares Job (his companions, in a telling failure of nerve, remain steadfastly on the surface, far removed from the terrors of this dark place). Or think of Augustine, long tormented by his insistence on remaining at the outer edges of his experience, far from his heart's desire, finally moved by the depth of his unhappiness to relinquish his proud defiance and fall into the arms of God.

In the New Testament, Jesus asks his readers whether they are prepared to drink from the living waters that run deep within them. It is a difficult and demanding question, for it carries with it the challenge to let go completely. In the letter to the Philippians, Paul reminds his readers that Jesus did not stand apart from this challenge, but opened himself to it in a radical and costly gesture of relinquishment. This is the meaning of his kenosis, or self-emptying, a letting go of who he was in God to descend into the abyss of human suffering. Here, depth becomes compassion, the means to redemption.

But must we always plumb the depths? Must we continuously open ourselves to radical self-emptying and relinquishment? Are there times when such responses to our experience are not simply difficult but impossible? Barbara Newman considers such questions in her honest reckoning with the ambiguous language of rapture ('overcome with wonder?' or 'raped, enslaved?') in John Donne's Holy Sonnet 14. Anthropologist Michael Jackson wrestles...