“Out of the depths I cry to you, O God”
~ Ps. 130: 1 ~

The Way of Descent

For as long as I can remember, I have been a lover of words. One of the words in my lexicon of favorites is the word spelunking. I like how it sounds and I like what it means. Spelunking is the act of exploring caves. It is, I think, a very important and instructive word for all who take the spiritual life seriously.

The signs of the time are such that I am led to believe we should retire, at least temporarily, the rather well-worn image of ascent and dare to reframe a spiritual life, whose trajectory is wisdom and compassionate love, so that it recognizes the significance of descent. In Religion Right, the spiritual life often was and still is portrayed as a superhuman Sisyphusian climb out of this base world to the distant celestial realm where God the overlord dwells on high. Sadly, the effort to “get it right” is as futile and misguided as the stairway to heaven is steep and daunting, and after all that, only to arrive at the pearly gates of a judging God who is stern and unmoved.

In Spirituality-Lite, the spiritual life becomes a way to rise above the mire and messiness of this earthly life. It evades or minimizes any sense of the gravitas of life which often makes daily living uncomfortable, difficult, unfair, excruciating, terrifying, or tragic. It knows little of descent and its means of airy travel is summed up in the lyrics of a popular song from the 1960’s:

We could float among the stars together, you and I
For we can fly we can fly
Up, up and away
My beautiful, my beautiful balloon
The world’s a nicer place in my beautiful balloon
It wears a nicer face in my beautiful balloon
We can sing a song and sail along the silver sky
For we can fly we can fly
Up, up and away
My beautiful, my beautiful balloon.*

Sadly, the effort to float above the fracas, while at times understandable, is equally futile and misguided, not to mention irresponsible. When the skies are full of thunder and lightning, the fall of our beautiful balloon is bound to be only a little less horrible than the landing.

Depth Theology

Increasingly dissatisfied with different brands of Religion Right and lacking respect for various versions of Spirituality-Lite, and with a full measure of the luck of the Irish, otherwise known as grace, I was fortunate in my mid-twenties to find my way to the work of Rabbi Abraham Heschel whose interest was not in systematic or scholastic theology but rather in what he called “depth theology.”

While theology offers a doctrine of God, depth theology is concerned with moments that are neither doctrine nor exclusively divine, but rather human and divine. Heschel believed theology suffered from a preoccupation with doctrine and the content of believing. In his collection of essays and talks The Insecurity of Freedom he writes: “Theology declares: depth theology evokes; theology demands believing and obedience: depth theology hopes for responding and appreciation.” He continues:

          Theology is like sculpture, depth theology like music. Theology is in the books; depth theology is in the hearts. The former is doctrine, the latter an event. Theologies divide us; depth theology unites us.
          Depth theology seeks to meet the person in moments in which the whole person is involved, in moments which are affected by all a person thinks, feels and acts. It draws upon that which happens to [humans] in moments of confrontation with ultimate reality. It is in such moments that decisive insights are born.

As a devout Hasidic Jew, Heschel was intimately familiar with the need and place of scripture, ritual, sacraments, dogma, and deeds. But he was also acutely aware of the inadequacy of our faith and “the incongruity of dogma and mystery.” He had little patience for religious smugness and self-certainty. He observed how over time religion failed to speak into and affect “the pretheological situation, the presymbolic depth of human existence.” Depth theology was Heschel’s attempt to redirect the focus, to recover the primal questions, and to explore the substratum and catalyzing situations which both precede and give rise to religious formulations and commitments of faith.

In addition to these primal intuitions and pretheological questions, Heschel responded to the urgent questions that were born in the realities of his time: the Vietnam War, racial unrest in America, and the persecution of Soviet Jews to name but three. Suffering the loss of family and friends in the Nazi enflamed holocaust and barely escaping himself, Heschel was acutely attuned to human anguish, injustice, and the moral failure and wicked vulgarity that give rise to them. Offering a theology that came forth from the depths of human experience, he was concerned about what it meant to live a life commensurate with being an image of God.

Spiritual Spelunking

To cultivate and live a life of spiritual depth means consciously to become a spiritual spelunker. It involves, to borrow Henri Nouwen’s evocative term from the upwardly mobile 1980’s, taking the path of “downward mobility.” It entails descending into the cave of the heart where we most directly encounter “moments of confrontation with ultimate reality” where “decisive insights are born.” Seasoned dwellers of the cave of the heart, both the mystic and the prophet know that it is in this cave where we become most completely and freely ourselves, become most aware of the extravagance of God’s love for us, become most aware of and concerned about others, and become most awakened to our sacred kinship with all the earth.

It is the role of spiritual leaders and guides to support others to take responsibility for their own spiritual lives and to resist the temptation toward Religion Right or Spirituality-Lite. Being serious about one’s spiritual life and “diving deeper” does not mean being chronically solemn, melancholic, depressed, negative, or doggedly pessimistic. Going deeper is not a negation of rising higher. An integral spirituality is not opposed to ascent, to exaltation, to humor, to joy, to praise. Earth and heaven forbid! As it is written in the Letter to the Ephesians:

When it says, “He ascended”, what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower parts of the earth? He who descended is the same one who ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things (4: 9-10).

But a healthy spirituality, which for Christians means a spirituality that is compatible with the way of Jesus, is unapologetically unaccepting of any ascent that is either a compulsion to “get it right” or a compulsion to “take flight” in order to escape that which is hard, painful, scary, or agonizing.

Spelunking Alone Together

It is important to remember that the specific nature, character, and dimensions of the downward journey to the cave of our heart and the cave itself are as profoundly unique to each one of us as is our physical heart which while being similar to all other human hearts is nonetheless utterly unique and singular. In The Human & the Holy community we gather to spelunk alone together and the uniqueness of each person’s path to the cave, when shared with and received reverently by others, en-courages all to faithfully walk into the depths where we will find our heart and the heart of God.

With love and respect,

Dan

* Up, Up, and Away by Jimmy Webb. Originally recorded by The Fifth Dimension.