The Road Not Taken — Staring into the Abyss

This past weekend, I was in my father’s house while I was in my Father’s house. That is to say, I went to virtual church from my parents’ home rather than mine. There is a story behind that, which I may get into and may not, depending on where the Spirit leads me, but first, let me explain where my spirit was on Sunday morning.

Ever since Memorial day, my own personal liturgical calendar has been stuck on a state that is always Holy Week but never (fully) Easter. I have been meditating each week on the Good Friday and Holy Saturday texts and how the people of America are recrucifying Jesus (cf. Hebrews 6:6) in the form of men like George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery — and women like Breonna Taylor. Last Sunday — Pentecost — I closed my Bible on the empty tomb and the terrified women, as described in the opening of Mark 16. I had felt terrified and grief stricken and not at all in a suitable mood to celebrate the resurrection.

This week, I felt a sense of mounting anticipation as Sunday approached. Was I going to read further in the narrative this week? Was I going to see the resurrected Jesus face to face (figuratively speaking)?

Saturday night had come. I was reading in Luke. I was particularly touched when Jesus admonished the women at the foot of the cross not to weep for him. Even while dying a brutal death, Jesus was concerned for the women who were mourning him. They were mourning him before he died, weeping as he hung on the tree.

I decided to scribe Luke 23 in entirety. The next day, I would scribe Luke 24 in entirety. I would walk with Jesus on the road to Emmaus — or so I thought.

I woke up on Sunday morning. Before I went downstairs, I spent some time in prayer, then dove in to start scribing Luke 24. I reached the point when Peter reached the tomb (accompanied by John, who apparently outran him, although Luke, from his less self-interested perspective, does not record this fact). I left Peter at the empty tomb and went downstairs to get breakfast. I wasn’t ready to meet Jesus face to face yet. I felt I needed a pause. I needed to dwell on the emptiness of the tomb, to dwell in the feelings of uncertainty.

At breakfast, I got into a longish conversation with my Dad and my sister, before retreating upstairs again to get dressed for church. I wouldn’t have needed to get dressed up for a youtube livestream, but I wanted to — to celebrate Jesus’ resurrection, which Christians commemorate every Sunday.

However, this weekend, my father’s church wasn’t commemorating the resurrection. The church was commemorating the events leading up to the crucifixion, not because the pastor wanted to denounce modern-day lynchings — he has the blindness of Niebuhr, as described in Chapter 2 of the Cross and the Lynching Tree, when it comes to the recrucifixion of Christ — but because he was he was in the midst of a sermon series on the Apostles’ Creed and had just arrived at the line, “suffered under Pontius Pilate.” God bless evangelicals and their (our?) sermon series and snappy three part sermons.

Before this tripartite wonder of a sermon, the pastor sang some hymns, and we sang with him from our collapsing basement couch. One of the hymns was “Ah, Holy Jesus,” the Good Friday hymn which I had posted what was now over a week ago in a blundering confessional gesture. I say blundering, because, while I was posting this hymn — recording and lyrics — to confess my complicity in systemic racism, I had copied the lyrics of the hymn without reading them in entirety, only to discover later that the third verse contained the line, “The slave hath sinned, and the Son hath suffered.” Given the history of slavery in the United States, I really didn’t think it was at all appropriate to keep this verse on my timeline. I had removed the text of the third verse, which was already omitted from the recording I had chosen. I had repented in dust and ashes, and had kept silent on social media for the rest of the week. I had felt that my blundering self was wholly unqualified to speak to the continued racial conflicts occurring in the US and the very important questions of how our law enforcement and justice systems needed to be reformed. Going into that weekend with my parents, I had resolved to avoid logging in altogether — not even to lurk.

Sometimes tuning out the chatter of my online hivemind can make me much more attentive to what is going on in my heart and spirit (admittedly a luxury which I am very privileged to have when some are much lower on Maslow’s hierarchy at the moment), and, looking in, what I found was that I still wasn’t ready to celebrate Jesus’ resurrection. I wasn’t ready to look, even figuratively, on the resurrected Jesus when George Floyd was sleeping in the ground, or, maybe, crying out from under the altar in the throne room of God, asking, along with countless others, “how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?”

I think this thought — the thought that George Floyd would be still waiting for justice and for resurrection — never really vanished, but it came again to the forefront when singing this hymn (choosing to remain silent for the third verse, even though the pastor sang it) and listening to the ensuing sermon.

As he preached on John 19 (specifically vv. 1–16), the pastor observed that Pilate was unwittingly insightful in his declaration “Behold, the man.” (In fact, Pilate was unwittingly quoting Zechariah 6:12, part of a Messianic prophecy, although the pastor did not point this out.) The pastor himself was unwittingly insightful, in speaking of the scourging and rejection of Jesus this particular weekend.

America has done so much to reject Black Americans and Black culture. Black voices are silenced. Black bodies are slain. The nation is in mourning. I am in mourning.

I did not find myself unready to scribe the resurrection narratives because of the sermon I heard this weekend. Rather, the sermon reflected what was already in my heart, the stories that have guided my thoughts over the past two weeks.

This weekend, I did not go to Emmaus. I have instead been practicing the absence of God. By this, I mean the kind of reflection that C.S. Lewis describes in the last chapter of The Four Loves (the only good chapter, in my opinion, but that is a topic for another essay). Lewis writes:

“If we cannot “practice the presence of God”, it is something to practice the absence of God, to become increasingly aware of our unawareness till we feel like men who should stand beside a great cataract and hear no noise, or like a man in a story who looks in a mirror and finds no face there, or a man in a dream who stretches out his hand to visible objects and gets no sensation of touch. To know that one is dreaming is to be no longer perfectly asleep.”

I have spent a lot of time this weekend staring into an abyss, a place seemingly devoid of God. However, thanks to God’s omnipresence there is no such thing as a true void. When you stare into the void, the void stares back at you.

Yes, I am quoting Nietzsche (with modifications).

Nietzsche’s famous declaration about the abyss was preceded by a caution that “he who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster” (Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886), Chapter IV. Apophthegms and Interludes, §146).

Frederick Dolan, an Emeritus Professor of Berkeley explains the monstrous transformation as something that can happen to “the man of ressentiment” who is “convinced that his various disabilities are caused by someone or something out to get him, and that if only the scourge were eliminated from the world all would be well.” Dolan continues,

“If this is your attitude, […] you’re going to get really good at ferreting out the nasty parts of life, wherever they might be hiding, and you’ll uncover one hitherto unrecognized injustice after another: first racism, then structural racism, then elitism, then heteronormativism, ableism, lookism, microagression…. You may get to the point where you can see nothing but monsters.”

One thing I have noticed while looking into the abyss is the presence of monsters in my own psyche: implicit bias, apathy, a craven inability to speak out against systemic racism. Introspection is scary. If I were drawing out a map of my mind, it would almost certainly bear the old saying, “here be dragons”…except that the monsters in my mind aren’t nearly as magnificent as dragons. They are tiny, sniveling, pathetic creatures, the kind of creatures one only hopes will melt in a deluge or turn to stone at the rising of the sun.

Sniveling creatures, though pathetic, can still be scary, especially in the dark. However, David’s prayer in Psalm 139 comes to mind: “Even the darkness is as light to you.” Even though my psyche may seem like dark, uncharted territory, God knows every single last detail of my convictions and motivations. After all, to be loved be God is to be known by Him. Since He loves me, He reveals these details in a kind way, a way that allows me the possibility of continuing to look into the abyss.

Even though I didn’t walk to the road to Emmaus, I was still walking with Jesus, not because I sought him — I sought to get away — but because he was seeking me. I will continue walking, and I will circle back to the Passion and Resurrection narratives next weekend.

Next weekend in Emmaus — God willing and my heart consenting.