Confronting the Abyss

We find the absent God of mystery once we abandon all our gods of false certainty.

Bernard McGinn (b. 1937) has been described as the leading living scholar on Christian Mysticism. He has written extensively on many topics related to Christian history and spirituality, and his nine volume Magnum Opus, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism is both an indispensable resource and a feast of wisdom and research in its own right.

If the modern consciousness of God is often of an absent God (absent though not forgotten for the religious person), many mystics seem almost to have been prophets of this in their intense realization that the ‘real God’ becomes a possibility only when the many false Gods (even the God of religion) have vanished and the frightening abyss of total nothingness is confronted. — Bernard McGinn

These words, from the introduction to volume 1 of The Presence of God, invite us into just how mysterious the contemplative life really is. To be a mystic means to abandon all false Gods — even the false Gods that often get promoted by those (in the churches and pulpits) who loudly claim to speak on behalf of this so-called God. Mystics know that the first step to truly encountering God means surrendering all our ideas, images, cherished beliefs, and prejudices that get in the way of truly encountering the divine. The problem: often when we manage to tear away everything that is “not-God” from our hearts and minds, all that seems to be left is “the frightening abyss of total nothingness.”

Eek!!!

Who wants to confront a “frightening abyss” (or any kind of abyss, for that matter)? This seems a long way away from the “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” that so many of us secretly long for in our spiritual life. We want to be comforted with a promise of eternal life, not challenged to trust a terrifying descent into … well, nothingness.

But this is precisely where the mystical, contemplative journey takes us. Into the cloud of unknowing, into the dark night of the soul, into the deep mystery… into the abyss.

McGinn calls it “frightening” and I would agree that it looks that way… from the outside. But from the inside, the descent into the abyss is nothing less than a dive into infinite love and compassion. We cannot control it, and all our false gods cannot survive it. But if we are willing to trust the Spirit of infinite mercy, we may find that confronting the abyss means opening our hearts and souls into infinite, everlasting grace.

Quotation source: Bernard McGinn, Foundations of Mysticism, p. xviii.