The ‘Abysmal’ Is Key to Passion’s Spirtual Destiny

“How great are your works, O God; how very deep are your designs” [Psalms, 91, 6]

1,

One of the things that has become clearer and clearer down the years is how important passion’s ‘deepest black’ is to passion’s ‘truest red.’

Without the most fathomless black abyss, we do not reach the most upright pillar of red fire. Without the plunging into the abysmal, passion never becomes in the end a love ‘greater than good and deeper than evil.’ Or to put this in another way= without plunging into the pit, the furnace, the void, of ‘a season in hell’, passion when it returns to the world never becomes given over to Redemption as well as Righteousness.

This point about the necessary connection of pathos and thymos, or of grief and fire, is not at all clear to most people, whether non passionate, pretending to be passionate, genuinely passionate..

The ‘normal’ people who never put their head over the parapet, but treat life as a game to be played by sticking to the rules, might like to see the heroism of passion depicted in films, or in a video game, but they know it is not for them. They dismiss passion’s way of living, its foolishly risk-taking and insanely generous action, as way beyond human flesh. It is romanticised, it is idealised, it is too extreme. It is best left in stories, to entertain and distract the masses. A few deluded people believe their ‘thrusting’ egoic ambition, ‘unrestrained’ lustful sex, or ‘correct’ self-righteous judgementalism, qualify as passion; none of these things is passionate in the least. The term ‘passion’ is even used in advertising to try to add gravitas to a product — “we are passionate about X, Y, or Z” — or to those who buy it — “you can be passionate if you consume X, Y, Z.” The vast majority of human beings are docile sheep. There are top and bottom sheep. But none of these are passionate, and they know perfectly well ‘if push comes to shove’ that is so. Hidden among the sheep are a few noble hearts who show some passion in their living, but they are often afraid to step up, as it would bring social disapproval, even banishment.

The people who see themselves as passionate, and announce it to others, are often just acting out narcissistic pathology. Their so-called ‘passion’ is a badge of identity they wear vain-gloriously, to brag to others in order to convince themselves. Heinz Kohut has given a sympathetic yet incisive account of such ‘heroic grandstanding’, or ‘posturing as a hero.’ Cultural images, symbolic and archetypal, are easily drafted in as masks or shields to make up for the absence of the heart needed to live passion for real. People nowadays talk glibly of being a shaman, a warrior, or anything grand and powerful they fancy, but this is only to shore up their weak, and shattered, sense of underlying identity by resort to a made up mighty and invulnerable overlying identity. It is like a child buying different outfits from a shop. One day you are dressed up as this hero, another day you are dressed up as that hero. You can change identity as easily as changing clothes — because that is all your identity is. A show, for you vis a vis others.

Yet, even among persons who are living passionately, doing what only passion can do, there may be a clinging to the red of zeal in order to avoid the black of tears. Why is it that the red must be extinguished in the black, before it can be resurrected and reborn in a new way of flaming up and out into the world? This paradox, which hits as a reversal, is often neither understood nor accepted even by the truly passionate.

These burning ones are ready, willing, and able to be heroic in the red – a person of great heart has self-control, bravery, and generosity, say the Lakota – but enduring patiently in the black, as it shatters all their hope, and destroys all their strength, throwing them into deeps of radical apprehension, anguish, agony, of heart, can prove ‘a bridge too far.’ Passion is about ‘fighting the good fight’, doing what seems impossible to those who follow the usual human triumvirate of reason, emotion, sensation, as their guide to conduct. Only passion has the muscle to go the extra mile; this is why persons sincere in passion are both respected and feared by more ordinary mortals who count cost and calculate benefit before they commit to action. The passionate keep going when everyone else has given up and given in; they do not give up and they do not give in.

None the less, even the passionate, indeed especially the passionate, are stopped dead in their tracks, and turned inside out and upside down, when the Daemonic seizes them, and bites into their living quick, inflicting a savage and clean wound..

Consequently, if you push youthful and even middle aged passion far enough, you hit the Jewish ‘wailing wall’ where all passion in all persons inevitably fails, comes unstuck, crashes. This crisis is the turning point in the way of passion, or it is the end point. In the Chinese ‘Book of Changes’, it is called “The Shock of Fate.”

The Jewish David — a lover, poet, musician, prophet, warrior, and what the Celts would call ‘high king’ — cries from this deep place where all is lost, where it is all over, repeatedly in the Psalms= “deep cries to deep.” Such depth is never embraced consciously and willingly. It is not possible to reach depth through any moral or ascetic ‘suffering that is chosen.’ Neither voluntary self-disciplining nor voluntary abstinence can take us deeper into the heart. This depth is only reached by the ‘suffering that is unchosen’, the resisted and denied, the evaded and fled, suffering.

The suffering that befalls us like a fate we would never willingly choose and from which we can never get free..

The suffering that is the deal breaker..

The suffering that profits nothing, and makes no sense, even on the irrational level where passion takes its stand..

There comes a point — or a punctuated series of points — where even the faith of passion’s leap into the unknown falters. The collapse of passion’s irrational urge, its intention and energy that pushes outward from a mysterious inward source never questioned whilst it works, is devastating for the passionate. The passionate ‘throw their bread on the water’, taking the chance most conventional people would never even consider= but if what comes back to you is just soggy bread sinking under its own weight, what then? This hurts those relative few who give their heart to existence far more than it would bother the vast majority who have learned how to get rid of any heart for existence from early on.

The blow of fate that savagely injures passion is more incomprehensible to the passionate than to those who are all too ready to mouth ‘I told you so’ from a position of safety.

The Daemonic wound digs in and goes deep..

The passionate are those who fight for justice, those who step up chivalrously in a host of costly situations, embracing sacrifice as the price of doing what is righteous, truthful, just; and for a time they experience, as their only intrinsic reward, the powerful flickering of passion’s red flame– the warm fire of love that starts as childlike enthusiasm and journeys toward adult commitment and engagement. Yet even the warrior who is the most fierce in dedication and unwavering in strength cannot reach passion’s real, and spiritual, destiny unless they meet pitiless failure and fall into abject dereliction.

This hits most people in their early to late middle years, when the complexity and difficulty of ‘doing anything for the sake of the world’ assaults them with disillusioning force. Many of the people living passionately up until this point bail out when the sheer human impossibility of doing what cries out to be done overwhelms them.

Some of the burning ones who do not bail out nevertheless only keep going in the red by denial of the black beneath their feet; these persons end up lying about the cowardly times when passion abandoned them and they acted badly. The red is sustained, but it becomes more and more forced, more and more desperate. The person seems dishonest, because they have to edit out of their glorious story of battles and victories the defeats, and especially the defeats coming from inside them when the floor boards gave way and they could no longer stand upright. Such persons end up with so much black chasing at the heels of their red, even they begin to wonder which side they are on, and for whom they are really working: the Truth they say they serve, or the Lie they often enact without wanting to do so. The warrior who cannot face the long shadow cast by the black creeping into his own heart – trying always to keep running ahead of it — risks having to ‘act out’ that shadow in all his deeds; in this way, a noble intentionality is undermined by an ignobility that intrudes..

Some unwilling to pass from the red into the black sustain this position by subtly shifting passion away from a heart driven action into a love of principles in the sky to be practiced on the ground. This keeps you ‘up’, so you avoid the deeps, but it renders far more shallow what passion can achieve in its action.

Heart action has to shift from heaven above to the abyss below. Ideals, principles, visions, are not enough to sustain action that gets more and more difficult in the compromised and inter-laced contingencies of this world. The heart is deep; the heart is not height oriented. It is of no interest to the life of heart that St Paul, and many other mystics down the ages all over the globe, ascended into the third, sixth, seventh, heaven far above, and met God in the heights. This ‘heavenly’ experience of the supreme and overarching reality of the divine, as St Paul realised — but many mystics receiving revelation do not realise — limits and even distorts the way of heart. The ‘dark inexplicable pain’ drags us down into the foundations of the heart, where it becomes make or break for the ‘fundamental’ change in heart promised from olden times by Yahweh to the Jewish prophets. The suffering we do not want, and the depth we do not embrace without being forced down into it, is the dark gateway to a ‘profound’ – not ‘exalted’ — breakthrough in heart. This is what Judaism began, and Christianity should build on and push to the end of the line.

2,

Yet all the burning ones who are also fated to become the grieving ones ask the same unanswered question from the God of the heartbreak, the Daemonic God.

Why, if we serve the dragon with heroism, does he burn us to a crisp? Indeed, it is stranger than that. Why does the dragon burn those who serve him far worse than those who oppose him?

The answer will be no comfort to you.

The dragon burns those who serve him so that, by dying in the abyss, they may be raised to serve him with a whole heart.

This answer is no comfort to you.

The dragon is harder on those he has chosen to become dragons not for his sake but for the sake of the world. The Daemonic is hardest on those it has chosen, and so if you start in the red but bail out on the black when it arrives, this means you do not believe in your own heart. If the Daemonic keeps hammering you, it is because God believes your heart can go all the way.

Thus rejoice and even laugh when the Daemonic goes on blasting you, but weep and sober up when the Daemonic withdraws. God forces no one to do anything. If the Wound of Fate is withdrawn from your life, and your season in hell is prematurely ended, it is because God has decided to respect your No.

For now, at least..

If the Daemonic Shock of Fate resumes, then it is because God is respecting the deeper Yes beyond your No.

The Daemonic believes in us, and trusts our heart, as we do not; the Daemonic knows our heart, seeing it for what it is, as we cannot.

Our heart can change, deeply. It can never be counted out. It can always come back.

There is a turnaround in existence that makes it possible to turn around in the heart. The Wound of the Daemonic is thus a far greater blessing, a far greater befriending, a far greater ultimate rejoicing, than any heavenly experience, or revelation, can bestow.

The choice to go all the way and acquire a singular heart, rather than remaining half hearted, is the choice to go with the Daemonic’s perception of us rather than going with our own perception of us.

We judge on externals, superficially, but God sees the heart.

3,

Depth and Truth of heart= the two sides of passion.

The depth of the heart is called, in the Chinese Book of Changes, ‘the Abysmal’, and its symbol is the water that flows through a ravine. The truth of the heart is called, in the I Ching, ‘the Clinging’, and its symbol is the Fire that flames up from the wood on which it is kindled.

Passion is always, from start to finish, two-sided; to mix Chinese with Hebrew, the Abysmal and the Cleaving.

Once ‘the day of trouble’ in the life of passion arrives, the black and the red have a new dynamic.

The red crashing down into the black is crucial, because there is a change in heart that can only occur in that deep place where we are “fearfully and wonderfully made”– and remade. Only in that abysmal mystery occurs the change that gives rebirth to a new red of passion, a passion that returns to its old calling of truth in a new way. To put it simply, whereas before Truth meant righteousness, after the change in heart in its Depth, there arises a new righteousness conjoined with redemption. This is the Sword and Cross of Christ.

This change happens in Yahweh’s heart, not only in humanity’s heart.

There is no suggestion here of the Gnostic, and Luciferian, doctrines of the divinity having to evolve [such as is evident in the hysteria of Jung’s ‘Answer To Job’] to become more humane towards humanity. Rather, once Yahweh has established for the human heart the truth of justice and righteousness, he can then bring the human heart deeper to a new land wherein the truth of justice and righteousness is ‘crucified’, and by being crucified, is ‘reversed’, and by being reversed, is able to stand upon a groundless ground, and act differently from there. The action that is Redemptive conjoins the action that is Righteous. Justice is always partnered by Mercy, Kindness, Compassion [‘hesed’] from the earliest times, but is now joined by Forgiveness; the Sword that separates truth from falsity is joined by the Cross that pays for everyone, true and false no different.

In the ravine of tears, we change in that we mourn no longer just for our ruined life, but we are initiated into and mourn for the ruined life of all humanity. We experience the suffering of all humans and creatures and things as our own suffering. Thus, in the pillar of fire, suffering from the world changes into suffering for the redeeming of the world.

4,

You will never explain this to a Jew, Christian, Muslim, who aspires to ascend up to God, and sees existence as only being directed, guided, commanded, by God from on high, above to below. The God who suffers with us, in the Old Testament, and the God who suffers for us, in the New Testament, is as inexplicable to lovers of the inviolability of heaven as the black pain that inaugurates God’s down coming, and ‘not finding Adam on earth, descending into Hell to release the prisoner by buying, at ultimate cost, his freedom’ [Easter Saturday service].

Given Yeshua is the Mashiach, then he is no mere prophet, nor any mere priest; the Messiah is a spiritual reality sui generis, and by no means simply the continuation of Jewish priesthood or yet another Jewish prophet. David at one point does describe the Messiah as an unusual kind of priest, not the traditional priesthood; and though prophetic inspiration can be ascribed to the Messiah, this spiritual figure has never appeared in the world before, he is new and unique, and utterly special, because he is commissioned by God as the Redeemer of humanity and everything. The Jewish prophets foretell and describe him, but know he is more than, and vastly different from, any of them. David says of him, “a man is coming whose heart is deep” [Psalms, 63, Septuagint]. This is arguably the single most important [short hand] description of the Redeemer in all of Jewish Tradition. The Messianic Reality is the divine heart in the human heart, and its task is to suffer the human heart to redeem it as the vessel of the divine heart. This is a theme of embodiment of the divine in the human [Incarnation of Christ], and sacrificial suffering by the divine for the human [Cross of Christ].

Thus the prophets describe the Messiah as a King who is Spirit-Bearing. Never has there been such a Kingship, nor has there been such a Spirit, at work in the world. This is a new kind of Kingship, and a new kind of Spirit, prefigured by the old, but never actualised until the Messiah has come.

This Jewish Messiah has no calling toward the ontological height. He is far from Moses. Like David, his calling is to the existential depth.

Do not confuse the spirituality of the mountain ‘above’ with the spirituality of the abyss ‘below.’ You can argue there was a necessity in returning to the mountain to relearn basics, before plunging down into the abyss. Yes, this is how Jewish religious history went. Yet Moses is secondary, not primary. Jewish religion began Daemonically with its three founding existential heroes= Abraham [faith in God as making a leap into the abyss], Jacob [honest contention with God], and Job [innocent suffering allowed by God]. Even the Adam and Eve story of human origins is existential, for God places in humanity the two hearts, greater [flesh] and lesser [stone], by which we are conflicted and among which we must choose in order to take a stand on the one or the other. But after the lengthy captivity in Egypt, the primal existential religion was lost, or went underground. The Jews became corrupted. This was not just a matter of living in slavery, but of suffocating in the poisoned air of the city where religion served the getting of wealth, comfort, and luxury, and had therefore lost not just its existential edge, but even more elemental, any moral compass. The Jews had to leave Egypt or betray the whole meaning of their being chosen by God as the people out of whom would come the Messiah. They needed a long time in the desert to undergo purging.

None the less, from the Law conveyed by Moses, we learn that humanity has lost its heart; but we cannot learn what the heart is. The Ark of Witness contained the Law which ‘testified’ to God’s will for humanity, revealing a pathway of action disciplined and bounded by the constraints on human heartlessness. ‘Thou shalt not, Thou shalt.’ This is addressed to our absence of heart. For it to carry authority with us in our rebellious waywardness, and our utter indifference, in regard to how serious our loss of heart really is, we have to be impressed by God’s authority. We have to be convinced God is more ultimate than our own heartless way of living. Psalm 92 [Septuagint; 93 in the King James Bible] conveys the ultimacy of the ‘God of heaven’ who is ‘ruler over the earth’, in terms that blend the Eros and the Daemonic sides of God, yet in both establishes the primacy of ‘He-Who-Is.’ We had better listen to such magnificence and majesty. The monarchal and patriarchal God is a concession to human wilfulness and stupidity= without the almost Walt Disney-esque show of Divinely Omnipotent knowledge and power in the heavenly sphere, we would just carry on in our self-destruction on earth, such is the delusion and derangement into which we tend to lapse.

“God is reigning, He is robed in beauty,
God is robed and girt with power,
He has made the world firm and it cannot be shaken;
Thy throne is prepared from of old,
Thou art from all eternity.”

In our foolish pride and futile vanity, in our lust for selfish devouring of all that is good [fallen soul desire] and our hatred of what is other and challenges our egoism [fallen heart passion], we need the mystical modality of heavenly revelation, or ‘throne mysticism’ as it is also called, or God even more Daemonically shaking the worldliness of the historical arena with thunder, lightning, hail, wind, and the storm [the psalms that describe the Daemonic threat wielded by God include 17, 28, 96], to get people to take note, and to alter their life.

But this creates a terrible bias, a real cramp on the human heart. The ‘heavenly’ shows the terrible gap between Creator [pure, permanent] and creature [corruptible, temporary], and it insists we cannot carry on as we would do ‘naturally’, without a second thought that we are living in total ignorance, and doing harm to ourselves, to others, and to the created world around us upon which we depend. When God commands us to live differently, and establishes a way to do it, a Law revealing what the Jews called ‘the way of life’ [Exodus, 25, 16; 31, 18], the emphasis is on not trusting the human heart’s natural inclination, but resisting it, curbing it, building a corral round it that does not let it run ‘free.’ The human heart is imprisoned in darkness, in many senses, thus the heavenly revelation brings a superior and irresistible light that exposes the darkness for what it is, and gives it a means to change its way.

Clearly, for the mass of humanity living in primal ignorance of awareness and primal fallenness of motive, the very few mystics who could ascend to heaven, break through the veil obscuring the divine to the human, and bring back in their person or in their testimony the shining of the divine light, and its ‘instructions’ in regard to how the human darkness could be alleviated and opened up to it, rendered them special. Moses, Mohamed, St Paul, are all special to those people who had no light, and relied upon these particular persons who, by divine dispensation, were able to ‘break out’ of our low estate and ‘break through’ to the high estate of God. Those who convey God’s light, and can show a path to walk toward it, are esteemed by those ordinary people who benefited hugely from what these religious figures brought back from exalted mystical experience.

The key issue is whether God, and humanity, stops here, in this kind of religion, in this kind of spirituality. The Jews did not. They moved on. Islam has not, as yet, moved on to what the Jews were called by God to move toward= the new Messianic Reality and its new Spirit. This brings something never before revealed by God and thus never experienced by humanity, even by the special people who ascended to the throne of heaven to communicate its rule over and direction for us.

Even the Jews split over the transition away from Height toward Depth. There are Jews who remained stuck with Moses. Other Jews understood the greater wisdom at work in the tempestuous and wave tossed David, the ancestor of the Messiah. Moses is not the root of the Messianic. David is the root of the Messiah. From the line of David will come the man whose heart is deep. Moses is not a man of deep heart. He may be called righteous, and the revelation given to him mystically at the summit of Mount Sinai was so overwhelming he could hardly endure it, but in later being denied entry into the Promised Land by God, it was revealed that the coming hope for all of humanity could not come from Moses, or any mystic like him, it could not come from the Law and its way of living, it could not come from the divine Light.

The Davidic path is not about saving us from darkness by leading us into light, it is about God’s Fire kindling the human fire, and God’s Spirit indwelling the human spirit. This theme is where God is a gambler, as in the Book of Job, and risks everything; this is where God trusts us to an extent that Moses, and all the Light-Givers and Law-Bringers like him, could never anticipate. By the criteria of these ‘revealers’, it seems disrespectful to God’s majestic control over all things, and too optimistic about the human.

Never the less, God changes from being above humanity to being with humanity, and takes a more humane view of our foibles, with time. A clear expression of this in the Jewish Bible is the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon [12, 13; 16—19]=

“For there is no God, other than you, who cares for all human beings,
to whom you might have to prove that you never judged unjustly.

Your justice has its source in strength,
your sovereignty over all makes you lenient to all.
You show your strength when your sovereign power is questioned
and you expose any insolence among those who know its reality;
but, though sovereign in strength, you judge with mildness,
and with great forbearance you govern us,
for you have the power to act whenever you choose.
By acting thus you have taught a lesson to your people
how the virtuous man must be kindly to his fellow men,
and you have given your sons the good hope
that after sin you will grant repentance.”

The Messianic Mystery takes this even further= God is more moved in heart by us, and does more to move our heart. Thus, the Messianic Reality is nothing like the heavenly revelation granted to Moses, Muhammad, St Paul, and countless other mystics. Its depth reverses the height, by subjecting it to a deep and radical suffering that tests its love to the limit, and beyond all limit, but by doing this, releases the chains on the human heart and brings the human heart through its vulnerability and weakness to a far shore on the other side. This is the New Land of Heart. It ‘rules’ from within, not externally, and rises from deeps below, not issuing orders from heights above, and it convinces by its authoritativeness, eschewing any and all claim to authority.

Not, ‘I am God, obey me’, but, ‘I love to the maximum, follow me, and be kindled in this love yourself for the world.’ For God is Love, and God is Spirit.

These are the ultimate mysteries of God, not majesty, not radiance, not dominion over all—but the highest serving all, from the deepest. God is Love and God is Spirit are the mysteries God will plant in our earth, our humble, torn, grieving, tear watered earth. It is for these mysteries that ‘God requires the heart’ of each and all.

Hence the mysteries of depth are far more wise and strange and marvellous, even in their heart break, than the awesome glories of the height. The heart breaks, but this becomes breakthrough.

The heart has to be lost and is refound only in the depth.

Heaven has to be risked to, and lost in, Hell before it can redeem Hell.

This is why, for the passionate who cannot stop loving Yahweh despite everything they suffer, the deeps of Hell hide the most secret and profound wisdom of God.

5,

The deeper truth that passion struggles for in the abyss is made clear by David [Psalms, 9, 35] as he cries to Yahweh=

“You see the heart, for you behold pain and passion, trouble and anger, that you may take them into your hands.”

The psalms of David give voice to the living out of passion, and to this extent, the black abysmal pain is always spark for the red fiery truth. Yet, more than this, in the throes of passion’s inward wrestling, or its outward stand and deed, it is only Yahweh who is our advocate and help. God’s passion seizes hold of human passion= this is what is happening.

However terrible the day of trouble, in its inward suffering from check mate and outward striving against all odds, at stake is the hidden process by which God grafts our passion to his passion; a wound is opened in God’s passion, and a wound is opened in human passion, as the two are bound together, unbreakably. This can take a life time to accomplish, or one life time might just begin it; for humanity as a whole, it will take until time runs out, at the End of Days. It does not matter how far this goes in our own existence. We will not see the point. We will not live to see the resolution. Despite this absence of guarantee, certainty, mastery, the reassurance is not in how far we get; rather, the encouragement is going through the way in which God sees our pain and passion, our trouble and anger, and seizes hold of our intermittently flickering flame, binding it to his great and deep Fire. The Fire is Love and the Fire is Spirit.

St Paul [Romans, 8, 14—23] alludes to this ongoing and protracted ‘grafting’ of the human passion to the divine passion when he says= “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of sonship. When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’, it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may be glorified with him.. For the creation awaits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.. because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now, and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for the adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.”

Passion’s crucifixion leads to passion’s glorification= this is the Cross and Resurrection, after the Descent into Hell. We redeemed humans are the flame that will ignite all of creation with God’s Fire, the Fire of Love and the Fire of Spirit.

Is it any wonder that St Paul remarks, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” [Romans, 8, 18].

Wound to wound, Fire to fire.

In the abyss, God is not inviolate, but takes into himself humanity’s vulnerable and wavering passion as the price of humanity taking into ourself God’s constant and unwavering passion.

The abyss threatens and proves the mystery of the heart, human and divine.

Yet in the thick of it, in the throes of it, in undergoing our ‘undoing’, we will despair and our only prayer to God will be filled with anger. All this is necessary. All this is grist to the mill. God fears nothing in the human heart, and if we go through the Davidic path to the end, we will cease fearing what is in our heart, and cease worrying God’s heart cannot abide it. Passion bears all things.

Thus, though in the Psalms the black is deep, inexplicable, pained beyond all bearing, it always promises in subtle hints a reborn red of flaming love, of fiery spirit, that is not lost, but awaits our resurrection with Christ, even as we embrace to be crucified with Christ. This mystery of passion, in its ‘sufferings and raptures of the spirit’, is the secret of the Psalms.

In the Psalms that are depth oriented, the heart is stretched to breaking, yet the heart cannot be counted out, the heart can come back. This paradox blends despair and hope in some peculiar way whose overall result is to affirm to our heart, it is not over yet.

We cry to God, and even though our crying is bitter and reproachful, as well as mournful, something in the crying crosses a gap not otherwise crossable. A broken heart and contrite spirit God will never repudiate. In reality it is more than that. In crying to God, we know in some unknowing which belongs to the abyss, that God will never forsake the human heart. Even in its forsakenness, the depth of our heart cries to another depth of heart, and ‘knows’ it is heard.

You do not rage against a God who does not exist. You rage against a different heart from yours, you accuse the heart you know always hears.

6,

The particular psalms that plumb and seek to fathom the depth are various.

On the one hand, there are the 6 psalms called ‘penitential’ by the [Greek] Septuagint. The first is Psalm 6; the second is Psalm 31; the third is Psalm 37; the fourth is Psalm 50; the fifth is Psalm 101; the sixth is Psalm 129. [Usually, the number in the King James Bible = Septuagint + 1.]

These six repenting psalms address ‘owning one’s shadow’ [in the modern parlance], admitting the lesser heart that undermines the greater heart. This is a whole existential profundity in itself.

For those trying to be obedient to God, in the Mosaic manner, restraining the heart to curtail its evil, and urging it to do good instead of indulging evil, the revolutionary step into a more existential depth only comes, as it did for St Paul, when you realise you cannot do the good you want to do. In part because of the complications of the world, and in part because of the complications of our divided but still beating heart, just inhibiting evil and doing good breaks down. To put it straightforwardly, it is when you try to be good and this fails that you acquire a heart. If you really try to ‘diligently’ follow the law, it is then you discover life is more complex. It is not possible to do the right thing; or, the choice is not between right and wrong, but often is between better and worse wrongs; or, if you love the world and want to repair it, then sticking to the rules proves inadequate. You make vast errors when you try to love, often precisely because you do love. This is why Christ said of the woman who was a prostitute and a lover, to those who love much, much is forgiven.

The path of law may prevent us falling into the worst, it ‘keeps us out of trouble’, but it is often sterile in not being able to love with freedom and creativity, and make a real self-investment in things that matter supremely.

By reaching the point where your obedience is no answer to what existence asks of your heart, you begin to face up to the fact that the heart is more implicated in the world and only by change of heart is there any way forward, personally and communally.

What the good Jew, the good Christian, the good Muslim, cannot grasp is that the yoking of law does not work as a solution in the long term, for it does not change the heart, and what must change in humanity is the heart, or humanity is ultimately ruined.

St Paul [Romans, 7, 15; 18—19; 21—23] expresses this moment of crisis when ‘behaving in the right way’ breaks down= “I cannot understand what I do. I fail to carry out the things I want to do, and I find myself doing the very things I hate.” He laments= “..the will to do what is good is in me, the performance is not, with the result that instead of doing the good things I want to do, the evil I do not want to do– this I keep on doing.” He sums up the human dilemma living under the law= “In fact, this seems to be the rule, that every single time I want to do good, it is something evil that comes to hand.”

Whilst he was still zealot, St Paul could not come to this uncovering of the division of heart that makes conflict between good and evil inevitable, and means until the heart is deepened and changes at depth, evil is all too often far more powerful than good. St Paul’s ‘wretchedness’ is actually a huge step forward. The law abiding are inevitably simple people, and simplistic about existence. ‘Just do good and avoid evil’, they declare, because they seek perfection through the law. This is not possible.

It is necessary for good to fail, and evil to predominate, for the conflict between our two hearts to hot up; and this hotting up of inner conflict is necessary to any deepening of heart and its deepest change. In reality, St Paul’s wretchedness would not have replaced his prior zealotry had he not embraced the Messiah; in a famous incident, St Paul asks Christ to take away his weakness, so he can be strong without any lapsing, and Christ refuses, answering instead, ‘my strength is revealed in weakness.’

St Paul says two further things that are vital to comprehending this situation of heart conflict. First, he argues that for people so corrupted they think their slavery is freedom and their poisoning is fulfilment, the law is necessary= “For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, ‘do not covet’ [Romans, 7, 6]. Second, he says that in his innermost being, he delights in God’s law, but he sees within his nature a “different law that battles against the law which my reason dictates” [Romans, 7, 22—23].

In other words, the law that is only a ‘written code’ is needed to tell us where we are not= we are not living from the heart. Doubtless the ‘inner being’ within us that ‘delights’ in the law is the soul, for the soul cannot spread her wings in the context of the pervasive state of human corruption, and reacts to God’s challenge towards it as a welcome liberation. It is often women who first support the Light Giver and Law Bringer, before men get on board, because the restricting of men’s heartlessness that the revealer makes possible gives the feminine soul space to breath and room to move.. Still, as St Paul acknowledges, we can only do good and avoid evil in action by virtue of an alliance of mind and will; and this strategy only works whilst we do not venture our heart. When existence calls out our heart, as it will if we have any love for people, human events, and the world in its historical caravan crossing a dangerous and trackless waste, then the conflict of our divided heart will come to the fore.

So it must. The truth is, without being tossed on the waves of the conflict tearing apart the heart, we do not recover the heart as such. Recovering the heart comes with neither being liberal about the corruption into which humanity can sink, nor believing the law is, in itself, enough to really shift humanity where humanity needs shifting. To shift the heart we must return to the heart, despite its conflict, and risk the greater to the lesser– as the price of risking the lesser to the greater. This is the point of Christ’s parable about not separating wheat and tares in the growing season, but waiting much longer for the final harvest. Let us see which heart in us wins out, over the longer haul. Let us see, even more radically, if the heart can turn over a new leaf, and can voyage to a far shore.

The law is not enough because ‘God requires the heart.’ This is why St Paul points to what is in fact the final resolution to our wretchedness= “We have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code” [Romans, 7, 6]. If the heart has no more inclination to covet, but is bursting with generosity, there is no need for any law that announces, ‘do not covet.’ For those who are recovered and deepened and changed in heart, there is no law because the Spirit which is Fire, the Spirit which is Love, indwells their passion. However, this new spiritual condition comes only at the end of heart aching wrestlings, vicissitudes, ups and downs, ins and outs, advances and retreats, that can last a life time, or many life times.

It would be inaccurate to say the law’s strictures are simply thrown away, for then we might just slide back into corruption of all heart. It is more accurate to say the struggle takes us beyond the law’s strictures, to the place of the heart where goodness and evil, truth and the lie, are uncovered in their real meaning, their real life, their real implication. Only when you understand in the heart do you acquire the wisdom to act from the heart. This is why David could be both inwardly pondering yet a leader without peer in the arena of the world. The silence leads to action, and the action, once completed, returns to silence.

In fact, all the mansions of the heart, and all the many depths, from the moral through the psychological to the spiritual, are articulated in the Psalms. Not surprisingly, they have figured both in public liturgy and in private prayer for Jews and Christians down thousands of years. The Psalms affirm you cannot contain the heart, you have to live the heart to change it.

We repent not just of misdeeds we have done, nor of how we have passed on our damage to others, but in actuality we are repenting of not putting our faith in God to sort wheat from chaff, preferring to ‘go it alone’..

On the other hand, there are a group of Psalms more expressly engaged in ‘heart cry’ as the only strangled prayer that can be uttered from the depth of our profounder breaking down into the common human fate, the common human tragedy. The pit, furnace, void, are three kinds of ‘hell’ in the Psalms wherein David suffers and tries to understand the abyss as the place of ultimate human dereliction. “Oh God hear my cry when I pray to you.”

These ‘depth psalms’ of terrible suffering, often inherited from the human condition, or inherent to existing, include at least the following ten=

[1] Psalm 63= “A man is coming whose heart is deep.” This refers to the Messiah.

[2] Psalm 21= “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This is the ‘deal breaker’, the experience of being abandoned by God deep in the heart; these agonised words of David were quoted by Christ on the Cross. “Of my God, I cry by day and you answer not, and by night; ..Leave me not when trouble is near, for there is no one to help. ..I am poured out like water, and all my bones are disjointed; my heart is like molten wax within me. My strength is dried up like a potsherd; ..Thou hast brought me down to the dust of death. But you, O Yahweh, delay not my help; ..For God has not scorned or spurned the prayer of the poor..”

[3] Psalm 41= “I thirst, deep cries to deep.” This is the anguished heart of humanity crying to the heart of God, and it is our soul asking for the water of life when it is parched. “As yearns the deer over springs of water, so yearns my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, the strong living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God?” The presence of God in the Jewish Temple was also known as God’s face, or countenance. This is Eros, the light of love and life. “My tears are my bread day and night.. Why are you downcast, O my soul? ..Deep calls to deep at the roar of your cataracts; all your waves and your billows sweep over me. ..I will say to God: You are my protector, why have you forgotten me? And why must I go mourning?”

[4] Psalm 129= “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Yahweh.” This mentions God’s redeeming; for Redemption, as more than Righteousness, works through depth. “If you, O Yahweh, should mark our sins, O Yahweh, who would survive? But with you is forgiveness. ..For with Yahweh there is mercy, and with him there is full redemption. And he will redeem Israel..” And all the world.

[5] Psalm 101 = “Turn not your face from me in the day when I am in trouble.” This is about Accidie — despondency; listlessness; deserting one’s post and indifference to duty; boredom and alienation — the depression of burn out of all fire. The day of trouble is when even passion fails. “O Yahweh, hear my prayer and let my cry come to you. ..For my days vanish like smoke, and my bones burn like brushwood. My heart is sick and dry as grass, so that I forget to eat my bread. Because of my loud groaning my bones stick to my flesh. ..For I have eaten ashes like bread and mingled my drink with weeping. ..for you have lifted me up and cast me down. My days decline like a shadow, and I am withered like grass. ..Yahweh will regard the prayer of the humble, and will not ignore their need.”

[6] Psalm 68= “Save me, O Yahweh, for the waters have entered even my soul; I am stuck in deep mire, and there is no foothold.” This is the depression of Melancholia, or dejection, being ‘pressed down’; drowning in the water, and being sucked down and held fast in mud, unable to move. “..I have come into the depths of the sea, and a storm has overwhelmed me. ..Save me from the mud, lest I stick there; deliver me.. out of deep waters. May storm waves never drown me, nor the deep swallow me, nor the pit close its mouth over me. ..I am in trouble, hear me speedily. Attend to my soul and redeem it. ..For you know my reproach, my shame, and my confusion; I looked.. for a comforter but I found none. And they gave me gall for my food; and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.” The soldiers who nailed Christ to the Cross drank the spiced wine prepared for the sufferers of crucifixion to deaden the pain, and substituted vinegar instead. David’s sufferings are a prefigurement of Christ’s Passion. “I am poor and in pain; ..let the poor see and rejoice; seek God and your soul shall live. For Yahweh hears the poor and does not despise his prisoners. ..For God will save Zion.”

[7] Psalm 76= “My spirit desponded.” This is another manifestation of Accidie; both heart and spirit are affected. “In the day of my trouble I sought God.. my soul refused to be comforted. ..I was troubled and did not speak. I meditated at night and communed with my heart, and stirred up my spirit. Will Yahweh reject us forever? Or will he cut off his mercy for ever? Has his promise ended for all generations?  Will God forget to have compassion? Will he withhold his pity in his wrath? And I said: ‘Now I begin to understand; this change is due to.. the Most High.’ ..You have.. redeemed your people.” And all people. The Daemonic is operative in the depth, though we think everything is finished. “The waters saw you, O God: the waters saw you and were afraid, the depths were troubled. Great was the roar of the waters; the clouds gave a clap, for your bolts pass through them. The clap of your thunder was in the whirlwind, your lightnings lit up the world, the earth shook and trembled. Your ways are in the sea, and your paths in many waters; and your footsteps are not known..”

[8] Psalm 142= “And my spirit desponds within me, and my heart within is troubled.” This is Accidie in relation to the evil spirit who attacks the heart and seeks to make it ‘faint hearted’, so it will not bear the unbearable and endure the unendurable to keep faith with the long road it must walk to the end. On this hard road, the heart needs the soul as companion, for the nourishment and renewal brought by the soul eases the heart’s effort. “Yahweh, hear my prayer; give ear to my petition in your truth, hear me in your justice. ..For the enemy has persecuted [me], he has humbled my life to the earth; he has made me dwell in darkness, like the dead of long ago. ..my soul like parched earth thirsts for you. ..Hear me speedily, O Yahweh; my spirit grows faint. Hide not your face from me lest I be like those who go down into the pit. ..Make known to me the way I should go, O Yahweh. ..Teach me to do your will, for you are my God; your good Spirit will guide me to the right land..”

[9] Psalm 27= “To you, O Yahweh, I cry. O my God, be not silent to me, lest.. I become like those who go down to the pit.” God withdraws—and returns.  “On Yahweh my heart relies and I am helped. Even my flesh has revived, and with all my heart I give thanks to him. Yahweh is the strength of his people. ..Carry them forever.”

[10] Psalm 87= “A prayer in the depths of distress, ..tormented in the deeps.” This is a descent into the hades and hell at the bottom of existence which we all feel, and fear, yet never speak of ‘in polite company.’ “For my soul is full of trouble; and my life has drawn near to hell. I am counted with those who go down to the pit; I have become as a man without help, free among the dead; like those who are wounded and lie in the grave, whom you remember no more, and they are cut off from your hand. They laid me in the lowest pit, in dark places and in the shadow of death. Your wrath presses upon me, and all your waves you have brought upon me. You have put my acquaintance far from me, and made me an abomination to them. I am imprisoned and cannot escape. My eyes fail from poverty. Yahweh, I cry all day to you, I stretch out my hands to you. Can you work wonders among the dead? ..Will anyone in the grave testify to your mercy, or to your truth in the place of destruction? Can your wonders be known in the dark, and your justice in the land of oblivion? ..Yahweh, why do you reject my soul, and turn your face from me? I am poor and in trouble from my youth; ..after being exalted, I am humbled and perplexed. Your wrath has swept over me.. You have put far from me friend and neighbour, and my acquaintances, because of my misery.” This is check mate. Or so it seems when we reach this place of soul, and of heart and spirit.

Elsewhere in the Psalter, David says to God, ‘you require truth in the inward parts.’ The depth psalms conceal and reveal just how hard won that truth of heart really is. The ‘lawful person’ would never come to these places, nor realise that their hell is necessary to the heaven planted in the earth and the heaven raised from hell to redeem the world. Even David is clearly ‘in over his head’, and wrestles with the innerness and profound deeps into which he is thrown. He has no answer. His gift to us is going through it, and conveying its terror and beauty, its peril and possibility, honestly.

The pious and the impious mock David for being so under the hammer on an anvil. This has strong echoes of the account in the 4 Slave Songs of Isaiah of how the Messiah is treated by the crowds. He too is mocked, in different ways, by the ‘great and good’, and the ‘gutter trash’, witnessing his ordeal. There is no doubt that David, shop soiled as he was, is the human prototype of the Messiah.

There is no such animal as a perfect human being; moreover, it is the very vulnerability and flawed state of the poor human clay that is the ‘hole’ through which the ultimate mysteries of God, and the ultimate destiny for humanity, enter us. The hole of the various depressions, and the hells that fill it, is at the same time ‘the hole in the heart so deep, nothing can fill it.’ Only God dwells in this nothing, and by working with its worst case scenario, brings out of that the victory in the heart we and all the creation have always been in travail waiting for.

God toils in the abysmal, and so do we, though it is a strange kind of ‘effort’ where all that we usually experience as effort is impossible. Our job, our side of the compact with Yahweh, is hinted at in such modern phrases as ‘facing the shadow’ or ‘inner work’, or as the ‘I Ching’ portrays it, ‘working on what has been spoiled’; at a deeper level, it is what is really behind the all too familiar lines that refer to ‘waiting in patience’ or ‘waiting under adversity.’ The same point is implicit in St Paul’s statement that we ‘inwardly groan as we wait for adoption as Christs.’ There is no instant switch, or direct leap, from living under the law to living in the Spirit; on the contrary, David’s protracted groaning inwardly is the road out of the law and into the Spirit– provided we do not drown in the waters where we are drowning or burn up in the fires where we are burning or fall without ceasing into the void where we are falling.

‘Waiting’ is not passive, it is active. It is a combination of accepting what is, and resisting its pull towards permanence. I am lost but I am not giving in and giving up, for I am still going to find God. I am shamed, guilty, hollow at the core. But I still ask for life, I still seek truth, I still surrender the heart.

7,

But this Messianic Mystery is in formation in David, rather than being neatly worked out.

Thus there are also psalms about the old Jewish theme of the battle for justice against worldly powers that are unjust [Psalm 82= “a cry for help against a world in arms”], and being attacked for righteousness by the unrighteous [Psalm 3= “the virtuous man under persecution”]. These situations, however, can also create deep inexplicable pain, especially when God does not favour the upright and allows the fallen to prosper. Not surprisingly, there are times when David cannot bear the way the world functions; at such moments, we too can plead with God to smash our enemies, and support us. Sometimes Yahweh does this! Sometimes he does not.

Ultimately, there is a sense in which he leaves the world’s fate in our hands, and thus if no hearts stand up to it, evil wins out more and more. W. B. Yeats spoke about our time where the stupid and venal are making all the noise, whilst those potentially with the heart to make a difference stand on the sidelines wringing their lily palms, mere bystanders, fearful to get involved and have a go.

There is no formula, no explanation. As there are times Yahweh will do nothing for the world, there are times Yahweh is absent from our depths.

The deeps are never voluntarily sought, but are always forced upon us against our desire and contrary to our will. We do not want these deeps. Yet in a subtle sense we do want them.. We know in our bones that life is deep, and a life lived in shallows is a life already ‘dead’ before it dies. Thus, in a peculiar sense, we pray for the deeps, but ‘in fear and trembling’, and even in the midst of ‘the sickness unto death.’

The deep heart is crucial to the destiny of humanity, because through its mysteries of sacrificial crucifixion, suffering descent, reversal in the deep place, the ‘power of the enemy is broken.’

8,

This means that the depth takes on a double meaning – paradoxical and ambivalent – for the persons on the Davidic path leading to the Messiah.

The Chinese Book Of Changes captures it=

The Abysmal

K’an is the Abysmal, the middle son.
The Abysmal is water, and particularly the rapid water flowing
through a gorge. The second son thus also in a sense resembles
his mother more than his father, having absorbed one of her oldest
attributes. Because of this ambiguity, the trigram signifies danger.

From water K’an derives its penetrating or piercing characteristics;
but it also means the ditch in which one hides oneself, and indeed,
even means a thief in hiding. It is blood.
Among men, it is the melancholic, the sick in spirit.
Among horses, sickly ones are related to K’an, those that stumble;
but on the other hand, those with beautiful backs and a wild courage
also belong to K’an.

It is a defective wagon, but also the wheel of the wagon.
It is everything bent, the grass, the bow, the moon.
K’an is due north, midwinter, midnight, the time of toil.
This contains the real meaning of the trigram. It is said:
“God toils in the sign of the Abysmal.”

‘God toils in the abysmal’ is the only reply to David’s heart cries. Far from aiming to be perfect, we humans should embrace what the abysmal means in our existence: ‘among men it is the melancholic, the sick in spirit.’ Because of it, we will stumble. But on the other hand, it is also the attribute of ‘beautiful backs and a wild courage.’

When you are where David went, remember this. Remember that in your sickness of spirit, your back remains beautiful and you have a wild courage. Like a horse, you need the touch to calm you and release you to run.

This is the Messiah.

Await him. Let him toil for you, and then with you, in the abysmal. Become wounded and glorified with him, and by this, you will become like him.

This is what is really happening in the deep place.

Your heart is everything bent, the grass, the bow, the moon, you are in the deep place, and it is midwinter, midnight, the time of acute spiritual toil.

You are the defective wagon, but you are the wheel of the wagon.

The heart is still turning, especially in hell; it will turn over, it will come through, it will journey to a different place.

The Messiah reached the Dawn for you. Your dawn is coming, because his has come.

9,

The place where hell puts us, inescapably, is actually a fruitful place to work for our final reconciliation with God, our final breaking through all illusion, temptation, diversion into unreality, though this is a secret we can only uncover from going through it in experience.

So, the advice is not, ‘do not despair but remain in hope.’ That is facile, glib, shallow — and untrue to where you are. The advice is, fathom despair to the bottom and do not resist it. Let it do its worst. Let it reveal its truth. Only one thing is needful to your patience, your labour, in the depth= wait for your re-ignition in that love which respects what you have been through. Take no substitutes, in the world or in you.

Either we will pass through, move through, and be transformed, resurrected, redeemed — or we will end in tears that are frozen on the cheek. The absence and failure of God will seem permanent and irredeemable, as well as one’s own failure, and humanity’s failure, seeming equally beyond recall. That is despair, abject and unremitting.

If you do not let yourself reach hell, the Daemonic power to bring heaven out of hell will not come lumbering out of its hiding toward you. ‘Staying in hell’, not escaping, yet not throwing in the towel, is work of a peculiar kind, unlike any other labour of the heart.

The ‘I Ching’ comments on “God toils in the abysmal” with the words= “that is, endurance in danger and trouble will be crowned with victory.”

10,

The saddest thing is therefore not being in hell, but getting stuck there, or rather, since ‘stuckness’ is a part of hell, not responding to the Daemonic at work in hell, making it possible for us to pass through the pit, the furnace, the void. The most awful thing is becoming static= afflicted by the Daemonic, and at the same time unable to move with the Daemonic’s dynamic. Even before Christ plumbed hell – and his movement inward and downward is forceful, even violent, in Greek ikons – David encounters the waves, the wrath, the storm, the lightning, of the Daemonic God present and in movement in the depths. The Daemonic works against us to be able to work for us. The billows and terrors over turn us to lift us back up to our feet, and for the first time we stand on groundless ground, upheld by the abyss.

Yet it can happen for some people that break down does not become break through, and instead turns into a kind of permanent stasis in the deeps. Currently this is called depression — whether Accidic or Melancholic, or as in Psalm 87, both – but that term hardly does justice to the life long stalemate at depth some people endure.

Only the active hunt for the God hidden in such profound hurt and sorrow, outrage and incomprehension, will alter the experience of its unremitting heartlessness. The heartlessness of God, of the world, of people, deprives us of all heart for existence. If we do not fight for the heart, we just go under, falling into the abyss unendingly. That is certainly permanent depression.

David was held fast in terrible suffering, trouble, torment, where the heat burning us up or the water drowning us, or the void pulling the floor boards out from under us, goes on and on.. Through Isaiah, Yahweh promises us, ‘I will bring you through water and you won’t drown, I will bring you through fire and you won’t be consumed’, and Yahweh will not let our heart fall into emptiness forever. None the less, the Daemonic God is indeed hidden. We need to cry to him, but that is not enough, we need to fight with him, demand he be found, and go through all the transformative learning and fundamental change necessary for us as we chase the elusive and exotic beast through dark forests, through gloomy seas, through savage fires, across pitiless deserts.

We must move through the Daemonic, by the power of the Daemonic. This is what is happening in the Psalms ‘for those with eyes to see and ears to hear’– and a heart to respond.

A friend wrote poems over years that were lamentations for their life’s losses, errors, hurts. For years the laments were caught in a kind of monotone. Recently, these poems have altered in tone as well as in content; the person is on the move. A log jam is being dismantled in a subtle but tangible way.

Stasis is ‘deadness’ rather than death, and its only cure is dying. In an early poem dating from 1963 — 1964, there was an odd line that asked, “Was it Death I saw, or only the dead?” And another line speaks of “moving back through deadness into death.” What did my heart know at 19 years that was subsequently lost for so many decades? [The Daemonic was emerging in my 20s, it was lost or went into hiding in my 30s and 40s, then re-erupted in my 50s and 60s. A strange history..] Like the abyss itself, moving through deadness is a paradox= it needs death, so we can pass through dying, and by this, arrive in the transformation of rebirth. The guilt and regret and bitterness of hellishness is the same paradox= ‘The worm that dieth not and the fire that cannot be quenched’ is not resolved by throwing water over it, to cool it off; it has to burn fiercely and reduce us entirely to ashes, for it is in these burnt up ‘remains’ that the true fire rises like a phoenix.

Do not try to fix depression. It is killing something in you, and it is depriving you of something. Let it die, let it go.

It is separating you from ‘what is not what’ and rekindling you, replanting you, in ‘what is what.’ Your reality sense, raised from the deeps where you were held down and engulfed and tortured and gutted, will henceforth be sharp. You know what matters. Most of it does not matter: you see the hidden, and easily overlooked, pearls in the rubbish, and you have the heart now needed to do what cries out to be done.

You know what is at stake in the world, and your heart is staked to it. You know what defeats the heartlessness of God, of the world process, of all the people around you. What you know is, this change from heartlessness to having a heart, and suffering what has been denied and carrying what has been put down, starts with you.

You have broken through the wailing wall, because you know if there is only one person of heart in all the world, only one righteous heart, only one redemptive heart, it would be sufficient, because that heart is yours and God is in it.

You have hunted down the Daemonic God; and, willing to be found, he has joined you, remade you, and now is the tyger burning bright in the night when you cry out in agony, and hunt in anger.

Your anger now is different. It must join your sorrow and grieving, for with it you demand of God, show me the heart.

And he will. The heart is you.