Deeper Still
My friend and his sister have recently started a podcast on the Chronicles of Narnia called, “Beyond the Lamppost”. It’s delightful; Stephen and Shannon Read profess having grown up as Narnians themselves. In a recent episode, they read a passage from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in which a poignant line ends with the words “Deeper Still”.
This leads me to talk about my wrist tattoo. It was not, actually, inspired by the Chronicles of Narnia (though I do love the books). Having this line from Narnia reread to me, however, and reflected upon, provided another layer of meaning to my tattoo. The tattoo is the words “Deeper Still” and a little wave graphic. I’ll sketch the original meanings of the tattoo and then remark on what Narnia’s Aslan added to it.
I got the tattoo in Thunder Bay, Ontario. A dear friend heard I was interested in sojourning to a certain “Urban Abbey” for a spiritual retreat of sorts and also to see about their Artist in Residence internship. This friend payed for my plane ticket. I had been invited to the strange opportunity when one of the Abbey’s founders, who had for a season been a professor of mine, invited me to go and arranged for me to be put up there. I was given, for the season, by God and his gracious agents on the earth, a peculiar sense of permission to drift and heal and re-compose. I have written elsewhere about how in that trip and the surrounding season undercut both my consuming worth-by-performance assumptions and also my insecure attachment with God. I felt that God provided the trip for me largely just to be, and told me that that was OK. I suppose I give this background to explain why I felt like getting a tattoo. I was on a journey of transformation. What better time to get a marking of some spiritual significance?
So, what did Deeper Still originally mean to me? Well, it was multivalent from the start, so it was not difficult for me to collect more meanings as I lived on. Originally, I would have explained its meaning with this or something like it:
“As deep as I have ever gone, Christ has gone deeper still.”
So, what does that mean? Hmm. I think its most prominent meaning is an allusion to the solidarity of Christ with those who suffer, including myself. Before and during the trip I had been struck by the realization that Christ’s life and atonement are in fact the absorption of human experience and pain into God’s own personal experience. In scripture, Christ, the Son of Man, God’s Son, is seen to suffer as a human.
By his life and pain, Christ absorbed the human experience into his own experience. I value this solidarity highly and would make the case it’s critical to our understanding of God, as I believe the writer of Hebrews does: “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are” (Heb. 14:15). Christ experienced human weakness, desire, and was touched as much as anyone by systemic human fallenness, or error, or sin. Christ’s distinction is, of course, that “He did not sin” (v.15), but he does not wield that against us. Not to condemn us, but to show compassion, Christ absorbed every dimension of human experience.
I posit that the experience of Christ has always been the experience of God. God is not time-bound, and so there is no pre-suffering version of God. His endurance of the crucifixion has always been part of his story. Our time-bound experience dictates that we do position the event at 33 AD, or thereabouts, but that does not mean that God changed that year. He was always a God of love, and always just as capable of empathy.
Here’s Psalm 104:13-14, “As a father has compassion on his children so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him for he knows how we are formed he remembers that we are dust.” This is an Old Testament indication that God was already compassionately familiar with human frailty. He did not gain the capacity after the crucifixion.
The Godhead has given humanity an astounding gift in God’s solidarity with our experience. He can say “I understand.” This particularly I felt that I heard from God in my journey of healing. It became and life-savingly comforting to know that all of my suffering – even that which so completely destroyed me – even with it senseless and absurd dimension – even that which can for so long rob a soul of meaning and hope and induces such shame – to know that every moment of and the furthest reaches of my pain were also within the experience of Christ. As deep as ever I have gone, Christ has gone deeper still. I felt him hold me and fall with me. I felt I heard him say that he will not let go and say, “Oh my heart, my precious boy, I’m with you.” God did not despise me in my ruination but opted to remain invested in me even while I plummeted. This does mean that in a way he fell with me, in the sense that he completely and unfearingly empathized with my experience in real-time. He was present with me in very dark places.
“The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit” (Psalm 34:18) and he “will not despise a broken a humbled heart” (Ps. 57:17).
To me, the pain and death of Christ by cruel and shameful crucifixion is the ultimate expression of God taking the human fall. While, of course his death is contains the “sacrificial lamb” substitutionary atonement meaning, aka “dying in our place” – while his death has this judicial component (taking the fall “for” us), I’m convinced it also has a more relational component to it (taking the fall with us). I believe that Christ on the cross is saying both “I love you enough to do this for you” and “I love you enough to suffer this with you.” Yes, Christ’s crucifixion is work by which cosmic realities are shifted and we are saved in way that we that we cannot save ourselves. So also, however, is the crucifixion an expression of compassionate solidarity. I think this aspect is definitely highlighted in the gospels’ crucifixion narratives which spend no time explaining what was happening on a cosmic level, but simply work to show that Christ suffered truly in a way that anyone who has truly suffered can relate to, and show him being attentive to the hopes, needs, and pain of those around him.
I believe compassion is fundamental to God’s character and as such, his choosing solidarity with people he loves is not an extraneous task that he tagged on to his salvation plan, but rather integral to his salvation plan. It was always the plan to suffer with the broken, even the broken who are responsible for having broken themselves. And, as I mentioned above, God is not time-bound so that solidarity and experience has always been within his experience. God has always known pain; both his own, and the pain that comes from empathy.
The solidarity of God in my pain restored my life – in multiple senses. The with-ness of God put a frame around my suffering by which I could ever slowly begin to trust that that it was contained within the experience of God and therefore completely understood. Furthermore, my saviour Jesus Christ understood my suffering not as lab technician understands bacteria but as a refugee understands displacement. Furthermore, his understanding did not lead him to judge me for how I was ruined by it and for how I had behaved poorly within it, but rather his understanding led him only to empathy. Having forgiven me completely, he had no need to judge me and could afford to be unreservedly with me.
My recovery began, not with a solution, but with assurance of the solidarity and compassion of God, concurrent with my pain. I found that the heartbeat of God could be heard even in destitution of spirit and brokenness of body. As deep as my destitution was felt, the presence of my Christ was there and deeper still. I felt his heartbeat in ruination, and it was not at all as rapid and anxious as mine. Rather, it was settled, and secure. So, I found as well, that though my pain was deep, my Father was familiar with pain deeper still, and yet at that depth he remained secure and free. I needed that secure, un-anxious presence, that parental steadying, to be validated and empowered toward healing. My Lord held my shaking body and said, “My Son, I understand what you feel. I grieve with you as long as this is yours to carry. I will lift you with me out of this distress, in time.”
There is no reservation and judgement in his relational commitment to me. He does not despise me as I have despised others, even though he has more reason to. He does not recoil from my ruination as I have recoiled from ruined people. He is not disgusted by me as I have been disgusted by broken people. I have joined the ranks of the destitute and found that Christ was already in their midst. My depth of inveterate error has been revealed and I find that God has already forgiven and accepted that depth of me. He has seen deeper still, within me and has already accepted that depth of me.
So, another meaning to Deeper Still emerges: I am forgiven to the depth I am aware of my need for forgiveness, and forgiven from sin deeper still.
Two meanings to Deeper still are these: 1. As deep as my pain has taken me, Christ is there with me and deeper still. 2. As deep as my sin I’m aware of is, Christ has forgiven me and forgiven deeper still.
To illuminate a final meaning of deeper still, I must return then to Narnia and the passage from, “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.” I’ll need to summarize massively. Put simply, “Deep Magic” demanded justice. Our hero Aslan absorbed the punitive edge of that justice on behalf of the traitor, Edmund. He actually, and truly suffered and died. “Deeper Magic,” however, a greater mystery but a greater power, demanded that the innocent who died for the traitor rise again from death. Aslan, then, rises from death to life and roars and plays with the children. They witnessed what the Deeper Magic dictated, “Death itself would start working backwards.” Deep Magic demanded justice, Aslan explains, but lo: “There is a magic deeper still.”
Stephen, one of the podcast hosts, notes this line and muses that though justice was fundamental to Narnian reality, Mercy was the even more fundamental reality.
I launch recklessly from here into my own musings. God made and gave order to everything. He is as such primal, original power, unfettered creativity, and endless light (by which terms I by no means intend to diminish that he is a person also). He is the alternate of entropy, the antithesis of dying. Without him, there could only be a downward trend but with him, there is possible an upward momentum. The resurrection is the pivotal intersection of God’s trajectory for all things with the trajectory of death. Death met God, and died itself. We’ve witnessed then that though entropy’s organic manifestation, namely death, has what looks to us like overwhelming and ultimate authority over life, even so it is not beyond the power of God to turn that backwards. So, death is a fundamental reality, but life is an even more fundamental reality, a reality deeper still.
That is absolutely paradigm-shifting.
Theologians call lived history the “age of decay.” They demarcate it as such because scripture enables them set this age, the “age of decay” in comparison with the “age to come,” in which not death but life will have the final word. I’ve argued elsewhere that God’s new world in the “age to come” will retain physicality – and I assert this again – but I admit that it is very hard to conceive of the physical world without death. The world we now know is beautiful but knows decay. The world we will come to know will be even more beautiful and will have moved beyond decay. The order of things will need to change radically. But it will, and it will not be death but resurrection that resounds indefinitely. Death will find itself in the context of life. What appeared to be the end, to us, will be repurposed into an avenue through to what comes next.
This emergence into a new reality is made possible because it is fundamental to the nature of God to make new, fresh, alive. Death has its place in the present reality. Perhaps God has assigned it to the present order to provide a cap, a safeguard against human abuses. Scripture presents death as consequence for sin. As such, it is right for God to cause or permit death to have its way with what is in error. It is like Narnia’s “Deep Magic”. It is an instrument of justice.
If this was the end of the story, there would still be beauty to the story, but it would be sad. It would have the same romantic spark that I’ve heard physicalism attribute to life: It’s remarkable that anything exists; enjoy it and wonder at it while it lasts. Soon, however, you will die, and soon after that the sun will be extinguished and there will only be darkness again. Maybe the multiverse is spitting out other realities, but ours is over. Our story had an arch from darkness to wonderful existence and back to darkness. This is the physicalist metanarrative. The narrative in which God let death be the end would be a similar narrative.
If God has run out of creative energy and has surrendered his created reality to death, then our story is tragic. We’re told, however, that resurrection happens, and that Christ will make (and is making, mysteriously) all things new. We’re given a chapter two, which is chapter eternity. Will eternity have temporal divisions or seasons? I really don’t know, but I believe it will be the continuation of that which God desires to make eternal. So, though death and justice, like the “Deep Magic” of Narnia, are fundamental to the present order, life and mercy are even more fundamental, like the “Deeper Magic”. Death is a temporal contingency and is not native to the ultimate order of things. Death is a visitor, and Life is the host. Death will one day tip his has to the Maker, and dissipate. Death intimates labour pains of the present created order, through which tumult will emerge astounding new life (Romans 8:22). Death and grief now; consuming joy later (John 16:1-22). Death will give way to life, and perhaps death had some part in the creation of that life or in the sweetening of that life. Deep is death but deeper still is life, because God is God and as such, life, rather than death, will be more fundamental to whatever he is invested in. Deep is reason to grieve, but deeper still is reason to worship and hope.
The following lines are something like a summary then, of the meanings of deeper still to me:
– As deeply as I have suffered and as I have been in darkness, deeper still can God empathize and deeper still would I find God’s un-anxious, secure, unjudging, presence.
– As deep as I see my brokenness to be inveterate to me, deeper still has God already seen accepted and forgiven what is within me.
– As deep and fundamental as death and justice are, deeper still and even more fundamental are life and mercy in the story that God is writing.
What I found in depth is what compelled me slowly upward. There’s a good saying I’ve heard in Christian circles: “Believe in the dark what you learned in the light.” Certainly, I tried to do so when I was in the dark. The saying had weight in my experience but now, so also does its opposite and perhaps even more so. I believe in the light what I learned in the darkness. By the grace of God, what I learned in the darkness was not despair, but the empathy and solidarity of God. What I learned in the deep dark depth of ruination was that God was there with me and that he could go with me deeper still without resentment or anxiety. I’ve carried that treasure with me as I’ve healed, still believing it, still believing in the light what I learned in the darkness. And now the light is lighter than I knew it could be because I have found that to God the darkness is as light (ps. 139:12) – he is acquainted with the depth of dark to which I have been and unafraid to go deeper still.