beyond this point. He can’t force it to move. Of course, the reader notices the paradox of a “bright abyss.” It is perhaps like a tiny wet circle of reflected sky. The only way to speak of God, for some of us at least, is to speak paradoxically of the abyss. It may be that we are more certain of the abyss than we are of God. A “bright abyss” captures something of what we need to say. Such faith is not like anything that typically gets flaunted as faith. But Wiman can conclude, as he reflects on his fragment of a poem, that “I seem to see you in the black flower mourners make beside a grave I do not know, in the ember’s innards like a shining hive, in the bare abundance of a winter tree whose every limb is lit and fraught with snow.”9 Wiman has described the oddity of what it is like to find God in the abyss. He suggests three images. “The bare abundance of a winter tree” comes closest to describing how I might understand what an abyssal God is like. There is one more line: “Lord, Lord, how bright the abyss inside that ‘seem.’” I search back for the “seem” and find it in the “I seem to see you. . . .” The word “seem” has the slippage, the fracturing, and the slant we need if we are going to speak of God. Only a word like “seem” will let us back into God from the abyss.
6. Vendler, Dickinson, 231–233.
7. Borges, Non-Fictions, 353.
8. Wiman, My Bright Abyss, 3.
9. Ibid., 13.
5 HOMELESSNESS
I have never actually been homeless. My closest approach to that condition was in 1946. During the war years, the federal Office of Price Administration (OPA) had stabilized prices, both income and costs. My family could afford the $20 a month rent for the shotgun house on Garland Avenue in Louisville. My parents used the living room as a bedroom, my older sister used the bedroom, we ate in the kitchen, and my bedroom was the ell room. For the two years of 1943–44, however, an Italian family, who were working in one of the many war-related factories in Louisville, took over my bedroom for themselves and their daughter, who was about my age. I moved in with my sister. We sometimes took turns eating in the small kitchen and other times we all ate together in the kitchen.
When the war ended in 1945, however, the OPA began to step aside and the market began to take over. Many young men and some young women returned from their military life, eager to get married and start a family, as well as taking advantage of the GI Bill to start college. There was a boom as housing developments sprang up everywhere to accommodate this return and the process of “beginning life.” Jobs turned from the war effort to the new possibilities of a long-restrained society. This was back in the day when nations and people had actually noticed that a war was going on. The mood of the nation was upbeat, glad to see its young people return, glad to see an economic boom.
However, all this played out differently for my family. My father was not a young veteran. Our landlord raised the rent substantially on our house, tripling the cost. We had to find something cheaper. It turned out to be two rooms on the third floor of a once-attractive private home on Third Street, which had been subdivided into rental rooms. The bathroom, shared with another family, was on the second floor. The house was not air-conditioned, so we ran a small fan to circulate the air in the summer. My parents used one room, my sister and I the other room.
My mother soon began to walk around the neighborhood, knocking on doors as she tried to find something better for us that we could afford. Several times she found something, but the resident owner looked at the gangly ten-year-old with her and told her they did not accept children. “He is very quiet and well behaved,” my mother would say, as I stood there trying to look very quiet and well behaved.
Though I have never been homeless, I learned in those years that even when things are going well for many people, those who have the least resources are often not able to share in the opportunities available to many other people.
Eventually the boom that improved the lives of many Americans also improved the conditions of our family. My father made a little more money and my parents moved us into a house where I had my own private space, in the attic in the winter and in the basement in the summer.
I was never homeless, but I did learn to treasure my ability, as I became self-supporting, to have a quiet, private space to myself. My personal sense of what space is like was affected by those childhood spaces. Looking back, it is probably not surprising that I chose to live in spacious Montana for 22 years as an adult.
PART II
6 THE HOMELESS GOD
Some thinkers have defined God as almighty (omnipotent), all-knowing (omniscient), and in all places (omnipresent). However, there are many problems and conundrums with such views. In most theological thought, omnipresence tends to receive less attention than omnipotence and omniscience. It hangs out with them as their weak sibling. This may be because the other two themes clearly figure in major theological debates. Omnipotence is often discussed in the context of theodicy, attempts to solve the problem of evil. If God is both good and all-powerful, why does evil exist? Thinkers produce many variations on what might be meant by omnipotence, in order to resolve this problem. Omniscience also often figures in discussions of theodicy. If God knows everything, surely a better world could be designed. But omniscience also plays into discussions of the nature of time and eternity. If God knows the future in detail, is there any human freedom to choose or change the future? What happens to human responsibility? If the future is already known, is it really future? Is it all really one big eternal Now, in which past, present, and future are dissolved into God’s present? Again, much attention has been devoted to these issues, though I am not preoccupied with such issues.
Other thinkers have suggested that God acts in the world by “luring,” rather than by causing everything. God knows everything there is to know (at any given moment), but God’s knowledge grows as there is more to be known. This approach is based on the idea of spontaneity and freedom in the world, a world that is therefore open to being shaped. This view has been worked out in detail by philosophers and theologians influenced by Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, known as “process thinkers.”
This view of God as deeply open to and influenced by the universe is referred to by these process thinkers as the “contingent” nature of God, since God’s being and becoming are shaped by the contingent universe. God as such, without any reference to or influence by the world, is often called the “primordial” nature of God, God as defined only by Godself. On the other hand, God as influenced by the many contingencies of the world is known as the “contingent” nature of God. I am myself much more interested in this contingent description of God, rather than in speculating about God’s primordial nature. I have been interested in contingencies ever since I fell onto the washing machine as a child.
I am also deeply interested in a set of ideas that began to come together for me when I first read Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a brilliant theologian, spent months in prison at the end of World War II, after he had been arrested by the Nazi government for taking part in attempts to weaken Hitler’s evil rule, finally planning with others an attempt to assassinate Hitler. During that time in prison, he wrote many remarkable letters to his friend Eberhard Bethge, hinting at a dazzling array of ideas. He did not live to develop them in detail, since he was executed days before the end of the war. Bonhoeffer hints at ideas about “religionless Christianity,” the need to take responsibility in “a world come of age,” Jesus as “the man for others,”
