of the universe’s fundamental indifference to us.
However, there may also have been some moments, after experiencing these “earthquakes,” when we found ourselves on more solid ground than previously. The experience of “fate” was also one that led to a deeper “grounding” in reality. We may even have reached the point of being grateful that we went through such difficult straits since they turned out to be the occasion of growth and a contentment that transcends mere gratification.17 They have made us experience a new level of ourselves and reality. Such earthquakes awakened in us a courage that gave us a deeper sense of being alive. The dimension of depth, therefore, is ambiguous. It is both terrifying and deeply fulfilling. In the words of Rudolf Otto, it is a mysterium tremendum et fascinans.18
The experience of depth has two faces.19 It is both abyss and ground. The dimension of depth which supports the surface of our lives initially presents itself to us as an abyss. Instinctively, we recoil from an abyss, since it seems to be unfathomable and bottomless, a void in which there are seemingly no supports. To fall into it would mean to lose ourselves. This is the first face the depth presents to us. It is an anxiety-inducing “nothingness” which seems to threaten our very being.
We might gain a more concrete sense of what this abyss means if we conjure up the specter of being utterly alone without the support of other people or of status or possessions. There is probably nothing we humans find more terrifying or try more ardently to avoid than the state of aloneness. One of the reasons for our anxiety about death is that it is an occurrence that we shall have to go through utterly alone. And so we tend to avoid the threat of death, along with other such “existential” threats as meaninglessness and guilt, since it signifies an intolerable solitariness. We bury our lives in objects, persons, and pursuits that seem to offer us a refuge from the abyss of aloneness.
What would happen, though, if we allowed ourselves, or were forced by “circumstance,” to plunge into the abyss? Again, the wisdom of those seekers of depth whose insights are buried in the classic texts of our great traditions have some encouragement for us that is worth pondering. They tell us over and over, whether in myth or direct philosophical and theological language, that there is yet another side to the depth. The depth will show itself to us not only as an abyss but also as ground. In the final analysis, the depth is ultimate support, absolute security, unrestricted love, and eternal care. Compared to this ultimate grounding of our existence, we are told, our ordinary supports are shallow, or at least inadequate. Hence there is nothing to fear in loosening our grip on these supports after all, allowing ourselves to be swept into the depths of our life. The reason we can have the courage to open ourselves to the depth, to accept our solitude, is that there is an ultimate ground to our existence, there is an ultimate companionship in our aloneness. The abyss is only one side of the experience of depth and we are tempted to think, as are some important philosophers (like Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus), that this is the only side. Most philosophers, and all of the major religious traditions, however, have insisted that the final word about the depth is “trustworthy.”20 It is, in Tillich’s words, the “ground of our being.”21
It is this ground of courage, testified to even by serious atheistic thinkers, that helps us, in part, to indicate what we mean by God. The reader may have experienced occasions in his or her own life when, facing a seemingly impossible challenge, an unanticipated influx of strength made it possible to go on. In such experiences, one may have felt a surge of vitality that is absent in less urgent moments. What “God” means may, in part at least, be hinted at when we ask for the ultimate whence of this courage and vitality.22
Religion
The wisdom of the great traditions teaches us that the experience of depth often occurs after or within the experience of despair, disgrace, impoverishment, loss, suffering, and especially the threat of death. Tillich summarizes this wisdom when he says “there can be no depth without the way to depth. Truth without the way to truth is dead.”23 This “way” involves not only the experience of pain and loss but also joy and ecstasy. It is only because we sense somehow that in the depth lies joy that we have the incentive to abandon ourselves to the abyss. We surmise that beneath the surface there is something that does not disappoint and that can bring a kind of contentment that runs deeper and endures longer than the usual forms of consolation we seek. This sense gives rise to religion. Religion is the passionate search for depth and for an ultimately solid ground to support our existence.
In simplest terms, then, religion may be understood as the search for depth. To those who think that religion’s only function is to provide answers, this may seem to be an unusual and even unacceptable way of understanding religion. However, once we acknowledge that the dimension of depth is inexhaustible, we must also confess that no present state of understanding can ever adequately represent this dimension. There is always a “more” that goes infinitely beyond what we have already grasped. Our relationship to this transcendent depth can never be one of mastery or possession. Indeed, to attempt such an absorption of the infinite horizon of our existence into the scope of our knowledge is repudiated by all the explicitly religious traditions as a deviation from authentic life. Instead, the appropriate attitude to take with respect to the depth is that of waiting and searching.
But religion is more than a search. For religion is also a confident naming of the dimension of depth. It is the jubilant enunciation of a sense that the depth has broken through into our lives in one way or another. Religion is the symbolic (and at times ritualistic) expression of the shared experience of this depth that has made itself transparent to human consciousness. In order for us to undertake the adventurous quest which we have called religion, we already need at least some sense of what we are seeking. Otherwise, we would not be aroused to seek it at all. Somehow or other, the depth has already insinuated itself into our lives at the same time that it has elusively receded into the distance. One way in which it makes itself provisionally known to us is to embody itself in events, persons, or aspects of nature and history. These then function as symbols that inspire us to trust and that motivate us to look deeper. Religion, therefore, is a surrender to those symbols and stories that give us the courage to seek further.
This view of religious existence recognizes that “there can be no depth without the way to depth.”24 The fulfillment of our deepest longings cannot occur in one instantaneous act of consciousness, though perhaps a radical decision to live irreversibly in trustful waiting may be one that takes place in a single moment. The experience of God as depth involves our embarking on a way, a journey, a pilgrimage with the full awareness that the end of it may lie an infinite distance ahead. Radical waiting is, of all possible responses to our life, the most difficult, the most arduous, the most ungratifying. But it is also, as Tillich says, the most realistic and the most fulfilling, the one that takes the depth most seriously. And it is not as though by this waiting and searching we are deprived of strength to endure joyfully in the present.
In summary, if God is the depth of existence, then religion is the confident search for this depth as well as the celebration of those events, persons, or occasions where the depth has broken through the surface of our lives in an exceptional way. The test of whether we are religious or not is simply whether we are concerned with this dimension of depth. And it is the degree of seriousness whereby we ask ultimate questions, and not the degree of doctrinal certitude, that determines whether we are surrendering to the transcendent depth of our lives—that is, to God.
14. The following text is an excerpt. Previously published in Haught, What
