I have been accused of being a deep-diving duck. My wife accused me of this, in different words, only yesterday. I like to dive down to the depths of things, in both the literal and the metaphorical senses.
As a metaphor, “depth” is one-dimensional. It lives on the axis of up and down, shallow and deep.
This morning, I read a reference to William Butler Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming,” and its famous phrase, “the center cannot hold.” The book I was reading talked about moving from the edges into the center. And I realized that this is a two-dimensional, or even a three-dimensional metaphor for the same movement undertaken by a deep-diving duck; to seek the center is similar to dive into the depths.
Even though this metaphor adds an extra dimension or two, and even though I wouldn’t mind being accused of being someone who moves from the edges to the center, I’m not ready to shift metaphors. For one, the “center” is more mathematical, more cognitive and abstract, than the “depths.” But a more basic problem is that the center is a destination where as the depths are simply a part of the journey to deeper depths.
Physically, I know that there are depths which I cannot reach with my current ability to hold my breath. And I know that I can train my lungs and metabolism to hold my breath for longer so that I have the possibility to dive deeper than I can presently reach. Metaphorically I know that this deep-diving duck will continue to seek greater depths.
I may think that I have found my way to the center of things, to the heart. But once I enter the heart there are depths that I can spend my whole life trying to plunge. I have run across three statements of this in my reading this past week:
The first is a quote from John Middleton Murray in On the Brink of Everything, by Parker Palmer:
For a good man to realize that it is better to be whole than to be good is to enter on a strait and narrow path compared to which his previous rectitude was flowery license.
The second is a quote from H. A. Williams in Walking on Water, by Madeleine L’Engle:
When I attempt to make myself virtuous, the me I can thus organize and discipline is no more than the me of which I am aware. And it is precisely the equation of my total self with this one small part of it which is the root cause of all sin. This is the fundamental mistake often made in exhortations to repentance and amendment. They attempt to confirm me in my lack of faith by getting me to organize the self I know against the self I do not know.
And finally from Horace Bushnell in the sermon, “The Power of an Endless Life”:
Inasmuch as our understanding has not yet reached our measures, we plainly want a grace which only faith can receive; for it is the distinction of faith that it can receive a medication it can not definitely trace, and admit into the consciousness what it can not master in thought. … [Christ]’s passion reaches a deeper point in us than we can definitely think … in the lowest and profoundest roots of our great immortality, those which we have never seen ourselves.
If the center can’t hold, I’m ok with that. Personally, I keep diving, aiming for the depths, somewhere below my attempts “to be good,” below “the self I know,” and below everything that I am able to “master in thought.”
Below a certain depth in the ocean, the sunlight doesn’t penetrate and we must dive by faith and not by sight. This is the “strait and narrow way that leads to life.” Think about it; dive into it.
