Failing/Falling/Into the Abyss

Gregg’s Reflection

One time, I was meditating in a hot bath, with a candle burning. As I am wont to do sometimes, I slipped below consciousness into a dream state. All of a sudden, the bottom of the tub fell out and an abyss opened up below me. As I grabbed onto the side of the tub, intent on not falling into the abyss, I woke up.

When I processed it with Mark Ritchie, my spiritual director, a few days later, he asked this, “What happens to you when you fall into the abyss?” I responded that I didn’t know. “You fall into the arms of God,” he replied emphatically. Mark helped me understand that we fear falling into the abyss because we are out of control, and that terrifies the ego.

In my spiritual journey, I have experienced many highs and lows. I have walked through the spiritual desert, and experienced dark nights lasting months. I began to form a theory from these experiences.

When we first come to faith, God shows up often, reinforcing our faith and encouraging us. After a time, God seems to draw away, and we lose our enthusiasm and struggle to put one foot in front of the other. I began to understand that in those times, we have to exercise our faith muscle, and grow our spiritual strength, endurance and perseverance. How much faith does it take when God shows up every day? Upon reading Thomas Keating, I discovered his explanation of the very same phenomena. See that below.

Jim Finley said it this way in a Living School Teaching,

There is the free fall into the boundless abyss of God in which we all meet one another, beyond all distinctions, beyond all designations. 

Our culture disciples us into the upward journey, climb the ladder of success, make it to the top, be the best. Let’s see what wisdom says about the descending way.

Scripture

Jerusalem staggers, Judah is falling; their words and deeds are against the Lord, defying his glorious presence. Isaiah 3:8

For I am about to fall, and my pain is ever with me. Psalm 38:17

God is within her, she will not fall; God will help her at break of day. Psalm 46:5

I was pushed back and about to fall, but the Lord helped me. Psalm 118:13

The Lord upholds all who fall and lifts up all who are bowed down. Psalm 145:14

For though the righteous fall seven times, they rise again, but the wicked stumble when calamity strikes. Proverbs 24:16

Israel Will Rise. Do not gloat over me, my enemy! Though I have fallen, I will rise. Though I sit in darkness, the Lord will be my light. Micah 7:8

Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. John 12:24

Consider how far you have fallen. Revelation 2:5 

When he opened the Abyss, smoke rose from it like the smoke from a gigantic furnace. The sun and sky were darkened by the smoke from the Abyss. Revelation 92

Ancient Writings

The divine will is a deep abyss of which the present moment is the entrance. If you plunge into this abyss you will find it infinitely more vast than your desires.

Jean Pierre de Caussade

Modern Writings

The Descending Way of Jesus

Jesus presents to us the great mystery of the descending way. It is the way of suffering, but also the way to healing. It is the way of humiliation, but also the way to the resurrection. It is the way of tears, but of tears that turn into tears of joy. It is the way of hiddenness, but also the way that leads to the light that will shine for all people. It is the way of persecution, oppression, martyrdom, and death, but also the way to the full disclosure of God’s love.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus says: “As Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so must the Son of man be lifted up” (John 3:14–15). You see in these words how the descending way of Jesus becomes the ascending way. The “lifting up” that Jesus speaks of refers both to his being raised up on the cross in total humiliation and to his being raised up from the dead in total glorification. . . .

Each one of us has to seek out his or her own descending way of love. That calls for much prayer, much patience, and much guidance. It has nothing at all to do with spiritual heroics, dramatically throwing everything overboard to “follow” Jesus. The descending way is a way that is concealed in each person’s heart. But because it is so seldom walked on, it’s often overgrown with weeds. Slowly but surely we have to clear the weeds, open the way, and set out on it unafraid.

Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devo, 3/13/22

Where we stumble and fall, there we find pure gold.

Carl Jung

Failure is one of the forms contemplation can take.

Parker Palmer

Failure is the path to boundless confidence in God.

Thomas Keating

It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life.

Joseph Campbell

By denying their pain and avoiding the necessary falling, many have kept themselves from their own spiritual journeys and depths—and therefore have been kept from their own spiritual heights.

Richard Rohr

Many mystics speak of the God-experience as simultaneously falling into an abyss and being grounded. This sounds like a contradiction, but when we allow ourselves to fall into the abyss—into hiddenness, limitlessness, unknowability, a void without boundaries—we discover it’s somehow a rich, supportive, embracing spaciousness where we don’t have to ask (or answer) the questions of whether we’re right or wrong. We’re being held and so do not need to try to “hold” ourselves together. Please reflect on that.

This might be the ultimate paradox of the God-experience: “falling into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31). When we can give ourselves to it and not fight it or explain it, falling into the abyss is ironically an experience of ground, of the rock, of the foundation. This is totally counterintuitive. Our dualistic, logical mind can’t get us there. It can only be known experientially. That’s why the mystics use magnificent metaphors—none of them adequate or perfect—for this experience.

Richard Rohr, Holding the Tension: The Power of Paradox (Albuquerque, NM: Center for Action and Contemplation, 2007), conference talk. 

Carl Jung would say the shadow is not evil; it’s simply where we put our qualities and traits we deem unacceptable. From our earliest days, authorities and peers let us know the subjects that are out of bounds. These issues become exiled in our shadow world. When the shadow shows itself in humans, people think evil. The trouble with the shadow is it makes us blind to the evil or potential for evil in ourselves. We hurt others, particularly those we love, because we are unaware of our own shadow. So every showing of the shadow is a helpful epiphany. Shadow work is good and important stuff. Marriages and relationships are made to-order for shadow work.

Richard Rohr, On the Threshold of Transformation, p. 194.

We must not be afraid of falling, failing or going down, because it is there we find grace. Like water, grace seeks the lowest place and there it pools.

Richard Rohr, Universal Christ

God hides in the depths and is not seen as long as we stay on the surface of anything-even the depth of our sins.

Richard Rohr, Universal Christ, p. 111

The path of descent is the path of transformation. Darkness, failure, relapse, death and woundedness are our primary teachers, rather than ideas or doctrines.

Richard Rohr, Yes, and, p. 289

By denying their pain, avoiding the necessary falling, many have kept themselves from their own spiritual depth-and therefore have been kept from their own spiritual heights. Because none of us desires, seeks, or even suspects a downward path to grow through imperfection, we have to get the messages with the authority of a divine revelation. The last really do have a headstart in moving towards first and those who spend too much time trying to be first will never get there. Our resistance to the message is so great that it could be called outright denial. The human ego prefers anything to falling or changing or dying. The ego is that part of us that loves the status quo even when it’s not working.

Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devo 6/29/20

The Path of the Fall. In spirituality, there are basically two paths, what I’ve called the path of the fall and the path of the return. The path of return has been the message of the priestly class. True priests talk of religion, communion, love, transcendence, connecting this world with the next, and generally offering a coherent world of meaning.

In contrast, the path of the fall is directed and legitimated by the prophets, who teach us how to go into our shadows creatively and how to lose gracefully. They teach us how to let go and let things fall apart without fear. The role of the prophet is to lead us on an individual and collective level through the necessary deconstruction of what I would call the false self. The prophet’s path is of descent and is never popular or easy. It is about letting go of illusion and toppling false gods.

People usually like priests, which is why they are established and comfortable in almost all cultures, but the prophets are almost always killed. The prophets are disrupters of the social consensus. What everybody is saying, whatever the glib agreement is, prophets say, “it’s not true.” They do this primarily by exposing and toppling what the Hebrew Scriptures called idols, things that are made absolute that are not absolute.

The tendency of religion is to absolutize. I’m sure it comes from a deep psychological need for some solid ground to stand on, but the prophets remind us that God is the only absolute. And don’t try to make the institutions of God absolutes either! Through Jeremiah, God reminded the people: “In speaking to your ancestors on the day I brought them out of the land of Egypt, I gave them no command concerning burnt offering or sacrifice. This is rather what I commanded them: Listen to my voice; then I will be your God and you shall be my people. Walk exactly in the way I command you, so that you may prosper (Jeremiah 7:22–23).

Perhaps my favorite understanding of prophets is that they’re lovers of spiritual freedom who keep humanity free for God and God free for humanity. It is harder than you think.

Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devotion, 3/22/21

A personal relationship with Christ forms. In our enthusiasm, our devotional life flourishes. This period is often called “the springtime of the spiritual journey.” At some point, Spirit decides springtime has lasted long enough. The Spirit decides to dig down to a deeper level. The Spirit intends to investigate our whole life, layer by layer, throwing out the junk and preserving the values that were important.

Our deepest and earliest wounds seem to be the most tightly repressed. As we progress towards the center where God actually is waiting for us, we are going to feel we are getting worse. Hence the spiritual staircase. The center corresponds to our first conversion. After our springtime, graces are withdrawn, a classic experience of the spiritual dark night. Our enthusiasm disappears. God does not seem to show up anymore.

What God has done in this instance is simply “gone downstairs” to a more intimate place on the stairs, where he is waiting for us to join him at a new level of maturity and trust. If we are very quiet during the dark night, we might notice a delicate sense of peace. As we let go of the level in which we formerly found satisfaction, we move to a deeper level of faith.

When we connect with the divine presence waiting for us at the level below, we experience freedom from the limited ideas we had of God, and our spiritual journey blossoms again. By leading us gradually through growth in trust and humility, we are able to make an even deeper surrender of ourselves to God. We reach a new level of interior freedom, a deeper purity of heart, and an ever increasing union with Spirit. Every time we go down in this process, we also move in the opposite direction by accessing a new level of freedom and growth in faith, hope, and charity under the influence of the Spirit.

Every level down is also a level up and releases our creative energy. The humiliation of the false self leads to humility and humility leads to invincible trust.

Thomas Keating, Intimacy with God, p. 53-56

We live by hope, that when we die and pass through the vail of death that we won’t be destroyed, but consecrated. In our finite thoughts, moved by the presence of God, we realize these things. When we die, we will be taken into God, and we will share in God’s life just as God shares it. We are the generosity of God, so we come home to God into this bottomless abyss of presence that wells up. God exhales us into the earthly plane, When death comes, God inhales us back into himself. 

James Finley, Living School Teaching

What if life is an endless jump into the abyss-like depths of the ground of being. What if you have to hit the ground over and over to reach that state? That is the cross. The teacher is the person who lives in this groundless jump, is habituated into it. 

James Finley, Living School Teaching