Last week I wrote about the rushing calm, the “ancient rumbling,” beneath the waves. The image won't leave me alone, though I haven’t been sure why. But as a daily-meditating gnarly wise woman (HA), I’ve stuck with it, kept asking so what? A couple of responses have emerged:

  1. The depths are not just calm and wise and centered; they can also be terrifying and lonely and suffocating, and sometimes you’re not actually choosing to be there.
  2. I keep having conversations where someone says, “it feels like the world is getting…crazier, right? It’s not just me?” and after a moment of silence everyone else exhales, “no omg it’s not just you, it’s definitely getting crazier, only I don’t think I can handle any additional intensity in my life so I’ve just been sort of ignoring it, but I don’t think that will be possible for long.” Relevant!

Summer fuuuuuun! Let’s start with #1.

A couple of people I love are extremely depressed right now. This is never easy to talk about but especially not in summer, when everyone’s supposed to be carefree. To a depressed person, “dive under those waves, girl!!!” is about as useful and novel as that damn viral “recipe” for “magic” banana “ice cream.”

banana, gently rocking back and forth
[not ice cream]

Depression can feel like an interminable sinking: airless and heavy, blinking bewildered at the surface far above, unable to move a single muscle toward the sun. However my Table practices develop in the future, they’ll have to account for the vicissitudes of depression, which, to be blunt, really sucks.

Two of my all-time favorite phrases in the Bible evoke both the profundity and the sometimes-powerlessness of the world under the waves. Check out the very second verse of Genesis (not for nothing, anyone claiming a coherent historical-scientific reading of this chapter is 100% stymied already, like ?!?!):

Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

The image of an infinite, pitch-black emptiness, deep vacant water, should be terrifying. But, like theologian Wil Gafney, I find it extraordinarily comforting: “the velvet darkness, darker than a thousand midnights down in a cypress swamp, this luminous darkness, this radiant blackness, the wholly black and holy black womb of God”—all presided over by Wisdom Herself, the Spirit of God??? Come ON!!!

In a meditation on water, the Psalmist also invokes The Deep. As usual, he’s bemoaning life’s serial difficulties, attributing them directly to God: “all your waves and breakers have swept over me.” But beneath them he hears the ancient rumbling. “Deep calls to deep,” he says, “in the roar of your waterfalls.” Deep calls to deep. The deep in God calls to the deep in me. The deep in me calls to the deep in you.

This deep, this roar are more ancient than the world itself, older than light or language, older than humans and our nonsense, older even than the waves. The Spirit of God Herself is in them.

I usually turn to these passages in December, when the sun shines for about three (3) hours per day, everyone is overwhelmed, people’s grief is raw and grinding but caked over with about a quarter-inch of foundation and merry triangles of blush. Then, I’m so grateful for the ancient practice of Advent, which honors the darkness, reminds us that it is, indeed, often bleakest before the light breaks in, and that the light itself is powerful and effective.

But sometimes the darkness descends in effing July, and the waves close over your head and pull you down before you decide to dive, and I guess what I’m saying is: if that’s where you are right now, I don’t want to glorify the under, don’t want to pretend that you’re lucky to be down where all the insight is. I do want to note that a very ancient, very sacred text begins with the assertion that the Spirit of God Herself is somehow both immersed in and hovering protectively over those depths. And I want you to know that you’re not alone in the sinking—that deep is calling to deep, and you are heard.