Sounds of the Deep
Percussive music helps us hear the sounds of the Deep.
The Deep is what God heard before the dawn of creation.
It has many faces, both beautiful and tragic. When we
hear the throbbing of life in its pulsating intensities;
when we awaken to the fact that life springs forth,
not from divine love alone, or from powers of the past,
but also from a bottomless depth that was with God
from the very beginning, and that cannot be contained
in formulas or definitions, or fully shaped
by divine love, however tender and loving,
we are hearing the more beyond the more,
the beyond beyond the beyond.
We, too, are hearing the Deep.
God and the Deep
In order to uncover a deeper answer to this age-old question, we have to revisit the dogma of creation from nothing, a teaching derived from Aristotle and one that makes belief in God’s goodness so difficult for so many. Tohu va-vohu is raw and chaotic – and we know that fractal beauty and order self-organize from the very heart of the chaotic. Chaos – an iterative nonlinear process – is neither rigid repetition nor pure random disorder, it offers rather a third way – an emergent, unpredictable becoming The work of creation is never ending and never static. We are a/part of its harvest, and we are, with the cosmos and the Divine, co-creators. The ruach continues to vibrate across the face of tehom, though us, in us, with us: creatio continua, continuous creating. A full consideration of creation begins by reviewing the rich harvest that scientific evidence has offered, as mediated through the cultural expressions of this age...What we know from science (and philosophy) makes possible a renewed and liberating understanding of the biblical and rabbinic tellings. |
Five Faces of the Deep
In The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming, Catherine Keller reminds us that we swim in waters deeper than we know: an undomesticated yet creative chaos. tohu va vohu. This is what God heard before the dawn of creation. God heard the potentialities for creation, bristling with creativity, not unlike the sounds of Memory Palace by the Los Angeles Percussion Quartet. They were throbbing, pulsating, vibrating in God's mind.
Each and all of these realities -- the divine lure, the divine pathos, divine self-creativity, our own self-creativity, and the way we create one another through our relationships -- can be known and felt as unfathomably Deep: that is, incapable of being enframed or contained in easy formulas or precise definitions. The various faces of the Deep, experienced as individually or as melding into one another, are always more than our words can contain. We can hear the Deep in one or several of its faces, even we cannot name it. The Deep has voices. |