Deep Down Things

      This post is mostly a book/author recommendation along with an encouragement to continue asking the important questions, and even to live into religion deep down. Today, looking outside, we witness the change of seasons, possibly a reminder of shifting world views affecting even our reach toward God. Some leaves must fall, and their full lives, like ours, show forth the beauty and promise of transformation. 

      During the manifestations of late summer and early autumn, I’ve also been turning the pages of works by John A.T. Robinson [1919-1983] beginning with Honest to God (1963) and continuing into The Human Face of God (1973). His writings give me support in moving further with the themes that feel most significant. For example, the notion I call “resonance” connects with a primary focus he makes in Honest to God: “a number of things have unaccountably ’rung a bell’… if one is to retain one’s integrity one must come to terms with them.” To elaborate this resonance, he notes that “three [texts]…  have since proved seminal” (pp. 19, 21). These he names: Tillich’s Shaking of the Foundations called “The Depth of Existence”, Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, and Bultmann’s New Testament and Mythology. Robinson explores the difficulties humans encounter in finding words to express the inarticulate; grasping at a shape-shifting reality proves so difficult:

Robinson asserts that to be honest to God is to persist through the fog, to refuse to surrender to a superficial view, and to plumb into the heart of matter because “God is by definition, ultimate reality” and “’the ground of our being’” (p. 29, referencing Tillich). Robinson further explores into the dominant but too-limiting view of God as a supernatural being in heaven. He shows that this perspective was considered “the great enemy of man’s coming of age.” This was the idea of God that they [Feuerbach, Nietzsche, and others] 

“must ‘kill’ if man was not to continue dispossessed and kept in strings. Few Christians have been able to understand the vehemence of their revolt because for them he has not been the tyrant they portrayed, who impoverishes, enslaves and annihilates man. Indeed, for most non-Christians also he has been more of a Grandfather in heaven, a kindly Old Man who could be pushed into one corner while they got on with the business of life. But the nature of his character is here secondary. What is important is whether such a Being represents even a distorted image of the Christian God. Can he be rehabilitated, or is the whole conception of that sort of a God, ‘up there’, ‘out there’, or however one likes to put it, a projection, an idol, that can and should be torn down?” (p. 41)

So, given the confrontation with the fallen leaves of the lost idea, what must we do? Robinson very helpfully names and elaborates the “task”

• “to validate the idea of transcendence for modern man” (p. 44)
• to affirm the existence of “a supreme Person, a self-existent subject of infinite goodness and power, who enters into a relationship with us comparable with that of one human personality with another… the existence of such a Being as the creator and most sufficient explanation of the world as we know it.”  (p. 48)
• to live forward “a view of the world that affirms this reality and significance in personal categories … that God, the final truth and reality ‘deep down things’, is love.”  (p. 49)

Force of Emptiness

May 31, 2026 brings forward a spectrum of features: 

* Heather Cox Richardson recounts a tragic event from this date in 1889 when over 2,200 lives were swept away in the Johnstown flood caused through the greed of materialism. 

* Richard Rohr’s meditation for today:
“The dualistic mind cannot deal with the biggies: love, death, suffering, God, infinity, and the very notion of grace.”  

* From Jim Palmer’s Week in Review

“The weakening of religion did not eliminate humanity’s need for meaning, belonging, or transcendence. Technological progress did not solve loneliness, mortality, grief, or purpose. Information abundance did not produce wisdom. Instead, many people now find themselves carrying enormous responsibility for constructing identity, meaning, and coherence under increasingly destabilizing conditions.”

* Reading in the wee hours:

Beneath an empty autumn sky stretch stretch endless wastes where no one goes. Who is that horseman riding from the west? These lines are by Wang Ch’angling, a Chinese poet of the eighth century. Using them to depict the realm of total emptiness and the marvelous activity of enlightenment that emerges from within it, Hakuin calls on students to affirm the sutra’s negations for themselves. (p. 43, Zen Words for the Heart: Hakuin’s Commentary on the Heart Sutra, Translated by Norman Waddell)

     Going yet further back, we note that these all are echos from the opening of Wisdom “all is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2).

And yet, still, the day begins with glory of a setting full moon and rosy hues from a rising sun. 

Tuning In

May 3, moon at morning

When awake mid-night 

As in any time attuned 

Look not for clock-time 

The Lord of both worlds 

Calls always “Now!”

Listen for in tone ing 

Home making

Of that harmony 

Eternal recurrence 

Of the Order 

Not for food-sleep-pleasure 

Nor for calendar bank account 

But to home in 

Always returning

“Original Countenance”

And Remember we are 

   there 

Sooner 

   moving more slowly 

Mindfully 

For fewer dragons 

   Disturbed 

 

May 3, 5:59A

 

Being in time. I’m wondering about the baseline … perhaps it’s a sense of center. The “original countenance.” Nishitani says “The dropping off of body-and-mind is self-presentation of the original countenance.” 

“…all things coming forward to practice and confirm the self is no different from defining the dropping off of body-and-mind as being the practice of Zen. The dropping off of body-and-mind is self-presentation of the original countenance. The original countenance is present at the point that the world worlds, where ‘one’s treasure-house opens of itself and one can use it at will.’ It is the place of self-joyous samadhi. . . On the whole, this is the meaning of ‘observance.’

… in the Existenz of the dropped off of body-and-mind (that is, of true emptiness)… a standpoint of absolute freedom. By means of its own dharma, this Existenz maintains dharani over all phenomena in the dharma-like nature, or suchness, within this world of transitoriness and uses them for its own enjoyment. Hence, when the self as body-and-mind is born, it is a birth that is a unbirth; and when it passes away, it is a passing away that is a non-passing away. (pp. 199-200)

May 3, 5:56A

 

Harmonizing with Resonance

Energy in autumn leaves, Nov 8, 2025

Sound and light are forms of energy, vibrations, frequencies, bridging for those ready to hear and see the expanse and interiority of space and time, infinity and eternity. One of my very favorite themes, resonance, is wonderfully amplified by Frank Wilczek, winner of Nobel Prize in Physics. From his chapter “Quantum Beauty 1: Music of the Spheres” in A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design:

Each natural vibration pattern takes place at its own natural frequency.  The natural frequency is also called a resonant frequency, for the following reason. If the frequency of your driving force is close to the natural frequency of some pattern, that pattern will leap out in powerful response. For then, and only then, does the external driving force match up with the internal forces, cycle after cycle, to build up the strength of the motion. (pp. 173-4)

Color in woodlands, Nov 8, 2025

 

Wilczek calls James Clerk Maxwell “the first truly modern physicist” (p. 7) and quotes from Maxwell’s private journal:

Happy is the man who can recognize in the work of to-day a connected portion of the work of life and an embodiment of the work of Eternity. The foundations of his confidence are unchangeable, for he has been made a partaker of Infinity. He strenuously works out his daily enterprises because the present is given him for a possession.

Thus ought man to be an impersonation of the divine process of nature, and to show forth the union of the infinite with the finite, not slighting his temporal existence, remembering that in it only is individual action possible, nor yet shutting out from his view that which is eternal, knowing that Time is a mystery which man cannot endure to contemplate until eternal Truth enlighten it. (from p. 164 in Wilczek’s A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design) 

Morning light, Nov 8, 2025

Revelation: Resonance and Radiance

2AM or maybe three, with coffee in the dark. Notes from recent nights.

   Vibrations of sound and light offer guidance for travelers between the worlds. Solitude and silence mark access with entrances signaled and illuminated by the qualities of God, especially Beauty, Truth, Love. Those moments out-of-time whisper in silences soon past midnight, reverberating with “the breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you...” (Rumi, of course) 

   Because Faces of the Divine reach beyond into the Unknown, the holy qualities shift with elusive forms, refusing to hold still while paradoxically affirming authenticity. 

   Resonance has become a closer friend over these seventy-eight years: Intimacy felt by absence as well as Presence; the sense of the vital-missing that leads most surely away from superficial enchantments--too material and too temporal. 

   The vibration, maybe that called “felt sense,” opens the boundary between worlds, becomes more hopefully trusting through repeated experiences in the beautiful/true/living that which awes/inspires/cares. It’s an intimate, interactive, almost unknowing, risky yet reassuring. 

   This texture knows loneliness and wishes for company in love, the textured kind that emanates from memoir—like when Mark Taylor writes of needing countryside instead of city, and my deep-knowing sighs. 

“Eventually, things reach the tipping point and more becomes different. Speed renders life ever more transient and thus increasingly ephemeral—everything solid melts into ether(nets). The proliferation of media, information, and telematic technologies in infinitely complex networks creates the new domain of cyberspace, where realities that are the ‘substance’ of our lives appear to vaporize and everything becomes virtual. In this placeless place so-called real time is no longer temporal yet not quite eternal. Glimpsing my face in Windows on terminal screens, I realize that I am no place, perhaps even nowhere.

   When real time interrupts ‘real time,’ the flow stops just long enough for me to realize that the time has come for me to return to the country.” (Mark C. Taylor, Field Notes from Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living, pp. 73-74)

In the countryside, Taylor writes and reflects in community with Kierkegaard, with his rock gardens, cites Melville, makes mind-pictures of wildflowers, clouds, reflects on memories. All this and more in order to amplify the knowingness of this text-ure-ing. And so my tipping-point nervousness recedes with the advent of such community, with Mark, reassuring and protective. I know in a way-not-known, by faith, by hope, by love. Tenuous. Scary. But enough, just enough. 

   Outside these windows, the view now blues, less gray, promising dawn, this hint of radiance. 

“‘God and the imagination,’ the poet Wallace Stevens avers, ‘are one.’ To appreciate this rich insight we must expand our notion of the imagination and transform our understanding of God. Wherever form emerges from formlessness or pattern appears in the midst of confusion, the imagination is at work. The imagination is not only within us but is also in the world around us. Theologians have had it wrong for centuries—God is the infinite process in and through which everything arises and passes away.” (Mark C. Taylor, Field Notes, p. 78)

Tracking the Holy

May 4, ~6AM

 Notes from May 4 ~2AM: This post I write incomplete—realizing all is.  Maybe in resignation about a draft that began a week ago and is still refusing to come to closure. It began this way:

A friend asks, “What do you do on Sunday?”

What a wonderful question! For Sundays come first and often forefront, anticipating the sacred. And yet, what if each moment of all days should be respected and searched for the Holy? Consider the spirit of “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil 2) and the model of Jesus who penetrates past the surface of religion, challenging the no-work command in order to do healing as if that is the true way to keep the Sabbath holy (Luke 6). Then an inquiry into Sunday might offer guidance for every day. 

Notes, 9AM, May 4: But I should have realized (given previous forays into sacred ground) that going there enters a realm out of control. Wandering and getting lost has more chance than not. And so, the maze has led into a shift in my reading that swirled into Orpheus (Walter A. Strauss, Descent and Return: The Orphic Theme in Modern Literature). Very interesting but more (and more serious) wandering… a force to simply accept (surrender to) the “gift” of fragments.

poppies

Anyway, all this muddle has me wondering about directions. When Lauren visited in January, she commented about how much her dad got confused when driving (or walking). Even for places we’d been six or eight times in the past few days, I’d turn the wrong way. 

And this brings back memories from much longer ago, from when I worked as a chain-carrier for my surveyor dad (and a few times for his father, Lee). I remember Dad’s exasperation in redirecting me north after I’d taken out east or southwest. But he’d only told me “Go north” and hadn’t pointed the way. The kind of inner compass that just knows cardinal directions must’ve been left out of my birthright. 

And yet the absence of that kind of direction-knowing might be a guidance itself. It only took about 50 years for me to find, to accept, and to appreciate the treasure of a different sort of resonance. Persons may be given a capacity with a needle that hones in, not on magnetic north, but instead on giving guidance toward the sacred. Yet to read this directional guide seems to require dedicated development and consistent re-calibration.

     And so, my draft about “What do you do on Sunday?” was like a zephyr going after the Holy. You know, “Keep the Sabbath holy!” I know. I know. Sunday isn’t the Sabbath. And yet, it is. Rule 1: The “holy" moves out beyond literalism. 

Ah, Zephyr-land! Uncle Perry lived there: Zephyr, Texas, pop. 750 when we visited in the 50s, down to 198 over the next 20-30 years (according to Google). Uncle Perry: not an easy fit with the “real world.” Is anyone really? Maybe we’re just fashioned for another realm, and all this trying to fit in, to make it, to succeed!!!—foolishness. There’s a Sunday-thought for us, and it’s nothing new. Rule #2. Align to the true self, the unique, and yet paradoxically One.

The draft then meandered off into the theme of “resonance” but we’ll save that for next time…

one Sunday

Entering Mystery

Why? For example, why am I writing? Why read? Reading for escape and pleasure, sure—why but theology! I’m just completing a collection of essays that … and as I draft this line, my screensaver answers:

Excuse the interruption (although it is the answer in cryptic form, appropriately).

     To resume, I just finished reading Thinking Through the Death of God, edited by Lissa McCullough and Brian Schroeder. The excellent volume is subtitled A Critical Companion to Thomas J.J. Altizer, and it consists of essays by 12 leading theologians, followed by a response from Altizer. My engagement with Altizer has been noted in the three previous blogs; and his provocative soul-searching continues to nourish the journey and to tease the way providing critical bits of understanding along with lots of intriguing not-yet-getting-it. Most, if not all, of the contributors acknowledge that reading Altizer can be difficult, and yet each proves the ultimate value of the effort. Altizer himself, three pages from the end, confirms

“… this is not a challenge to an elite few; it is rather a challenge to us all, and just as each of us has been hurled into a condition of ultimate emptiness, each of us must find a way through that emptiness…” (p. 227)

A helpful comment on this challenge comes in David Jasper’s chapter, “In the Wasteland: Apocalypse, Theology, and the Poets.”

The Self-Embodiment of God has been described by Altizer as a gratuitous gift, the result of a long and deep struggle, and it is perhaps for this reason that its reader—though this is also true of most of his writing—must transcend the author himself, enacting a genuine communion that is nothing short of a liturgical experience. This may well explain why a critical reading of Altizer’s work is so difficult, perhaps ultimately impossible: certainly it evokes a religious reading that, at best, is participatory or even celebratory, rather like his own readings of poets such as Blake or Dante. To read is to speak, which becomes a self-embodiment realized in a silence that is the heart of prayer and celebration. . . in the form of a meditation…

Altizer’s writing…as a poetics that yearns in its very language for a ‘total presence,’ which is, in fact, nothing other than true prayer—a voice of silence experienced as such an intensity that it is everything and nothing. Such total presence in Altizer’s theology is a suspension that explains his profound acknowledgement of Dante’s vision of Purgatory, the place (which is no place) where opposites meet and the possibility is held out for redemption and purification. (p. 185, 187)

     As Jasper articulates, I read (and write) as a means to reach toward the sacred, that is, to pray. Let’s return to his lines: “To read is to speak, which becomes a self-embodiment realized in a silence that is the heart of prayer and celebration. . . in the form of a meditation…” We might substitute “to write is to listen” in place of the first phrase: To write is to listen, which becomes a self-embodiment realized in a silence that is the heart of prayer and celebration. . . in the form of a meditation. When I write, usually as a meditation with material from reading, and when this infuses with the gift of images, the photos provided by “total presence” (as much as I am capable) of beauty in nature, when these “gratuitous gifts” flow in, around and through—well, it’s prayer. And in the silence, grace brings peace, reconciliation of opposites, insight into mysteries, manna for the journey.

A recent, if not ever-present, question/concern for a “solitary dreamer” (a phrase used in Alphonso Lingis’ chapter on “Kenosis” that I accept as apt for me) relates to whether the [solitary] journey must engage community and, if so (as often asserted by writers I admire), how and how much? This band of searchers that crowd my study and demand my time, these theologians, poets, story tellers, and a few walking/talking/loving close friends—Isn’t that the church of today? Consider Lingis on the visionary:

The visionary language makes us see what the visionary has seen. But for us to see what the visionary has seen is for a visionary to awaken in us. It is indeed a visionary in us that alone makes contact with the visions in visionary literature and receives from the visions the writers have received. Thomas Altizer affirms that it is through knowing a primal vision of one’s own time and world that one can open one’s own vision to the infinitely deeper vision of our great visionaries. (p. 205)

     The final word belongs to Altizer. In his concluding page, he returns to a frequent and central theme: the crucified/resurrected body of Christ. As I’m reading this conclusion, my mind echoes, “the body of Christ” as “the church,” the gathering of two or more who compose the profane/sacred mystery incarnate.

If we do not yet know a resurrected body, or do not do so either fully or decisively, we can know a crucified body, and can know the full actuality of that body, and most clearly know it in the ultimate suffering of the body of humanity, a suffering that can be known as a renewal of the Crucifixion. But if it is a renewal of the Crucifixion it is a renewal of the passion of God, a passion inseparable from an apocalyptic transfiguration, a transfiguration only possible through the death of God, or only possible through an absolute self-emptying or self-sacrifice of the Godhead, a sacrifice that is the sacrifice of the Crucifixion, and a crucifixion that is itself the consequence of an absolute genesis or an absolute beginning. But if the Crucifixion is the most ultimate realization of the body itself, it is so only as an absolute breaking of the body, a breaking that is renewed in the Eucharist, and comprehensively embodied in the most ultimate suffering of the body of humanity, then body as body is absolutely real, and finally real only as the body of Christ. This is certainly not the ‘spiritual body’ of Christ, not a mystical body that is an other-worldly body, it is the very reversal of every possible other-worldly body, indeed, a reversal ending every other-worldly body, a reversal that is the totality of incarnation, and only thereby the totality of resurrection itself.

     And as I complete Thinking Through the Death of God, re-reading Altizer’s final lines, this image appears on the screen: