Deep Calls to Deep

I have never been to the Niagara Falls. I hear, though, that it is something to behold. I have heard that the roar is deafening, that when you stand on the look-out rails, even those several hundred feet from the bottom of the falls, you get soaked by the spray. I’ve never been, but I want to go. Someday, I will. And I think that I will break down weeping when I do.

In the deafening roar, in the blinding spray, there is an untamed wildness, a primal power that somehow calls me. The stories I’ve read of people hurling themselves over the falls in barrels – I understand that. Not that I would do that, trust me, but there is something in me that wants to be thrown into that – to be consumed, overwhelmed, defeated, plundered, and washed away, swept away.

I think if I visited there, I would understand better the Psalmist who wrote that “deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls” (Psalm 42).

Most of my days, I stand at the look-out tower and peer into the depths. I am enamored, enchanted, in love with the idea of loving God. And I have discovered that if I stand close enough, I can still hear the roar, feel the tremble, get soaked by the spray. But, I am never plunged into the Water.

I think God is a lot like that. And I think that His constant invitation and calling is for us to plunge in. He’s not promising us safe waters, or an easy time at it, but He is promising us life. The promise is that our thirst will be quenched, our souls filled, our hearts resurrected, even as we are crushed and swept away by his “reckless, raging, furious” love.

Living the life of God, or living life with God, is I think a lot like the scene in one of Monty Python’s movies. Jesus is talking to the crowds, and a couple in the back can’t quite make out what he is saying. One of them utters, “Blessed are the cheesemakers?” It’s the spray, not the rushing, pounding waters – the scraps, not the banquet table, we find ourselves in when we just stand at the perimeter and not press in, when we come to the edge and not jump off.

There is a great image in C.S. Lewis’s “A Horse and His Boy” when Wihn, a talking horse from Narnia, finally meets up with Aslan. Thinking him not really a lion, or at least a nice, tame one like so many have told her, she can’t imagine how big, how glorious, and how dangerously beautiful he is until he appears before her. Trembling, she approaches him and says with a quivering voice, “If you must eat one of us, please, eat me. I would sooner be eaten by you than fed by any other.”

And that is, I think, the experience of all of us rough and ragged ones who finally meet up, face to face, with the Lover of our Souls. We are left naked, alone, surrounded by a circle of stones fallen from accusing hands and some scribbling in the sand, facing a Savior who looks at us with eyes deep and knowing, hearing Him say, “Go now, and sin no more.” We are just amazed to even be alive. We are confused and wonder, “Could this really be the Messiah – He knew everything about me and still offered to me something I’ve never had,” and leave our own water buckets to run back to our villages, full of hope and wonder. We find our hearts burning within us, because somehow, in ways deeper than words, we realize we knew all along He was really here with us, right beside us, more alive than we ever dreamed he could be. We are blinded by Light, and then we see that we were always blinded, and it is now that we really see. We are caught in a Storm so wild, but find all we have to hold onto is all there ever really was. In awe, in wonder, stupefied, and blown to dust we saunter up wobbly-kneed, and with a rapidly beating heart say the only thing that can come out of our mouths, out of our hearts, “I would sooner be eaten by You than fed by any other; I would rather be crushed in Your hands than whole in desert lands.”

Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me.
–Psalm 42:7