In vertical gaping

Man, who are you so that God can fall into you? Who are you so that you can fall into God? Who are you so that the love of God can be widespread into you? You are an infinite gaping deepness. It is to be feared that here our contemporary obviousness cannot follow any more, where reigns a radical finitude, a strict immanence and a total enclosure of the human being?

Saint Augustin, through his `Confessions', does not cease asking: where, in us, can we meet God? And it does not cease answering: `transibo'… It is necessary to go further. It is necessary to go deeper. While going always further and deeper man experiences always more vacuum, and at the same time always more plenitude.

The `sciences' known as `human' ones build a vast number of defence mechanisms trying to buckle the schizoid mankind on itself and protecting him against the divine ‘other’ dimension. The human being catches itself into a tautological totality. From finitude to entropic liquidation… a double dead end of the human reality trapped in its enclosure. Such enclosing can despair of finding openings but it cannot infinitely repress the irrepressible question, formulated in thousand manners and driven back in another thousand manners. Is this dead end total or, despite everything, even surreptitiously, is there an opening on elsewhere?

But the major reason of the one-dimensional approach of the human sciences, who cannot reveal all the faces of the human mystery, is that, in fact, they are constituted like negative theology. A right side of a reverse side. A reverse side of a right side. A vacuum of God is curiously filled with reversed substitutes of the divine reality. A massive repression testifies negatively of what is repressed. The `same' calls negatively the ‘other’ just at the point where the schizoid totalizing tries out the ultimate narrowing of finitude and where it believes meeting the absolute neuter at the side of the absolute nothing.

Mystical gaping opens in the crack of the being. The authentic mystic way is negative. Against our instincts and our logic it is a question of making vacuum, in all the meanings of the word and under all its possible aspects, to reach plenitude. A deep bound links together Christian mystic and ‘kenose’. This means the `descent' as fundamental dynamics of an `ascent'. So is the mystery of Christ damaging himself in death before rising up. The mystery of ‘kenose’ is identically the mystery of Agape.

The life in the Spirit starts not with a full but with a vacuum. In the middle of our false abundances we find only holes to be filled up… where the Spirit, starting from the superabundance of God in us, sees only obstructions to be drawn aside. All our natural reflexes translate the horror of this vacuum, and our modernity does nothing but accentuate this horror. When the basic essentials are lost, you will have to cover your nudity with expedients of fortune.

You do not find God through your plenitudes. You find God through your nothingness. It is like a leitmotiv by Johan Tauler. A deep and secret dialectical law of the inversion of the opposites governs the spiritual life. The more you approach your own nothingness, the more you reach this point of rupture where you fall over in the absolute being. Become nothing and you become all. Empty yourself and plenitude will be given to you in addition.

Man exists only in the precipice of the vertical gaping where the Abyss calls… There cannot be any true humanity without this call. Even if nobody listened to it, even if nobody heard it, it would not less be the fundamental and constitutive dimension of the human reality. Man, simply, unconsciously or consciously, would constitute himself in negative inversion against him. Nobody could know which kind of animal man would be without it.

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