"For a number of reasons I have been feeling deeply lately."
I put the quotation marks around that first sentence because I want to think about what it says, and why I wrote it. Feeling deeply is one of those neutral phrases, given its edge and direction by naming what it is that creates or causes deep feeling. The metaphor of depth – like deep water, deep space, deep thought, is intended to convey seriousness, the opposite of superficial; profundity in contrast to shallowness, of lasting worth and weight rather than transience, feelings that endure and have to be endured.
In a revealing essay Denise Levertov tells her friend, "we [human beings] are not that different from one another at the deepest levels. In fact, it is precisely at the deepest levels that we are most alike." Here Levertov identifies a peculiar and precious quality of human relationships. She refers to those resonances we feel when in our deepest experiences, our in-depth moments, we know we are not alone; others have felt this too. The French existentialist philosopher-pilot and novelist, Saint Exupery, considered suffering to consist of the vibrations of the soul that remind us that we are alive and that we are human.
The slightly embarrassing confession that lately "I have been feeling deeply", is best understood against those kinds of thoughts. Over the last several months, within my personal circle of friends, we have journeyed through long debilitating illness, bereavement, newly diagnosed conditions that have forced life changes, people striving against the inner darkness and coldness of depression, or living through the bleak haze of the isolation and shame of mental ill health.
Being a friend is one of the highest callings on our time and energy, our money and our possessions. At least it seems so to me. I hope that more often than not, I hold to Levertov's insight that at the deepest levels we are most human and most alike, and because of that, when I feel deeply I place myself in imagination in the place where my friends live. And consequently I pray too, that in doing so, their suffering and my longing to ease it, share it, lift it, or bear it for them, that such deep feelings are themselves prayers. And as that brilliant agnostic Saint Exupery wrote, not knowing he was describing empathy as prayer, I pray too that the vibrations in my soul that their suffering sets off become reminders to me, and in ways wrapped in mystery and grace, become also to them, intimations of what it means to be most fully human and most fully alive.
One of the reasons I read Levertov, regularly and deeply, is because she not only understands deep feelings; she articulates them, or better, she exegetes them, shows what they are, and explains in much of her poetry how they give the thickening texture to love and compassion, sorrow and sadness, joy and hopefulness. In one place she says to be human is to drift on "murmuring currents of doubt and praise", and to "kneel in awe and beauty." We are mortal, vulnerable to time and circumstance, created in the image of God who is eternal love, and thus made capable ourselves of such love as makes bereavement and grief inevitable, suffering and sorrow inescapable, and at times life all but unbearable.
To contemplate our own feelings, and analyse what "feeling deeply" means, can easily become selfish indulgence, surrendering to the whispering temptations to self-importance, and anxious to preserve our own souls from a too costly encounter with the pain of others. On the other hand, to reflect on our deepest feelings, especially those we experience on behalf of others, whose suffering and struggles and sorrows we know, and choose to bear, that is neither selfishness nor indulgence. It is, or can become through such contemplative 'unselfing', prayer as passion, perhaps even prayer as passionate identification with the Passion of Christ and taking up the cross and condition of those we love.
When Paul talked of filling up the sufferings of Christ he spoke of what he barely grasped, and hardly dared give words. Nevertheless, he spoke of the final realities which intersected at the Cross, the nexus of time and eternity, where love with open arms eclipsed hate, mercy absorbed judgement, and suffering redeemed suffering by bearing it. There, at the Cross, God in Christ felt deeply, the sin of the world, felt more deeply still love infinite in mercy for that same world, and then in the desolation of loss and God-forsakenness, Jesus the Christ, the Word become flesh of our flesh, descended to death and the final relinquishment of all feeling.
Is that too theologically stretched, to compare feeling deeply with the anguish of God in Christ? Perhaps. But at times of grief and sorrow and sadness, when deep feelings of sympathy and love for others preoccupies the mind and sets up those humanising vibrations in the soul, there is an inclination, an inner turning towards that one place where all of this is understood in the deep recesses of the divine life of the Triune God. That is, for me at least, the place where when feeling deeply, I am confident of being understood, and under-girded.
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