direction as everything else that I valued: up. I had failed to
appreciate the meaning of some words that had intrigued me
since I first heard theirs in seminary -Till ich's description of
God as the "ground of being." I had to be forced
underground before I could understand that the way to God
is not up but down.
The underground is a dangerous but potentially lifegiving
place to which depression takes us; a place where we come
to understand that the self is not set apart or special or
superior but is a common mix of good and evil, darkness
and light; a place where we can finally embrace the
humanity we share with others. That is the best image I can
offer not only of the underground but also of the field of
forces surrounding the experience of God.
Years ago, someone told me that humility is central to the
spiritual life. That made sense to me: I was proud to think of
myself as humble! But this person did not tell me that the
path to humility, for some of us at least, goes through
humiliation, where we are brought low, rendered powerless,
stripped of pretenses and defenses, and left feeling
fraudulent, empty, and useless-a humiliation that allows us
to regrow our lives from the ground up, from the humus of
common ground.
The spiritual journey is full of paradoxes. One of them is
that the humiliation that brings us down-down to ground on
which it is safe to stand and to fall - eventually takes us to a
firmer and fuller sense of self. When people ask me how it