We spent last week on the midcoast of Maine, visiting my in-laws. On the way back we stopped for lunch at a Burger King. They gave me my order number—forty-eight—and then called number thirty-two. So, I had a while to wait.
Number thirty-seven was a young man with a neck-beard and all his baby fat. According to his t-shirt, he had graduated high school in 2021. That puts him at (what?) twenty years old. Then his girlfriend sidled up next to her. I’d say she was in her mid-thirties, though it’s hard to tell, because she was clearly a meth head.
I’ve been noticing more and more couples like that one, and I’ve got them figured out. Chubby, awkward young guy doesn’t have much luck with the girls in his class. Somehow, he hooks up with a drug addict. Her standards are lower. He buys her food. Maybe she gets to sleep in his parents’ basement, as long as she doesn’t mind him rolling around on top of her.
As they were leaning on the counter, he grabbed one of the cardboard crowns they give to kids on their birthday, and placed it on her head. She looked at him, and he looked at her. And I’ve never seen so much light and love in two people’s eyes.
Nietzsche said said that, when you stare into the abyss long enough, it begins to stare back at you. He was right, but not in the way he thought.
In the Eastern Church, the abyss is a symbol of God’s infinite and ineffeble love. Kallistos Ware said,
The Greek Fathers liken man’s encounter with God to the experience of someone walking over the mountains in the mist: he takes a step forward and suddenly finds that he is on the edge of a precipice, with no solid ground beneath his foot, but only a bottomless abyss.
One day, a brother monk asked St. Seraphim of Sarov, “How can you read the human heart without anything being hidden from you?”
“No, no, my joy,” said St. Seraphim (he always called folks his joy.) “The human heart is open to God alone. When one approaches it, one finds oneself on the brink of an abyss.”
St. John the Beloved says, “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.” He dwells in the abyss. He is the abyss. In those moments when we catch a glimpse of each other’s abyss, we see God.