A woman I know described to me once an experience she had in the process of giving birth to her first child. It was not too difficult a birth as births go, but at the point where the labor became most painful and difficult the doctor gave her an anesthetic to help her through the actual delivery itself, and in the few minutes that she was unconscious she had a kind of dream or vision that haunted her for months afterwards. She didn’t see anything in her dream, and that was part of the strangeness, just the darkness with nothing to get her bearings by, but she said that she heard a voice which in a very even-toned and relentless way kept telling her the same thing over and over again, and what the voice told her was to push and to keep on pushing harder and harder even though, the anesthetic notwithstanding, the pain was considerable and she believed that the pain and the pushing were going to kill her, the straining of her whole body, but she also believed that she was going to have to die in order for the child to be born.

And then the dream opened up or deepened into a kind of dream within a dream, and this was the dimension of it that haunted her for so long afterward. Because within that inner dream she came to believe that it was not just that she was going to have to push the baby out of her womb and die herself, not just that the birth of this one new life was going to cost her her own death, but that this was the way the universe itself had been born. The vision she had was of God laboring in cosmic agony in order to give the world life, and therefore the darkness of her dream was the unfathomable darkness of a world where God had long since ceased to exist.

The child was born and lived and the woman didn’t actually die in the process, but the vision she had under anesthesia is a vision which many people have had before her, to the point where forty years ago a theology became known by its name. This dream of life coming out of death, particularly this dream of life itself coming out of the death of God, like all the great recurring dreams of humankind, seems in some way to be the bearer of a truth, and it must be taken seriously and must be allowed to haunt us as it did this woman. She did not physically die that day; but there are more ways than one of dying, and there’s much that can die quite apart from the flesh.

The phrase ‘self-centered’ has come to have an unpleasant meaning in our day, and we use it to describe people who are self-contained the way someone is contained in their own house when the door is locked and the phone is off the hook — safe from the demands and intrusions of other people yet also in a way cut off like a prisoner from the companionship of other people. But in another sense, the phrase ‘self-centered’ describes us all, not so much that we’re selfish in these ways but simply that we make ourselves the center of our own lives.

We look at the world with our own two eyes from the place where we ourselves are standing, which is right in the center, and we see the good things and the bad things of the world, out there on the circumference, primarily in terms of the way they affect us. We may deeply sympathize with other people when bad things happen to them, but very often the bad things that happen that are entirely real to us are the things that happen to us. We may be glad when good things happen to other people, but very often the good things that really make the heart sing are the good things that happen to us. All of this gives us as selves a kind of partial invulnerability.

For instance, the 230 thousand people killed in the Indonesian tsunami or the discovery of a cure for a terrible disease, even the horrors and the marvels that happen to people known to us, may move us very deeply for a while but they don’t really hit us where we live for the reason precisely that where we live is not out there on the circumference where such things happen, but right here on dead center, so that the only way life can really get at us is by scoring a bullseye.

To that extent the self-centered person is invulnerable, and with invulnerability comes a measure of independence because you can move around through the world not very much or for very long weighed down by anybody’s problems but your own. And make no mistake, there’s much to be said for such a life and you don’t give it up easily, and you do well to think twice before you do, and there are many worse selves that a person can be than self-centered in this way. However. When the woman bore her child that was just the part of her self that died as surely as her body might have. I mean that quite literally. The person she had been before simply and quite literally ceased to exist.

It’s not sentimental claptrap to say that when you bear a child as this woman did, or when as a man you become the father of a child, you just cannot be the center of your own life in the same old way any longer because now there is your child at the center with you. No longer is it true that the only things that can hit you where you live are the things that happen to you directly because you live also in the child now and whatever hits her for good or ill hits you also, so you’re vulnerable on not just one front any more but on two. And by the same token, it’s not just your own welfare that’s at stake any more as you blunder your way around the world, but it’s also the welfare of this other self, too.

In this sense, then, the woman’s dream was true because her self as the center of her own life did die and not without pain, as she brought her child into the world. From that time onward it became her destiny to die again each time the child moved out into new worlds of its own to risk dangers and defeats which would also be in some way hers.

In Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son we have not a baby coming into the world but a young man going out into the world, not the pain of the mother in her labor but the pain of the old man when his son decided to leave home and strike out on his own. If you consider how the old man rejoiced when his son finally came back, you can imagine something of what it must have cost to let him go in the first place, and how much he would have given to have had him stay. But just as in her dream the woman knew that she would have to die in order to give her baby life, the old man also knew that a part of him would have to die if his son was to have the chance for a life on his own. For the father it was the self-centered self that crucified itself in an act of love and let the boy go. And you might think twice about life on your own just as you might think twice about that word crucified.

The deepest and darkest part of the woman’s dream had to do with God’s dying in the act of creation. This was the part that haunted her for so long afterward. It’s this same idea that haunts the world still in what was called the Death of God theology. It’s a vision with a lot of terror in it and a lot of loneliness in it, and to try to fathom this vision’s meaning if it has any meaning at all is to move out beyond the reach of human thought. But I can’t help wondering if the same idea I’ve been trying to express in terms of the woman herself and Jesus’s tale of the prodigal doesn’t perhaps provide a kind of possible clue.

The ancient Hebrews spoke of God in God’s ineffability or holiness — God as the deus absconditus, the hidden God to look upon whom is to die and before whom even the angels veil their faces, the God who existed before existence itself existed, before the great “Let there be light” was ever spoken and before time and space themselves were brought into being. The Greek philosophers spoke of the Unmoved Mover, perfect and unchanging, whose nature it was to contemplate itself eternally. The Hindus have their idea of Brahman-Atman or the Void or Pure Being which can be described only by the Sanskrit phrase “neti … neti” which means “neither this nor that” — in other words that this Pure Being so far transcends our understanding that nothing we can say of it can be true.

In other words, it would appear that nearly every age and every culture has pointed with its own symbols to something like a God centered in and totally sufficient unto Godself. And then as widespread as that idea is the idea of creation, of the Ultimate Reality however you want to name it, as stirring in something like the labor of childbirth and bringing forth … light, water, earth, human beings, as another reality over against itself. This extraordinary vision of a God who exists beyond all pain and all joy sacrificing perfect invulnerability for the sake of giving life to a world and then leaving that world free even to deny him as the source of its life — a God who leaves the world free to suffer the consequences of its own actions and then suffers with it and for it.

To love another — a child, a friend, a neighbor — is to place your self at the mercy of the other and as a self sufficient unto yourself to die. So it is with God and all the prodigals who are all of us, and whom in love and at unspeakable cost the Most High gave life to, and whom in love and at unspeakable cost the Most High leaves free because though in freedom we can forsake God, only in freedom can we really love Him.

It was G. K. Chesterton who wrote, “There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to say there,” but there are few if any of us in this age of revolt from the past who choose that way. Even if we do, even if like the elder brother we stay at home and play it safe, going about our business at God’s house, it can happen even there of all places that we’re far from God because we don’t notice how smug and self-serving we are, how loveless and cynical. If God is someone we can find anywhere, God is also someone we have learned to lose track of anywhere.

If God is dead in the sense that he has willingly died, if God is far away because he has drawn far away so we can have room to be ourselves — then God is also dead and far away because we have so willed him to be, and the darkness of our world is a darkness we have made for ourselves as in a thousand ways and every day each of us flees God into countries just as far as the one where the prodigal went to try his luck until finally his hunger drove him back home again. God is dead for us because we’ve shaken the dust of him off our feet and have struck out on our own with faith in ourselves.

But even at his worst the prodigal remembers the life he once had — we have God’s breath in our lungs and the memory of God somewhere deep in our bowels, and unless we know God’s presence as a blessing we are doomed to feel God’s absence as a reproach, an emptiness, a hunger. Unless we live with God we are destined to die without him as in so many ways we have died already, a death of the spirit, a death of the heart. In so many ways we have died already that if I thought I could, I’d try to start a Death of Us theology to replace the Death of God one. It is just when the prodigal sees that he’s wasted everything not least himself, that he sees there is only one risk left to take, and that was to take his chances back home. Having squandered his inheritance, he can’t go back as a child but maybe he can get back in business as a hired hand.

This is the part of the story that is as moving as anything in any literature. He’s tried his luck only to find that his luck didn’t hold very long and he stinks of the sty and he’s lost everything, so finally he decides to go back home. And with the pathetic cunning of the panhandler he figures out that the best way to do it is by crawling back on his belly like a worm. So he works out ahead of time a rather mealy-mouthed little speech about how sorry he is for what he’s done and how he’s willing to be treated as one of the hired servants if the father will only take him back again. Only it’s a speech he never gets to make the way he planned to because before he finds a chance to make it the old man sees him coming up the road and rushes out to meet him and throws his arms around him, and to the scandal of all who prefer justice to mercy, speaks the great words, “Bring quickly the best robe and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand and shoes on his feet; and bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and make merry for this my son was dead and is alive again.”

The whole truth of it is even more than that, for it isn’t just the son but the father too who comes alive again because he has the son back home. The real truth is not that God is dead but that to turn to God in whatever half-hearted and half-baked way we choose — a confession, a clumsy prayer, one little act of compassion done for Christ’s sake and in his name — is to find what at its richest and most profound life really is, both God’s life and our own. The very source of life chooses to enter into death in order to give us life as we were meant to live it. Jesus’s death calls on us to die to our own self-centeredness that we would live not for ourselves any longer but for him who dies and for those God dies to welcome and give life to, with tears and embracing and gladness and a Feast.

One of the books I read again and again is Kenneth Grahame’s *The Wind in the Willows*. Here Grahame gives us the scene wherein Rat and Mole find at last the fat little otter child Portly sleeping peacefully at the feet of the great Pan himself. There is elsewhere beautiful writing to be found among children’s classics. There is no writing more beautiful than this.

Perhaps he would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fullness of incredible color, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humorously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.

“Rat!” he found breath to whisper, shaking. “Are you afraid?”

“Afraid?” murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. “Afraid! Of him? O, never, never! And yet—and yet—O, Mole, I am afraid!”

The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame, is a book about a group of small, vocal animals who lived once upon a time on the banks of the stripling Thames in Oxfordshire. There is one rather famous chapter in the book called “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” and the way the chapter begins is roughly this. A family of otters discovers that a small, fat, otter child named Portly is missing. Rat, who is a water rat, and Mole, who is a mole, decide to go search for him in Rat’s boat, and off they go one morning just before daybreak.

Strange things begin to happen. Rat suddenly hears a scrap of music such as he has never heard before, and then before he knows it, it’s gone. “So beautiful and strange and new,” Rat sings (and since these are British animals you have to imagine the British accent). Rat also has a rather flowery way of expressing himself. “Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it forever.”

At first his friend Mole can’t hear anything — “only the wind playing in the weeds and rushes,” he says — but then when it comes again, he does hear it; and then, as Grahame writes, “breathless and transfixed, he stopped rowing as the liquid run of that glad piping broke on him like a wave, caught him up, and possessed him utterly. He saw the tears on Rat’s cheeks, and bowed his head and understood.”

Religion is listening the way Rat and Mole listened — which is listening with more than just your ears, of course, which is listening with your hearts, with your intuition, with whatever is that part of you that longs, like a castaway, to hear news from across the seas. Worship is a response to that news, hearing it even in the ancient words of our forbears who themselves were listeners, who heard and then spoke of what they heard — Shema ’Yisrael, adonai Elohenu, adonai echad. Ecce agnus Dei qui tollit peccatum mundi.

Maybe it’s misleading to speak of religion as listening to something, maybe listening through would be more accurate — listening through the silence, through the prayer, through the music, through the sound of the wind in the rushes or through the sound of your own life, for whatever is to be heard through these things. It is listening the way a child listens or the way an animal listens for all I know, without any presuppositions about what you are going to hear or what you are not going to hear.

When you hear something like what Rat and Mole heard, what do you call it? Rat called it music that struck him dumb with joy and at the same time sent tears running down his cheeks. As for me, I would call it the sense that not the world certainly, not existence, but whatever it is that existence itself comes from, the power and ground out of which our lives spring, wishes us well, you and me, wishes to restore us to itself and to each other. It is the power that ultimately all theology is about. It is the power that stirs inside us at those rare moments when we make the effort of real speech with each other, and with it.

Throughout modernity, the church has presumed that its mission was directed to persons who already understood themselves as inhabitants of a narratable world. Moreover, since the God of a narratable world is the God of Scripture, the church was also able to presume that the narrative sense people had antecedently tried to make of their lives had somehow to cohere with the particular story, “the gospel,” that the church had to communicate. Somebody who could read Rex Stout or the morning paper with pleasure and increase of self-understanding was for that very reason taken as already situated to grasp the church’s message (which did not of course mean that he or she would necessarily believe it). In effect, the church could say to her hearers: “You know that story you think you must be living out in the real world? We are here to tell you about its turning point and outcome.”

But this is precisely what the postmodern church cannot presume. What then? The obvious answer is that if the church does not find her hearers antecedently inhabiting a narratable world, then the church must herself be that world.

The church has in fact had great experience of just this role. One of many analogies between postmodernity and dying antiquity—in which the church lived for her most creative period—is that the late antique world also insisted on being a meaningless chaos, and that the church had to save her converts by offering herself as the narratable world within which life could be lived with dramatic coherence. Israel had been the nation that lived a realistic narrative amid nations that lived otherwise; the church offered herself to the gentiles as their Israel. The church so constituted herself in her liturgy.

For the ancient church, the walls of the place of Eucharist, whether these were the walls of a basement or of Hagia Sophia or of an imaginary circle in the desert, enclosed a world. And the great drama of the Eucharist was the narrative life of that world. Nor was this a fictive world, for its drama is precisely the “real” presence of all reality’s true author, elsewhere denied. The classic liturgical action of the church was not about anything else at all; it was itself the reality about which truth could be told.

In the postmodern world, if a congregation or churchly agency wants to be “relevant,” here is the first step: it must recover the classic liturgy of the church, in all its dramatic density, sensual actuality, and brutal realism, and make this the one exclusive center of its life. In the postmodern world, all else must at best be decoration and more likely distraction. 

[Robert Jenson, in First Things] Jenson is, with Rowan Williams, one of the two more interesting contemporary theologians.