Theological Journal – January 17 What’s the Difference between a Stone and a Kiss?

Our day and time is one in which approaches to religious or spiritual faith tend either toward some experience they regard as religious or spiritual (and it doesn’t matter what it is) or toward a retrenchment to faith as commitment to a cause or as a specimen logged in a book). The former is open-ended with almost no boundaries; the latter quite specific with the specter of political correctness/purity always near at hand (Andrew Root following Charles Taylor).


Neither events without a history nor history without events will do theologically, however. These legacies of the 19^th and 20^th centuries have left us between a rock and a hard place. Or better, following physicist Carlo Rovelli (Seven Brief Lessons on Physics), between a stone and a kiss. What does this mean?


Stones are objects locatable in space and time with which one has at best an impersonal relationship. Even of one worships the spirit or deity of a rock it is not the rock itself one relates to but the reality it is believed to mediate. Such objects we relate to objectively.


A kiss, on the other hand, is an event that cannot be so captured or related to. A kiss happens in a relationship that impinges immediately upon us and our circumstances. It is an event of encounter between persons, not an experience within a person. It cannot be known until it happens and its happening, if genuine, is always an act of freedom. Such an event carries with it an extension of knowledge between and for both parties to it.


Encounter with God, neither simply objective or subjective, is a kiss. Life with God is a kiss, an event that we know in its happening. It, this life with the God who rescued Israel from Egypt and raised Jesus from the dead is an act of love that most often comes to us when we are dead and know and confess that deadness. Our God is a God of freedom and life and the places in our lives where we are bound or buried are where we must learn to look for his coming to us. That coming, liberating and revivifying, is a kiss of love. An event of encounter with God that avoids both the subjectivity and objectivity in religion and faith our history has left us with.


By that I mean that this kiss God bestows on us involves the subjective element of our passionate participation and the objective element of the presence and reality of God as the one liberates and gives life in imprisoned and deathly places. To speak of the imprisoned and deathly places of our lives is to speak directly to the experience of the absence of God that is the hallmark of our age and hollows out our religion and spirituality into untethered experience or tightly tethered political or theological correctness.


Imprisonment or death are events. To identify them is to speak of times and places. To speak of an encounter with God then means looking to these particular places where the Bible’s God has revealed himself acting. It is here where we may expect to encounter this God.

This was MLK’s experience. Root explains:

“What led Martin Luther King Jr. into the event horizon of God’s arrival was not his own spiritual vitality or even his goodness but his death experience. In that kitchen God showed up speaking, but only because King was pulled into the event horizon of nothingness. The concrete, lived experience of impingement was what led to the eventful encounter with the living God, because this God acts as minister. It is the confession of impossibility that opens our eyes, even in a secular age, to see the possibility of the arriving God. God comes to us with spoken word and is found near, identifying most particularly with the events we wish had not happened. God gives us a new story, a new history written on top and through these negative events. God turns our mourning into joy (Ps. 30) and our death into life, and transforms us into Christ (theosis), not because we are made gods, but because while we are yet creatures, our history is Christ’s, our story God’s own. God bears our events (in the cross) while God’s event (of trinitarian love) is given to us.

“At the kitchen table, King laments: ‘I am at the end of my power. I have nothing left.’ From this confession of nothingness King continues: ‘I could hear . . . [a] voice saying . . .’ When Martin confesses that he can’t do this—that there is no way that he can lead, bringing a new history to the people of the South—is when God arrives, speaking a ministering word of new possibility. Martin has tried to move himself away from the pull of the black hole. With the power of his courage he’s tried to avoid the event horizon of nothingness. But at the kitchen table he lets go. Pulled into the nothingness, he finds something incredible. To enter the event horizon of God’s own being is to confess your death experience. It is like Hawking’s theory, to admit that you’re being pulled toward the nothingness of a black hole. But just as physicists today believe that the monster black holes at the center of each galaxy, frighteningly able to eat whole solar systems, are actually there to create something new, a kind of hidden engine of new creation, so too are our own events of nothingness. They are monstrous, but in God’s sovereignty they are forced to serve God by becoming the stage on which God plays out the revealing of God’s being through God’s acts. Out of the event horizon of nothingness comes the arriving of God, who speaks words of new possibility, giving himself to us as minister. This is what King means when he speaks of ‘that power that can make a way out of no way.’ And the ‘no ways’ of our secular age are the very place where we begin to await divine action.”

And that, friends, is the kiss of God, merciful in its severity yet gracious in its provision. Thanks be to God!

(BTW, I would heartily recommend Root’s The Pastor in a Secular Age as essential reading for ministry in today’s world.)