To Dive In

By Andrea Lingle

In my dreams I can swim like a porpoise. I am sleek and strong and silly, leaping and lunging just for the joy of being. In my dreams, I can dive and spin along any axis. In moments of exuberance, I can leap from the water and fly, loved by the wind and the water alike. The dreaming depths are not unknown to me. I can go deeper than my waking lungs and terrestrial ears can tolerate. In my dreams, my more fragile self can dwell in the deep embrace of the trenches and catacombs of the water, bathed and laved by the gestation of silence. And, in my dreams, I cam send by voice across the world through the incompressible medium of water. No brother is too far to hear my morning greeting. No sister is out of reach of my whispered Vespers.

What is salvation?

I am a theologian of the pilgrim road, which means I have learned to prefer silence and walking to definitions. I am a philosopher beguiled by the Spirit which means that I am sure that to seek answers is to honor the sacredness of the universe. This is contradiction. To seek a silent answer. What I have learned is that to seek an answer to a deep question is to learn that you cannot know, but you cannot avoid stifling certainty without raking the desert for an answer. Only through diligent searching can we truly find the freedom of not finding. Surely salvation is something ineffable. Surely it can only be glimpsed as a shadow on the wall.

What is salvation?

Let us return to the water. If we dive in, we can, for the length of a breath, move in three dimensions. All it takes is the thickening of the medium, and we can fly! In air we are bound by gravity, but in the density of water, we are birds. In baptism we enter the water through grace, and through grace we are taught how to move in a three dimensional world: “On one hand, we find the individual person; on the other hand, we find other persons; at the top we find the supreme infinite person. These three must work together; they must be concatenated in an individual life if that life is to be complete, for the complete life is the three-dimensional life.” (King, “The Three Dimensions of the Complete Life) Perhaps, grace is a thickening of the spiritual density of reality, which allows us to move into the three dimensions of the complete life. Perhaps to be saved by grace is to enter into baptism, to live toward love in three dimensions with hands wide open.