Deep calls to deep
The in-between
After the break comes a stretch no one warns you about — not the old life, not the new, but a strange suspended in-between. One writer on transitions, William Bridges, called this the neutral zone: the disorienting middle where you have let go of the old and not yet laid hold of the new, hanging in the air like a trapeze artist who has released one bar and not yet caught the next, holding nothing at all. The sons of Korah knew the feeling from the inside long before anyone gave it a name. Deep calls to deep at the noise of your waterfalls, they sing; all your waves and your billows have swept over me. It is the language of someone in over his head, one breaker arriving before the last has passed, the floor of the sea calling up to the floor of the sky. This is the very threshold of the wilderness, where Disconnect tips over into the long disorientation ahead. And in that overwhelmed, holding-nothing place the psalmist does the single thing that holds: he turns and speaks to his own sinking soul. Why are you in despair, my soul? Hope in God; for I shall yet praise Him.
“Deep calls to deep at the noise of your waterfalls; all your waves and your billows have swept over me.”
— The sons of Korah — Psalm 42:7 (WEB)
“Why are you in despair, my soul? Hope in God! For I shall still praise him, the saving help of my countenance, and my God.”
This is Disconnect closing into Disorientation — the suspended in-between, where you have released the old and grasped nothing new. The phase asks you to stay honestly in mid-air without bolting back or grabbing forward, and to preach hope to your own sinking soul until the next bar, the far shore, finally comes into reach.
The break has let you go, and the new thing is not yet in your hands. This is the hardest part to sit in, because there is nothing to grip, no old certainty and no new arrangement, only the mid-air and the waves coming over. The temptation is to grab anything, to bolt backward to what was or to lunge forward and fabricate a false certainty just to have something solid to hold. Resist both. The honest work of the in-between is the psalmist's work: to talk to yourself instead of only listening to yourself. Your sinking soul keeps reporting that all is lost; you do not have to believe the report. Why are you in despair? Why are you downcast? Hope in God.
The psalmist does not say he feels hope; he commands it. You can preach the far shore to your soul before you feel it coming. He commands it, sets it deliberately before his own heart as a fact truer than the waves. You will not always feel the far shore coming. You can still preach it to your soul while you wait, in the dark, holding nothing but the promise.
The whole Church lives, in this cultural moment, in exactly such an in-between: old certainties released, new ones not yet formed, the waves of change sweeping over. One student of transitions, William Bridges, described a disorienting middle zone where the old has been let go and the new not yet grasped, like a trapeze artist between bars, holding nothing at all. That is normal to any real transition, not a sign of failure, and Phyllis Tickle's account of the Church's recurring upheaval says much the same: the between-time is part of the pattern, not a derailment of it. The Body's task in the suspended middle is the psalmist's, to keep preaching hope in God to its own anxious soul until the far shore comes into view. The footing is gone; the God the deep is calling to is not.
God Himself, when both bars are out of your hands. The old hold is gone and the new one not yet caught; the One the deep is calling to remains. What cannot be shaken is not your footing, which is gone, but the God you can still hope in from mid-air.
- Where am I suspended in the in-between, having let go of the old without yet grasping the new?
- Am I bolting backward or grabbing at a false certainty to avoid the honest discomfort of mid-air?
- Can I speak hope to my own sinking soul before I feel it, the way the psalmist does?
Lord, I have let go of the old and laid hold of nothing new, and the waves keep sweeping over me. Keep me from bolting back or grabbing at false ground. Teach me to preach to my own soul: hope in God. Hold me in the in-between until the far shore comes. Amen.