The question put was: “Are Coptic Christians orthodox or monophysite?” Few would be concerned with the arcane query. Was Jesus, the Christ of God, one person with two distinct natures, human and divine, or, to put it inelegantly, one person of a divine nature subsuming something lesser, as before the divine all must be, and so only seemingly of human composition? If one were inclined to play with Greek metaphysics and proceed logically in this matter, the monophysite position seems the stronger. As the son of God and a woman, as an admixture of a divine person and nature and a human nature, Jesus would logically be only half human. If one added to the monophysite arsenal the latter doctrine that Mary was spared the taint original sin, she would not be a woman like unto others. She would be a woman according to the order of nature before the fall from Paradise. The divinity of Jesus would therein be in no manner contaminated by humanity’s fallen nature. The role of Jesus would seemingly then be, not to be the incarnation of God, but to initiate it. Thus, as the designated mediator for humanity, he (as indeed he did) would ask the Father to send forth the Holy Spirit that they who embrace the gospel might become through the second birth of grace and faith the “children of God.” (Welcome to a Sunday afternoon in my world.) It ought to be patent that the controversy here is about the philosophical understandings of what exactly constitutes a person and what exactly constitutes a nature. The incompatibility of Hebrew religious vision and Greek meta-physical concepts did not occur to them involved in the tossing of volleys toward one another. Neither did “where charity and love prevail.”
Most of the ruckus that racked the ancient church had little to do with faith. It was, most assurdedly, about faith is search of understanding, but that understanding was locked into the Greek philosophical systems of the day which were incapable of converting the semitic imagery which stands the building blocks of scripture into that rarified, all-embracive, speculative perspective on reality called meta-physics. If, as all agreed, God in himself is inconceivable, how does one take a concept—a mental construct—and apply it not only to the inconceivable but to the power of the inconceivable in creative action, specifically to the agency of God in time-space as made manifest in his plenipotentiary re-presentative, the Christ. Arguments by analogy are interesting, but are still arguments by concepts, by an ascending mathematical logic that presupposes the end point of all comparison is real rather than ideal, actual rather than theoretical.
Even before psychology emerged from its ancient chrysalis of philosophy, it was noted that how we conceive of the world and its essentialist foundations depends upon differing but connatural dispositions toward reality. Today we name those dispositions extraversion and introversion. These predispositions govern how we organize reality, how we tend to fall into the philosophical camps of idealism or realism. They are the viewing platforms on which we orient ourselves regarding the basic-most organizational systems of reality. Does the foundational organizational and evaluative system reside within, in my mind, or does it reside without, in external reality? Where does one find the proper-most way of seeing, understanding, evaluating the world? Where resides the definitive point of contact with reality? Neither the internalist nor the externalist perspective is correct; neither is false. They simply present as naturally occurring personal pre-dispositions through which information is interpreted. They are evolutionary devises to insure the bifocality of the species. Because they are so basic to our functioning as social animals, we tend not to consider their inherent necessity, and to hold the opposite of our perspective as wanting or completely erroneous. Regarding the inconceivability of God, both perspectives tend to forget that regardless of the perspective all are taking an item inconceivable, and packaging it into a rational box called a concept. Reason is born out of the life-force, out of psyche. It cannot contain the power out of which it arises.
Two natures or two persons is an argument about concepts, not reality. It is about perfectly natural but opposite perspectives on reality. Can such have practical impact? Yes, everything does. Ought it divide a church confessing the presence of God in creation for the benefit of creation? No. Ought it ever to have emerged? The answer is moot. It did, and was undoubtedly an event requisite in the evolutionary emergence of Christianity into the ancient world. Is it relevant in the world wherein Progress metaphysics supplants the supremacy of Platonic, Neo-Platonic, and Aristotelean metaphysics? No. We have conceptually moved on to broader planes of enunciation. “I AM the Lord thy God, thou shalt not hold up idols before me!” What other than an idol is a concept? What other than concepts are the philosophical constructs of nature and person? God, says Christianity, becomes incarnate in the human to the end that the human might become in-Spirited into the divine. More traditionally put: “God became man that man might become God.” It is an ideal about the functioning of creativity more so than an idea setting boundaries around God and man. It is about having an empowering vision, not pounding out definitions. It is about the practical application of creativity to the moment, not about debating the nature of creativity in itself. It is about in-Spiration, not cold hard facts. It is about faith not empirical surety. There assuredly are objective norms we need to incarnate in the process of positive growth, but as creativity is a power and not a thing, neither the incarnation of creativity in a moment nor what in-itself is creativity is accessible to reason and its compartmentalizing boxes called concepts.
This want of man to compartmentalize God into a concept of God is the idolization of God we need always be armed against. When Moses asked of God that he identify himself, he received no more than “I AM.” God leaves no platform upon which to build an idol or a tower of Babel. For the ancients to know a name was to have power over that which was named. Adam is told to name the animals as a sign of the domination, the lord-ship, over them being given. Likewise, when God re-names Abram Abraham and Jacob Israel, God is taking control of human history and making it into a divine destiny, a salvation history. God has no proper name (pace Aquinas). Our notions of Father, Son, Spirit are scripturally based, culturally-toned indicatives of relations within the Godhead understood philosophically. God as our Creator and as our Father are about relationships with us. We can name God only in the historical experientiality of his condescension toward us, in his surrendering of himself, of his creative Spirit, into the created in ever greater and inexhaustible measure. Jesus as God’s Christ is the living icon of the historical manifestation of that divine kenotic action, that self-giving, that self-sacrifice. God and creation are joined in the creative Word of God, the Logos. As God speaks his Word in the infinite power of his creative Spirit and creation is, so too God, in the infinite power of his Spirit, surrenders into creation his creative Word that creation become one with him, and become perfected in his being. God and creation are forever in a “dialogue”, in, literally, a state of “because of the Word (dia-Logos).” God in man experiences creation and creation experiences God. It is experiential. We can express the affectivity of the experience, but any attempt to extrude a definition of God in se from the elaboration of that is beyond the bounds of reason in se. The divine kenotic process is eternal because its origin and its power, its Spirit, are of God. The divine Logos is incarnated into creation from the moment of creation, and in faith, in a deeply moving psychic experience and actualization, bursts the bounds of physicality and therein initiates the spiritualization of cosmos. It is a pivotal point in the evolution of the psyche, of the spirit, of man.
I am neither an iconoclast nor a misologist. Sacred images and lofty ideas are integral to our integration both within and without. They are, however, not the way or the truth. They are but masks, indicatives, and instruments that are of themselves too easily adapted into idols or weapons. The psyche is an autonomous factor, and religious statements are psychic confessions. A power within over which we have no power produces these statements and unless we are daft or committedly self-destructive we must pay attention to them for our very vitality. But as these confessions come from the unconscious they are “transcendentals,” items that “go over our heads,” go beyond our faculty of reason. That is why religion must recognize its sacred statements and images do not denote a quasi-super-nature, a semi-concrete reality. They merely point toward a vitalizing meaningfulness of life, toward spirit. That is why the projection of these items onto a cosmic background as philosophical statements, as meta-physical statements, must be recognized as hypothetical attempts to organize reality on an intellectual level. The psychic confessions, the power-bearing symbols brought forth from the psyche, indicate. They do not define. They are spiritual (psychic) realities, psychic experiences, not facts of a rational world, a world we create out of no more than our rational organization of a handful of transient sensations. The factuality of the last statement ought to be uncontestable to anyone at least minimally familiar with the arguments of empiricism, relativity, probability.
Nevertheless, we glory in our rationality. Modern man thinks it his crowning power. Because it cannot contain a concept of God, man “thinks” God a non-entity, a phantom “object.” We glory in our individualism and all the accomplishments of our ingenuity. Yet we fall in every battle to make wholesome, to “sanctify,” this world that seems ever to be running away from us, always in some corner defying both our reason and ingenuity. Indeed, reason and ingenuity themselves keep contorting and turning in upon themselves. Every reason, every ingenious plan seems to harbour an unknown problem awaiting to erupt. They of a certain age might recall how plastics were to be the marvel product of a progressive society, how that which we now term sub-urban sprawl was to be the new independence of the new middle class, how a grand new world map was to be the path to a lasting world peace. We strive for a world health, for a world-wholesomeness, and diseases of soul and mind, of sea and soil crop up like thistles and thorns. We, rather psychotically, return over and over again to the same fact-driven, technic obsessed policies, politics, and pathways, to the same obvious pathogens, that have brought us hence. Too few look still to something beyond the rational, the ingenious, the scientific, the pseudo-freedom of the newly canonized individualism. Too few still know to celebrate there is to life a joyous irrationality that channels power into vistas and visions and vibrancies reason cannot, that reason cannot conceptualize and yet cannot function without.
Energy is always a product of a tension, a pivoting move from one side of an equation to the other, a pulsing give and take. Regarding the psychic energy that makes us, when only one side of it is allowed “to speak” the other does not vanish. It tries to compensate for the ignorance of it, for its having been ignored. It thrusts itself forward in an angry rebellion. When there is lacking an accepted and recognized channel to direct the energy that stands the psychological counterforce to the accepted diurnal expenditure of energy, the neglected counterforce boils over and reacts against the one-sidedness. The over-materialized and hyper-rational Western world has ignored the spiritual and non-rational, a world long to be found in the Christian cult. Thus, our one-sided, materialistic, rationalistic world is rebelliously assailed with chaotic non-material ideas and irrationalities: spewing demagogues battening on fears, anxieties, and conspiracy theories, societies racked with a macedoine of incomprehensible thoughts, moods and incipient hallucinations, and a host of enticing and demanding false gods most of whom bear names ending in -ism. All this overrides the questions and insecurities reason has no room to accommodate. Thus counselling rooms are filled to capacity with souls that once would have been served with examination of conscience, prayer, confession, and faith in a power higher than one’s ever so rational self, and civility and civilization tear themselves apart while the world falls apart.
If modern man will not heed the call of prophets and saints from ages past, perhaps he ought to look to the great saints of modern science, to Dirac, Heisenberg, Jung, and the others who in their analyses of mathematics, world, and man have allowed irrationality its rightful place. For the believer, for the one capable of that irrational leap into a faith in something inexplicable yet compelling, there appears a sapience, a “taste,” for a higher vision. The channel for that higher vision has long been the cult centred on the divine condensation that is creation and the gracious awakening of creation to its spiritualization. Such psychic experience of the vision of a higher power, a power within, humbles. Being humbled does not read well in a world where everyone is ever trumpeting one’s existence, one’s accomplishments, wherein everyone needs to “post” the latest lunch, the latest purchase, the latest dance move. Far from being a crushing of human nature, humility is the heart of wisdom. It is literally a “bring down to earth.” It situates man in a proper place before one’s own powers and those of cosmos and its God. It is, from the theological perspective, the blessing that compels one to look within, to recognize that the dynamic within is something more ancient than reason, more archaic than man, more potent than cosmos. In that sense it is something sacred and akin to that which we are accustomed to name grace, or the imprint of God within, or the experience of God within. When in the silence of that “seeing” we can avert the eye from that seemingly autonomous, incomprehensible force that but touches a distant depth of heart, that abides in the deepest recess and trace of all things, we find ourselves grounded, humbled, and in that moved ever more confidently to set aside all else, and allow Creativity its freedom of expression. The essence of Christianity has always resided here, albeit that Christian vision has often been transmitted in a distorted, and blindly gnostic form. Faith is the leap beyond reason that recognizes the bipolarity of the human soul, its irrational organs of intuition and sensation. Religion arose as a channel to hold fast to that vision and to the wisdom at the core of the psyche, to the revelation of the power that both feels and grasps the meaningfulness within life and cosmos. Religion gives room, gives freedom, to imagine a new world. That world is not something beyond this life, but exactly this life adequately valued and oriented for the benefit of all.
“Unless you abandon all else and follow me, you cannot be my disciple.” To follow after the spirit of creativity which Jesus presents, makes present, one cannot hold onto ego, to persona, to some treasured and tiny view of self and the world and also surrender to the grace, to the power within to grow into a “kingdom of heaven,” a community wherein Creativity rules. To follow one can neither look backwards nor hold on to the status quo. To follow is to look forward, to move forward. The apostle Paul writes: “We live in the Spirit, not the flesh.” We, as incarnations of creativity, live in the future-oriented power and not the materialized past. As Jesus marked: “A prophet is never accepted in his own home.” The seed-bearer of the deeper vista can never go back to the place whence he began. The past can be redeemed only in the present.[i] Thus also Jesus can say to the Peter who tries to persuade him against the future: “Satan, get behind me,” for Satan, the demonic power of resistance to true growth, is always a retrograde power. He may offer, as in the three temptations, every form of ego-satiation, but evolves no God-within, evolves no truth of the man within. It is of note that Jesus’ responses to the temptations are not arguments. They are not reasonings. He turns to sacred narrative for reply because only a Divine Word can speak to temptation, to Satan. In terms of archetypal psychology, only the constancy of the inner power of the all-integrating Self can face the volatility of ego-concern and the shadow hidden within. One cannot fight the dark side within. One can merely acknowledge it and rise above it. The descent of the Crucified into hell is the ultimate acknowledgement of hell and its power. Only in that descent, in that apocalyptic, that revelatory, acknowledgement of its existence and power, can the retrograde power be seen for itself, faced on its own ground, and dissipated. Only then can a man rise into God, into godliness. The resolution of our dark side, of the shadow within “me” is always through the positivity of “anima,” through relatedness, through love, and love is always about the giving away of “me,” the sacrifice for an-other. Unless one constantly sacrifices the constantly forming wall of appearances and ideas that is the necessary veil of our existence, unless one submits to the deeper powers within, to grace, to God, to the sheer face of creativity ever cleaving off within, one cannot advance either self or the world. Unless one takes up one’s unique cross one cannot “follow me,” cannot share “the same cup of which I drink,” cannot redeem the world from the flash of ego-fascination and the fractured light of the shadow within.
It is here a spiritual danger lurks. It is to abandon realistic action by escaping into fantasy, into a romanticizing of Jesus, therein neglecting and negating the dynamic that is his Spirit. To follow is to embrace the mission, not the historical person, though they be iconically and intimately commixed. One is called to take on Christ-hood. One is called to look realistically to one’s own time and space, and not to sentimentalize a Jesus of centuries past. The angels ask of the apostles: “Why do you stand here looking into the sky?” when you ought to get on with the mission (Acts,1). Only in going forward, be it toward a cross or a crossroads, is there the possibility of futurity and fore-giving. Blessed are they that know this, or as The Gospel according to Matthew has it: “Blessed are the poor of spirit.”
Blessed is an interesting word. Many habitually roll their eyes whensoever they hear it. To them is saps of a mind constellating a religious stupidity or fanaticism. It carries more than the sense of happiness or contentment. Happiness and contentment are about a degree of peace with oneself and one’s world. Contentment carries flavours of an emotive, somewhat animal degree of internal satisfaction. Happiness is on a more human level, somewhat rational, and definitively social in orientation. Being blessed is neither. It does not arise within; it is something given. In scripture blessed is always one part of an equation. The counter part is thanksgiving. This is reflected in the communion service wherein “Blessed is he who comes” is swiftly followed by “We give Thee thanks and praise.”[ii] A blessing is a gift of some good, and it awaits its acceptance in an act of thanks. That act of thanks is itself a blessing, and so blessing is a circular action, a mutuality of giving, an act of love, a flowing of love from one to another. Humility is a blessing that allows a realistic love of self, a thankfulness for the God-image, the grace, within that both opens and sustains life. In humility man becomes authentically man, and God becomes known as God. It is a relationship of honesty. The implications of this relationship are played out in scripture in the “beatitudes.”
Both Matthew and Luke have a rendering of the beatitudes, although they differ. While we know the evangelists had common source material as well as material specific to each, we know also that each used the material on hand to fit the specific thrust and orientation of their preaching. Before Luke set out a gospel, he was a missionary assisting the apostle Paul in his work among the Gentiles. His gospel exhibits the trace of a man of action with a concern for the everyday world. Matthew’s gospel exhibits the heart of a rabbi intent to present Jesus as the spiritual descendant of Moses whose teachings he matures. Matthew seeks to preserve a line of spirituality, but also evolve it. Luke writes: “Blessed are the poor,” and Matthew: “Blessed are the poor of spirit.” Have we here two different messages?
According to the Hebrew scriptures the poor, the neglected, the outcast, and the downtrodden hold a special place in the heart of God. They manifest the dis-ease of society. Their care is an act of mercy, and therefore, of God. That tradition is carried forward by Jesus. In The Gospel according to Luke Jesus states he has come to defend the poor, release the captives, heal the sick and lame, and set out a new time of rest and reorientation. Because the poor and all of them bound by the ills of body and body-politic bear the dis-ease of mankind, it is to them that the healing grace of the gospel is preached. In his vision of the beatitudes, the psycho-social orientation of Luke has him write simply of the satisfactions that await them that now are poor, hungry, sorrowing. He also raises the spectre of woe upon them that that neglect the poor, and now revel in wealth and comfort of body and soul. The rabbinical Matthew takes the same dominical tradition in a different direction. As had Moses before him, Jesus goes up a mountain, goes up toward God. Unlike Moses, he does not come down, he brings down no laws, no moral axioms. From his mountain the Messiah declares blessings. “Blessed are the poor of spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” It is the benefaction on which hang the other beatitudes for only the poor of spirit can mourn with others, hunger for justice, know the sorrows and true needs of the soul and of the world. The poverty of spirit creates ample room for empathy, fortitude, prudence.
In Matthew’s gospel Jesus is not addressing social issues. He has no interest in monetary resources or financial equity. He is making a statement about spirituality, about the functioning of the soul. Blessed are they that know ego is a poverty disguising a greater power, the power to enter into the kingdom, into the reign of grace, into the society led by the true and authenticating knowledge of self and other. Poverty of spirit is the blessing that opens the truth of self, and in that brings happiness. Happiness does not flow from an imagined and fleeting sense of independence but from the wealth of resources at the graced heart of the soul, the sociality of the psyche, its for-the-world-ness, its worldliness, and therein its thrust to creatively give self away, to pro-create. Happiness, being social, is always pro-creative. Blessedness resides in knowing the inclination of ego toward a solitariness of identification, and in coming to clearly see and appreciate the depths of soul, its innermost vocation to become authentically in the world for the world. Blessedness resides in humility, in being firmly grounded in the reality of self and world. It is only in humility that the poverty of ego, persona, and the other masks we so comfortably are wont to wear can be properly valued. It is only in humility that the blessings of life and the grace of life within are found, and life allowed to flourish both inwardly and outwardly in balance. Poverty of spirit is about spirituality, but a spirituality that does not incarnate into the material world, its needs and cares, is merely a distortion of life, an ego inflated with the pretentions of piety. Thus Matthew’s beatitudes bring us to those of Luke.
The claim that one cannot enter the kingdom of heaven unless one leaves all behind is not about departing the cares of this world. It is not about retreating to the security of a feigned sanctuary. It is about relativization, re-valuation of ego and its needs and attachments. It is about their sacrifice, their “offering up” to the power of the graced Self within to the end that they become freed to Spirit, redeemed by the transcending Spirit, bought back from the clutch of ego-concern. Here the ego-world falls away to reveal the “kingdom” wherein each aspect, each event, is received in its own right and context, its own “sovereign” time and place. The world is received then in the Spirit, in the core transformative power: “The kingdom of God is within you.” In this does one embrace and follow the Christ who stands as the great archetype of personhood, as the ultimate reality-making symbol of creativity in the world for the world, and so becomes from the perspective of psychology truly an individuated person, and from the perspective of the theological and spiritual “a child of God.” It is here the ancient efforts of dogmatics looked—to a human person simultaneously divine, not two natures or two persons, but seen through two pragmatic lenses, one seeing the fully individuated man, and the other beholding the triumphant Self at the psych’s core taking its place as the centre and creator of that same person, the “God within” birthing the individual, and moving in time to “glorify,” and “substantiate,” that individuation.
Here we have clarity regarding the issues behind the joint divine and human status of Jesus that caused such turmoil in the early church. The metaphysical projections of the psyche become hypothetical ways of expressing the psychological, the experiential, reality of Christ-hood. As an individuated individual he is fully man. As this process is generated from the psych, which is an autonomous power whose core is the imago Dei, the God-within, he is divine. The role of Mary in salvation history is also clarified when set upon the psychological, the symbol level. Christ and Mary here constitute the new Adam and Eve, the progenitors of the new heaven and earth. In their humble obedience to the voice of God within they cancel the fall of man from paradisiac grace. They are not only the symbols of the new order of nature, but constitute the new enunciation of something constantly arising in the mythopoetic psyche: the celestial conjoining of the son and the sister/mother. We find this archetypical “marriage” that brings new life replicated in all cultures and ages: Uranus and Gaia, Zeus and Hera, Osiris and Isis, Ra and Hathor. In this sweeping flow of images now come Christ and Mary (who is symbolically at once creature of God, mother of God according to Christ’s divinity, sister creature and mother of Christ according to his humanity, mother of the church as its proto-member). The “celestial marriage” is a symbol of a psychic integration of opposites, a transcendental movement, that channels psychic energy, spiritual energy, into greater consciousness of self. It is a subliminal coming together of opposites that attunes the consciousness to the voice of the God within, the creative core of psyche, and allows space and power for its humble reception. Thus, from the new symbols of heaven and earth, from Christ (filled with the Spirit of God) and Mary (overshadowed by that self-same Spirit), are “born” the twice born, the in-the-world and worldly “children of God.” The contrariety between good and evil is overcome, and action is judged on its propitiousness. As St. John has it: “Christ is the propitiation of our sin,” of our primal differentiation of good and evil.
For many struggling to get along with everyday life, everyday needs and concerns, the God-given, the psychic, call for individuation is an inconvenience, a “not-coming together.” The story of salvation, of ultimate well-being, is about an im-position that is perceived as an inconvenience. Things do not come together because they are being caused–by a power within–to fall apart. There is a call to something other for which one must strive, suffer, sacrifice. It is an inconvenience for the ego with its constant want of its own plans and security. Yet, growth never just happens. Grace is never just there. As Augustine has it: “The God who without us made us, will not without us save us.” One does not advance to a higher plane, a deeper understanding, a richer vista without giving up something held dear, without a sacrificial offering. Here one makes the thank-offering for the blessing of humility. Turning to the imagery of sacred writ, could God have saved us without the cross? All things are possible, but we, being human, need to see the cross to understand newness of life always means giving up the oldness of life. “When I was a child I clung to childish ways, but now, having matured, I can put away the past (1 Corinthians,13).” The appearance of God always entails an inconvenience. From the paradisiac test centred on a beguilingly insight-bearing piece of fruit, to the Abrahamic summons to pack up and go to a foreign land that it might one day become an inheritance in perpetuity, to a pregnancy outside of wedlock, to a birth in a stable, the multitude of trials and tasks placed before kings and prophets, disciples and apostles—past and present—facing reality with the freedom demanded by creativity, facing reality not armed with “the might of princes” and “the power of many horses”, facing reality not with the face we would like to put on, not armed with the fondly held and potent ideas we have made of reality, is never simple. Simple is the childhood dream world we once and always want to create, the security blanket to which we in some secret chamber cling. It is the womb-world we ever weave. But blood that does not flow does not animate. Blood that does not flow outward does not redeem. Blood represents life, and life grows in giving itself away. Here is the insight of the symbol of the cross. Unless the Christ has died, there is no resurrection into new life. Unless God constantly renews self in man, unless creativity constantly finds a new face, a new moment, a new “putting on of Christ”, neither God nor man transcend, neither God nor man have a new way forward toward that apocalyptic moment, that ever immanent and ever ideal moment wherein God and creation, Creativity and the created, are subsumed into one identity, one completed moment, one “all in all”, one moment of final judgement wherein all things are set in their proper place, one moment when “He shall come again in glory [in full substantiality]” to surrender the whole of the created into the hands of Creativity, one moment Power and its manifest collide into a “new”, a cosmic transcendence of difference, a “new heaven and earth,”–a new individuated person.[iii] Humility makes way for a new adequation of reality. The blessing of humility summons the thank-offering, grounds in the reality of self and world, opens the powers of discipleship, and fortifies the soul to embrace its cross, and follow the self-sacrificing God of both creation and Calvary. Is there here too great a price to pay for a “kingdom,” for a grounded self and world wherein the opposites are opened and integrated in creative resolution, wherein the lion and the lamb can coexist in equity and harmony?
Two natures? Two persons? Yes, and yes. Looking to soul-science, to psychology, rather than to meta-physics, we are each of two natures, the infantile and the wise, the ego and the Self, the persona and the God-image within, the horrid and the beatific, the sinner and the graced. We are each two persons, one the mask we fashion for the everyday and one the Wisdom of life within fully empowered to spin out a world more fantastic than we can “either ask or imagine,” more real than any extrovert can conjure, more imaginative than any introvert could cherish. Let us therefore beware of confining, of de-fining, God and his Christ, and let us humbly, peaceably, prudently, kindly, bravely follow into that great symbol of the cross writ large for us, the cross of sacrifice, the cross of triumph, the cross from which is breathed out the Spirit of freedom, the freedom of the children of God. Let us be humble and poor of spirit that we may wisely and richly use the icons of religion and the projections of philosophy, and freely and authentically “put on Christ” for both our well-being and that of the world. Let us be open to the God who dwelling within us makes us, empowers us, and wills us to make ourselves and this world whole, wholesome, holy.
[i] It is because the past cannot be redeemed except from the present that the Roman Church insists that the Eucharist is a re-presentation of the sacrifice of God on Calvary, albeit in non-bloody manner. The protestant objection is that this re-presenting is simply a spiritual reality. To the protestant mind, to the mind disinclined to a metaphysics, to speak of a “real” presence and then accommodate it on a super-natural level is an excuse for the quantification of something qualitative, a speculative meta-physicalizing of something mystical and spiritual. Both sides of the argument want for a deeper appreciation of—and transmission of–the psycho-symbolism of the eucharistic action and rites. Such does not deny the impactability of eucharistic action and rites upon the physical world, for modern psychology and psychiatry stand on the sure experience that psyche has influence over that which is physical, that the symbolic, understood consciously or not, can and does impact the psyche, and in turn the physis [material nature]. The doctrine of creation states Spirit, the Divine in-Spirited Logos, created both heaven and earth, both the spiritual and the physical.
There lurks always a danger in defining the aspect of “present” in the sacrament. Psyche and physis are divisible only theoretically. We are here in the realm of faith, not reason, and we too often defy and defile faith in trying to be clever and reasonable. Before the mystery of God it is worthy to in worship and adoration allow it to move us rather than to sit and analyse and hypothesize. To enter the kingdom one needs to be “like unto a child.” There is no directive here to behave in infantile manner. It is an indication that there needs to be a certain attitude and approach, one that has room for the irrational, for playfulness before potentials, openness to adventures. There needs to be room for the processes of nature within which we are wont to sweep under the false comforts of facts, technics and systems.
[ii] Who is the “Blessed is he who comes?” Is it the Christ who comes as the eucharistic feast, or is the communicant who comes to partake of divine identity and mission? It is both. Communicant and Christ meet in the thanks and praise, the bread and wine. The action is the give and take of love, the sharing in the identity of one another, and so the capacity to pro-create that identity into the future of self and world. Here is daily consummated the marriage feast of the Lamb, the conjoining of Christ and Church.
[iii] They that can discern the symbols of this sentence will clearly see that Revelation is, indeed, a text on spirituality. Cf: on The Apocalyptic Book of Revelation (January 2013).