Before I begin this discourse, it is necessary to place before the reader three propositions, items I deem necessary, if not to the logic, at least to the spirit in which the arguments are performed. First, I am not without the prescience that that which I herein note will not change the minds and hearts of them that cling to one position or another, that it will neither empty a pew, nor cause one to be filled. Yet, in the dissemination of any knowledge it is always the hope that somewhere a seed will fall upon fertile ground and begin to take root, one day, perhaps, to flower and bear fruit. We live by adapting, and we adapt by having the faith we can, the envisioning hope that the vision ahead is reachable—in some manner.
Second, it is requisite of the reader to keep in mind that the title Christ (Messiah) means one designated to act on behalf of God as God was conceived of in the universally oriented mind-set of the latter prophets of Judaism. Christ primarily refers to an office, an ambassadorial role. The title is, thanks to the Apostle Paul, virtually fused to the man Jesus as type of surname subsequent to his having been received as the initiating and therein revelatory holder of that office. It is also the proper designation of all them who, by grace and faith, embrace that office after the example of Jesus whom they therein receive as “the Christ”, the true “image [icon] of the Father”, and thus worthy “by inheritance” of the divine title of Lord.
Third, I am not of a mind to be parsimonious concerning perspectives, but decidedly inclined to be reticent of any perspective that is dismissive of all others. To that point, as example, were someone to say: “I was alone and heard voices speaking to me”, a psychiatrist might think the person momentarily slipped from consciousness to a subconscious state and hallucinated an internal voice as something external, as we often do in dreams and day-dreams, might then inquire as to whether this was a solitary experience or one that tended to reoccur, and depending upon the reply to that, to consider an investigation into the possibility of schizophrenia. A neurologist might well be more inclined to analyze the situation as resultant of an accelerated level of activity in a portion of the right temporal cortex, and dependant upon persistence, seek to investigate with certain tests. A religious guide, having duly ruled out any biological or psychological aberration, might opine the experience was a communication from a higher, a spiritual, level and ought to be prayerfully discerned as to its nature. One experience may have been related, but three perspectives interpreted it and each in its own “science”, body of knowledge, and its appropriate language. It is a fundamental rule of science that the observer, physically and psychologically, colours the item observed, at minimum the interpretation of the item observed. I receive all three of these analyses, each according to its position of observation, as valid assessments. This is not to say all religious experiences are simply neurological occurrences or psychological disablements, or that all religious people are a tad “off” or “crazy”. This issue is raised because it is judged necessary to keep in the foreground of thought the fact that “god” and “mind”—two rather undefinable items—have always been twinned. History is plump with the recounting of prophets, oracles and mystics manifesting a “divine madness”, a loss of the everyday self, consciousness and its internalizing time-space to an animating power understood as beyond and yet within. Furthermore, this same phenomenon is set out in intellectualized form by a great number of them that have investigated to understand how we know and learn. We have, thus, multiple theories of knowledge that claim the mind must be in some manner “externally” illuminated in order that we might rightly “see” (and note it is the mind that sees) and act. That illumination is usually achieved by a purification of the distracting senses that then enables the true forms of existence to be discerned and received (Plato). It might, again through a sense-purging, be an openness that allows God or God’s grace to penetrate mind and take power over or within it (Augustine). In the wild antics, seizures, and uncontrollable impulses of sundry prophets and oracles, the dramatics and histrionics so often found in the visions and voices of mystics, to the reasoned but passionate arguments of “idealist” philosophers, there is a consistent conjoining of a primal power (God), mind (soul, psyche), and the “something more” than the quotidian “I” with its internalized sense of a “my” space, time, history.
With such an extended labour of introduction, it seems trivial to note I had intended to entitle this work “on the Resurrection—a theological explication and defence” but opted for something less off-putting for them I wish to reach—the yea- and nay-sayers of Resurrection. In this Paschal season I have heard both dismissals of the resurrection of the Christ as meaningless fable, and passionate avowals of that same event as bedrock historical fact. Those dismissals and avowals have come from both clergy and laity. Both are errors. As errors about an item that touches upon a cultural fundament and profundity, they are detrimental to the well-being of both heart and soul, and thus, as we are integrated systems, “organisms”, to body. They are both ill-in-form-ed positions. In both cases, there is, I believe, not a purposeful, conscious, deliberated and reasoned trek to the position held, but rather a decision that is at root a subconscious manifestation, an emotive gut-reaction, that is then rationalized. That does not undermine its felt authenticity or profundity, but it does render it something lesser than the fully and freely taken stance.
First, to them that are wont to cling to the historicity of the resurrection, it is not an historical event. That is not some old or new heresy. It is the Apostle Paul. It is, says he, the birth of “the first born from among the dead”. It is an event at the end of history as we know it. It is, in the terminology of theology, an eschatological event, the first event of the end of time, the first event of a new world order, a renaissance of creativity, the primal action in the making of “a new heaven and a new earth”. It is a power-event at the horizon of an absolute future from which emanates “salvation” (unlimited well-being) into the present. I have named it a power-event because Power is in scripture a reverential designation for God, and the resurrection is, as says scripture, God’s doing. Furthermore, it is not a physical event. Again, as Paul marks it, the Christ is “raised up a life-giving spirit for all”. To that point he notes that following Christ, when we die the body that is “planted” (buried) is something corruptible (physical), but that which shall be raised up will be incorruptible (spiritual), and therein “we shall be like” the Christ in whom by faith and by grace we even now do dwell (have our true “life and being”, our authentic identity).
The resurrection is an item of faith, of belief, of confidence in a vision wherein there is no defeat—moral, spiritual, or physical—that cannot be overcome. This may be to certain individuals simply an item of faith in a promised future, but it can also be, and properly is, an item of intense, existential, concrete, observable, and transformative psychic integrity, as Paul rousingly put it in addressing the Romans: “This I know…nothing can ever separate us from the [ever-creative] love of God made concrete for us in Christ Jesus our Lord”. The cosmic life and purpose are toward positivity, well-being. In the imagery of scripture, the cosmos is made to make its way back to its ever-life-giving source. “The word that goes forth from my mouth shall not return to me void but it will accomplish that which I desire, the purpose for which I sent it.”
It must be acknowledged that Paul and his confreres did understand these spiritual events in concrete terms. There was a “place” called heaven. There was a time-space known as the end-of-time. There was a “being” who dwelt—in some manner—within the Temple’s inner sanctum. There was a tangibility to all such items although they were primarily on another plain of existence. The peoples of the Near East several millennia past conceived of divine powers as in many ways resembling the human. The king was god, the son of god, or the prime minister of a god’s sovereign territory. The statue of god was not to them an idol, not a sacrilegious depiction of the undepictable; it was the very manifest of the god, the god’s very self. The god-presence, the statue, was thus honoured with food and sweet-smelling offerings. It was carried about its territory in processions. It might be bathed in holy water, anointed in sacred oils, dressed in finery. It was cared for and catered to because it was the Lord, the true and living source of the tribal foundation, order, and well-being. Its wide, opened, and rounded eyes saw all. From its opened wide and rounded mouth each was in-formed of the divine directives. Its house was also sacred, and its chief minister, the king, lived within its precincts or adjacent thereto. As tribes gave way to more complex and extended mechanisms of cities, the societal intimacy of the god and his or her “son” to his or her people needed to be mediated. That role fell to lesser divine beings, to associated household gods, and to priests. The reality of god, the god-presence in the god-house, was not diminished, merely distanced. The absolute authority of his or her directives was not lessened, merely mediated. The individual—increasingly both collectively lost and individually freed in the expanse of the social grouping—could not clearly hear the informative voice of the aging tribal god within. The tightness and uniformity of the tribal-mind was dissolving. Governance was through a mediatorial voice: “Thus say the Lord, thy God!”. The first mediator remained the king, then the task fell to priests, and last in the order of sacred vocalists, to prophets.[i] It is notably a long and historically conditioned trek[ii] in both individual conscience and societal ethics from the “thou shalt…” and “thou shalt not…” to “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, all thy soul and all thy strength” to “Whomsoever abides in love abides in God and God in him”. It takes a span of mind and time more extensive than forty years of wandering about a desert to make the societal circuit and the psychic circuitry that can take man from the psycho-social uniformity of the tribal life to an incrementally unfolding social egalitarianism to, and intimately within that, a matured individuality wholly conscious of and responsible to both self and world.
Nevertheless, they that abide in a literalist understanding of the spiritual will turn to the sacred texts in support of their position. They will firmly note the gospel accounts speak of the Risen One being absent from his grave, eating, being touched, ascending into the sky. The relating of all these events are posterior to the church’s earliest proclamation that the Christ has been raised up and has been seen (Peter, Paul, Mark). To this issue, as noted in Spirituality, Part 2 (section V),[iii] when the scriptures speak of the Risen One being “seen”, the preferred term in the original Greek is not βλέπω [blepo, I see], which references a blip on the screen, an impress of ocular sensation, but the more inclusive ὁράω [horaho], which also is commonly translated “I see”, but which references not merely the first result of eye-sight, but the subsequent and reflective abilities to envision, recognize, understand, witness. It is necessary to deeply appreciate the fact that Resurrection is a revelation, that the Risen One is the Seen One only by grace and faith, that the Risen One is never simply recognized as the Jesus of history. He is always first mistaken for something or someone else—a fellow traveller, a gardener, a ghost, an unidentifiable someone speaking out of the thunder and lightning surrounding God himself.
Every revelation, every bursting onto consciousness, brims with insight, inspiration. Its “fire”, its brilliance—akin to Sinai’s thundering peak—makes it an assault upon the complacency of the moment of encounter: “Take off thy shoes, for the ground upon which you stand is holy”, “I shall cover your face with my hand”. Man must stand before it in some sense bare or blind. It is a “Halt!” It demands to be met first with silence. The conscious mind cannot attempt to think before it. As in contemplation, the mind, the heart, the soul, must first stop, be still that the revelatory power have the room, the time and space, to “descend”, to “visit from on high”. The revelation of resurrection, thus, is a confrontation. It confronts one with an integrating vision that calls for response. The High One has given his soul into its other-ness, the world. The immortal and mighty one is unfailingly and indefeatably in-fleshed within its creation. The man, abiding by grace this insight with faith, is therein challenged to “ὁράω!”, evoked to find, envision, recognize, understand, and witness his soul is in his other—Creativity and its willfully redeemed world–in its totality and its every particularity.
Furthermore, the more tangible references to the Seen One enter the preaching of the church in the 70s, at approximately the time Matthew and Luke are setting out their “infancy narratives”. The newest believers want something more than just the “good news” that God is invincible, that he has confirmed Jesus as the Christ by enabling—through his ever creative and holy Spirit–his continued presence in and as the church (the body of Christ). They wanted a history—not of salvation—but of the man, the Saviour. A millennium before this, the Jews made it well known to their tribal leaders that they wanted not simply a God-King enthroned in heaven, but a physical, historical, terrestrial king as in the nations about them. The second generation of Christians had a similar want. They needed that which the first believers had had, a sense of immediacy, presence, physicality, history, tangibility. Their world history was filled with god-kings. The empire of Rome still spun around its order-giving-fundamental, its lord-saviour-emperor. The preaching and spirit-presence of Christ was not enough. This great mediator needed a history like unto the other great mediators of meaning and purpose. It was a very socially conditioned need. It deflected the socially transformative dynamic of the Christ-message. It diffused the convocation of a community of christs, a holy communion of believers as the “presence”. The mind-set of all about Jesus, all for Jesus, sidetracked the mission of converting hearts to the heart and mind of forgiveness, healing and love by establishing a celebrity, a celebrated being, one to look to, and one who could, and would be housed in a god-house, and cared for and catered to as were the ancient gods before him. A holy society of psycho-social therapeutic activism became a congregation of worshippers. The immediacy of God in Christ in the heart of the believer was set at a distance, a psychological and social distance still manifest in the multifaceted breach twixt altar and pew. The spiritually and existentially demanding roles of the believer as priest, prophet, and self-governor in-Christ-before-God are surrendered. The great Mediator, in whom each and all were to dwell, now stands apart. Thus, the Mediator twixt the mind and heart of God and this world now needs a mediator—a saint, a priest. The “body of Christ” is no longer a community, a communion of believers. It is an institution of sundry congregants, and in that increasingly not inclined to brotherhood so much as to infighting over some supremacy of one congregation over another or all. The “bread that gives life” is shredded into crumbs because the life force is no longer about forgiveness, selflessness, or love. The power-icon of all history comes to shield that which history most wants—a meaningful interconnectivity amongst all.
It is of note that in the early church the primal feast that defined every other was the celebration of the Pasch, the Passover of the Christ (in the English world, Easter). The celebration of the birth of Jesus, which most take as the most important feast, at least socially, was not observed until three centuries after Jesus’ death. Its appearance on the calendar did not change, theologically at least, the understanding of Jesus’ work, death, meaning or presence. It was an ancillary celebration of the same truth: God is ever-creative, and that creativity fears not any force that may dare stand before it (be it doubt, death or Herod), that it is able and ready to defy and dismiss it, and that the creative thrust of God that is the cosmos will end where God has givingly, forward-givingly, lovingly, willed it—in total at-one-ment within his own being, that is, fulfilled, made whole, made all it can be, a potency become an actuality of “more than we can ever conjure in dream or desire”. The Resurrection speaks of the meaning of life and death. It speaks of that as we all speak of it, must speak of it, in symbols. But symbols are a-temporal. The birth and the resurrection of the Christ are matters of the “eternal”. He was from “in the beginning” and was “with God”—and those descriptors are the bedrock of the sacred narratives be they of a birth or a rising beyond the dead. They proclaim that Christ is the beginning of the world, the beginning of salvation, of fore-ward-giving-ness, of life with God, of “walking in Thy holy ways” as his temporal particularized presence until there be amongst all naught but Thy holy way.
We need appreciate that religions evolve, adapt to their world, are apt as much to transcend their worlds and bring them forward, as to be bedraggled by their worlds and suffer the degradation of both their sacred symbols and insights, and therein their vitality and relevance. As the gods of four millennia past aged, morphed into idols, and vanished, so too the gods of two millennia past must either mature, adapt, unfold in the self-revelation of their truth or cease to be relatable and relevant to the present. We need to appreciate that the vision of God does indeed evolve.[iv] We need also to ackowledge that evolution is never a straight, uninhibited ascent. It is a circuitous road, and for man–because “civilization” is a concrete manifest of his biology–one at times primarily informed by “civilization”. Religion is a resource of civilization meant to vitalize, to rouse awareness, understanding, healing. It is not unsusceptible to being denied, ignored, distorted, or manipulated in ignorance or even malevolence, and therein creating, not vivacity, but anxieties, neuroses, psychoses and all manner of most tangible ills and evils. There is nothing that our nature, civil or biologic, that cannot turn to either good or ill. Such, however, is our fallibility, not necessarily therein our fate.
The counterpoint of fate is, of course, faith. Faith is a vacuous concept without an existential, experiential, “worldly”, socially tangible component. In the terminology of traditional, orthodox Christianity, faith is without meaning unless it is a living faith, unless it makes itself visible and viable in this world, in the transactions of daily life. Faith in the resurrection thus means being able to face life—its glories and its challenges—with positivity. It means “putting on Christ Jesus”. It means making bold to be the re-creative, the “resurrected”, presence of the Christ here and now. The church is the “body of Christ”. As such, it is not an institution, or a collection of institutions whose function is to promote godly living. It is the community, the body politic, of all them that embrace the work of meeting this world here in its every now with the same creativity, fearlessness, and love that Christianity claims to be both the world’s purpose and meaning, the very thrust of its beginning, its ongoing life, and its end.[v] What other meaning is there to saying God made this world, moved by love incarnated himself into it in re-present-ative presence, and triumphantly filled it with his own life-giving spirit as its ongoing dynamic for graciousness and light?[vi] It means God (and read that as a generic term for Creativity and Loving) is found and is knowable only as one experiences creativity and loving in being them and being open to receiving them. It means exactly that which scripture claims: God not only makes us, but comes to us, not (as said in Babel) the other way around. Modern psychology might be inclined to present that in terms of an exalted ego-ideal or a Jungian “Self” summoning, inspiring, moving the person to become fully a person, standing above, apart, beyond the present person and evoking the present into fulness. Furthermore, as with talk about grace, this “beyond the present state”, while ceaselessly calling forth and forever standing “above” the present, to be made real needs to be responded to from the present that the future be both transformed and transformative. As in the story of Mary with the angel Gabriel, God can propose whatsoever he wills, it will not happen until a soul says “Yes” or as Luke has Mary more elegantly phrase it: “Let it be to me according to Thy word”. (Freedom is not a power of God, “Self”, or individual; it is a dynamic of their interrelatedness, their relationship.)
There is no denigration of the notion of God in the equation of God with the Jungian notion of “Self” or a socio-genetic type of ego-ideal. We cannot misunderstand both the eternality of Creativity and the Christian doctrines of incarnation, grace and redemption. The eternal and inexhaustible One “comes” to man as man, wills to dwell within man, to the end that man, the created one, find fulfillment, satiation, wholeness. Some may object to the somewhat obverse side of this, arguing that here is a reduction of Christianity to the positivity of mind-set proffered by New Age religiosity. And there is a fragment of truth in this, but merely a distorted fragment in that new-age teachings do distill from, not simply Christianity, but a host of religions ideals of positive approach and action. They, however, adopt an approximation of message without the medium (mediator), without the symbol-laden ritualizations requisite in psycho-social beings to reinforce and propagate the message. In that they are all fad-diet and no exercise, ideals without the mechanisms of endurance.
Every religion’s raison d’etre is to make people whole (holy). All the varied terms (salvation, forgiveness, transcendence, etc.) indicate well-being through the freedom to both work past (discipleship/discipline) and dissolve (forgive) the knots we sew into our hearts and souls and worlds. The rituals, doctrines, creeds, symbols, and arts religion uses are its tools of immersion, transmission, transformation. They are the sacred instruments employed to advance growth toward wholeness (holiness) in the individual and society.[vii] This “cure [the care] of souls” is always a care of the world, for one cannot care for a soul if it is in a starving body. Jesus casts out demons as often as he cures the maimed and sick, makes wine, feeds the hungry, halts the storm, baffles the hypocrites, and calls out them seeking to be politically correct. He attends the Temple and synagogue and celebrates the feasts of Judaism as readily and openly as he dines with “sinners” and associates himself with outcasts both social and religious. He claims, with his native religion, that this is God’s world. He knows God not secondhandedly through rituals and laws, but intimately, prayerfully, communicatively, as he listens to and experiences the freedom of creativity, personhood, fearlessness, and love as integral to himself, integral to the ever-formative of himself. He is an integrated man. Infinitely more so than the religion that proclaims, celebrates, and reinforces his reputedly in-conceivable image and voice, the Creator, in his creativity, personhood, fearlessness, and love, is the heart of Jesus’ integration. The intimacy is viable, realizing, real. The Lord, the God-Creating, is his vocation, his ever-summoning voice within. He is his life-source and his heritage, his “father”. He and his father are one. He is God’s presence. He is, in the terminology of his native cult, Messiah (Christ). The essence of Christianity is to re-create that Christhood in each and all.[viii]
To them that hold the resurrection nothing but a fable without meaning or context in the modern world, I ask they think about how it is we learn, advance in understanding and appreciation of the world about us. It is by making comparisons, using metaphors, creating mental models. Look through a dictionary and consider the nuances so great a number of our words carry. How is it a knife and a comment can both be “sharp”? We compare the capacities in two very different items of experience to cause a differing yet similar sensation, pain. Is the sharpness of the word or of the knife the basis of the metaphor? When I was a lad in school, the freshly observed inners of the once indivisible atom were presented as a type of micro-solar system with a “Sun”-nucleus orbited about by an “Earth”-electron. However, electrons do not behave as nicely as does the seemingly subservient Earth. Electrons jump, change spin, and the whole inner lot of the atom is not a big ball of some type of “solid” stuff encircled by smaller balls of stuff. The solidity of the subatomic stuff might be better understood as akin to a swath of spun sugar or candy-floss. Some might well say even that is too primitive, and that the atom is better imagined as a whirlwind of flashes, a tornado of infinitesimal twitching pulses. Nevertheless, Bohr’s model remains an accepted, communicable, if simplified, pictogram. It provides a jumping-off point for visualizing (mentalizing) a series of relationships internal to an atom. Again, were I to write out a formula for a gravitational field most would be lost looking upon a jumble of letters, signs and numbers because they constitute a mental shorthand. They are the symbols, the characteries, of a certain technical language, which admittedly can be translated such that the uninitiated to higher mathematics and physics can grasp the idea being presented. But again, look at what would be transmitted: an idea about the operation of a “gravitational field”. Both those words are used metaphorically. What do you “see” in your mind when you hear the word field if not a span of flat ground on which is growing a type of grass or other plant? As for gravity, what does that mean twixt bodies? Gravity is an air one carries about—something that transmits seriousness, importance, severity. How can the cosmos be a landscape of fields sprouting seriousness—except metaphorically? There are also those treasure-troves of symbols we conjure out of selves and our collective inheritance—our dreams. We all dream, but we dream not merely as individuals, but as a species, and as cultures and civilizations within that species. From ages unfathomable we have stored up experiences and pictures of them and use them to speak to ourselves in the quiet while consciousness sleeps. They are not non-sense, merely an internal language, part personal, part cultural, part cosmic. Psychology and religion find in them fertile grounds for plummeting how we inwardly seek to communicate with ourselves and thereby ignite the transformation of our reality.[ix] However, wordless symbols fall heavily into words. When they are placed into words, there is a conscious editing. They metamorphize. They incarnate into conscious idea as metaphor. The dream symbol of the unconscious mind coalesces according to the metaphors and the psychic resilience of the personally defining and sustaining group.
Thus, from a small group, traumatized, forlorn, and yet sustained within the vision of its native and inherited religion and its symbols, comes a great dream, a great vision that defies the workings of the world-sorting mind. It is a symbol old yet new—transformation, transcendence, the Power of faith to buy back (redeem) fate. Is it real? It is realistic? Is it a power to do something more than go off in a boat and fish as in once upon a time past? Is it capable of transforming fishing and occupation into metaphor and vocation? Is it a defiance of pessimistic surrender into an automatonic stoicism? Is it, in a moment of crisis, a turn (conversion) into positivity, creativity, life? The great architype of holistic man, holy man—the Christ role—becomes the eternally validating metaphor, the cynosure of life grounded in this world and yet free of boundedness to any moment, any event, any corruption of its vitality. “Thou shall not allow thy holy one to see corruption.” The Font of life is unstoppable, and its ever-evoked re-present-ative presence in this world is con-substantial with that vitality. Its incarnation as our word is thus: “Christ is risen”.
I have pounded out approaches to meaning. They are merely approaches because “Christ” as an architype[x] of man embracing wholeness, and “Christ risen” as metaphor for the unboundedness of life’s capacities, as existential symbol, can only be comprehended in concrete experience, in realization, in being purposefully made into reality here and now. Newton and Bohr knew their formulae and models were simply that, mathematical, pictorial representations of certain relations within the real world. The Christian acclamation of Christ risen is that also. It is a symbol-laden formula concerning the capacity of creativity to overcome all bounds woven into history because, in, by and through trusting it is so, each and all are summoned to make it so, incarnate it, in-flesh it. As symbol its meaningfulness is itself an inexhaustible, an “eternal truth”. As symbol it is worthy to celebrate, to contemplate, to activate. As a symbol it is susceptible to being misread, misused, made to be, not a symbol, but some concrete piece of a time past. Unfortunately, in the past several days it has in many churches, pulpits, hearts and minds suffered that degradation from revelatory, animating inspiration.
We, at times and to some degree, may be aware of the extent to which we navigate life with preconceived attitudes, dispositions, prejudices both personally positive and negating. Seldom do we apply that same scope to the pictorial metaphoricality, the fundamentally shape-shifting nature of word that is the great medium of our interlinking, both internally and externally. Further to that point, we often, in this day of clipped sound bites, emojis, and the general simplification and superficializing of communication, fail to pay due diligence to the differing types of language we posses for differing situations. There is a pervasive social lethargy decocting all language to a single type. Journalism, liturgy, political discourse, diplomatic exchange, advertising, correspondence, intercourse, even simple utterance–all are being compressed into one form and format, simplified, robbed of every nuance, and in that, of both power and politeness. Complexity of thought is verboten. Unless it be about the mad or the monstrous, we tire beyond the 140th letter. We can code computer programs and navigate a trove of computer games with fingers flying. Yet, we shrivel connectivity into a barrage of idioms. We gloss over the fact differing disciplines of life and knowing are differentiated by their very need for differing terminologies, rules of grammar, ideals of usage. Perhaps we are upon the cusp of new forms of connectivity, consciousness, communication. Perhaps words are becoming obsolete. Perhaps we are retreating from the challenge of the world we have made. Perhaps we fear the leap we must, by are own making, make together. As the pressures of globalization increase so too do those to flee its compression, and as nation states and world organizations fray at the edges, so to do our words, our very means of community, communication. Perhaps that is why in this traumatized, forlorn, and torn world the ancient symbols and the holistic metaphors cannot stand. Perhaps a proclamation of life’s triumph is a defiance of our fear we cannot hear, cannot believe. Perhaps we have buried our heads too deeply in denial, and despite incuriously moving along, secretly harbour a despair that can no longer suffer either “good news” or the need to repent—to change course. Perhaps this world of our making is become too complex and the only solution we can find is to infantilize our words and deny any symbol that evokes to selflessness and maturity.
Christianity, however, still lives, and this world needs it, needs faith in the truth of its message. The church cannot cease to proclaim in true and honest form its prime symbol, and life metaphor: Christ is risen. Its clerics and its people cannot go about in insistence upon a history that is not there. Its clerics and its people cannot dismiss as fiction the viability of a symbol that has endured millennia. In an age running in un-enunciated terror from itself, we cannot cease to tell the truth. The immortal one descends to the mortal one. The dead one rises into the living one. The ceaselessness of life transcends and transforms every form of death. Light overcomes darkness, vision blots away obscurity, meaningfulness dismisses absurdity, faith supersedes fate, even whilst in between hypocrisy may vie with forgiveness, law with love, absolutist authority with personal authenticity, an abstracted eternality with a concrete here and now. The symbol is always something sacred, something not of the here and now, not of the ordinary. The symbol stirs to new depths, “to comprehend the breadth and length, the depth and height” of loving creativity. The symbol addresses man beyond reason and logic. It is a dream, not a concept, not a word. It is not even a vision so much as vision—a spirit over a void not yet come to light, a creation ever about to begin. It is a wisdom before either knowing or understanding ever can take root. It is a silence that makes way for words, a stillness that gives space for action. It is that rising dawn wherein unknowing beings go to mourn and are startled to find life is one step, one moment, one momentum, ahead of them. That is the precipitate that transforms perspective, meaning, reality. Thus, must sing the church: “Alleluia [Praise to He-who-is]” because only by him who dares to be Him-incarnate is this world saved.
[i] The Christ is designated as holding all three offices—king, priest, prophet, and his risen presence, “the body”, the church, is thus a kingly (self-governing), priestly (symbol-mediatorial) and prophetic (socially analytic) people.
[ii] This evolution is termed in theology heilsgeschichte or salvation-history.
[iii] Cf: Spirituality, Part 2, February 2017.
[iv] Cf: Spirituality, Part 2, February 2017.
[v] Because the Body of Christ consists of all them that live the creative presence of God in the world, theologians, both ancient and modern, have noted that even amongst them that have never heard of the gospel of Christ, there are some, who by and in their daily living in the spirit of that gospel, are truly members of the Body of Christ. Some refer to them as crypto-Christians. This view upholds the teaching that the Spirit of God is not confined to the institutions of church, but is ever free, ever creative, or more precisely Freedom, Creativity.
[vi] The Christian vision that God is universally and continuously salvifically present is an amplification of the vision of Judaism wherein God is eternally partnered with the Jewish people as his chosen.
[vii] The establishment and maintenance of good bodily health is not simply a matter of taking pills on occasion, having an annual check-up, blood work, sometime an x-ray, ECG, MRI, etc. It is about a discipline of diet and exercise, and only on relatively extraordinary occasion the intervention of special tests and medication. The science of medicine is supplemental to the art of healing, as that art is ancillary to the art of living wisely and well. So too, creeds, dogmas, rituals are supplementary to the living well of the spirit. They exist not to be interventions in crises threatening the good health (salvation) of the soul, but to enlighten and guide the exercise of daily living, to reinforce the directionality of life, to provide the sacred (extraordinary and inspirational) spaces and times for the essential re-creation of spirit. Despite an openness to misuse and misapplication, they stand as guides to re-direct the ego-centric, pleasure driven, and incessant want of distraction. They cannot make one whole or wholesome anymore than taking a regiment of pills will make one physically perfect. Whether it be the tools of medicine or of religion, tools cannot work miracles; attitudes do. We can attribute whatsoever powers we wish to the tools, it is how, with what type of mind, heart, dedication, wisdom, and skill we use the tools that is the essence of their utility. No one will be “saved” (made whole of psyche) by simply going to church, as no one will be made wholesome in body simply by on occasion consulting someone entitled to write M.D. after their name.
[viii] There is here not anything foreign to the Buddha, Zoroaster, or any number of the great mystics, saints, or holy-founders of sundry religions. According to the culture within which these great souls appear, the words and images of their thinking and those of their disciples do vary, but the thrust, the life-giving spirit, is akin. It is akin because there is one Spirit. It resides in the heart of each as the voice summoning each to the fulness of our singular being. The ancient and religious worlds are accustomed to name it the indwelling of God, grace, Atman, Dhamakaya, while modern practitioners of the psychic arts are wont to reference that self-same power as the Jungian “Self” or an ego-ideal of some supreme standing. The languages of the disciplines differ, the item of consideration does not. It is the primal potency. It is inexhaustible, and it is always a positivity of personhood—creative, fearless, embracive—and therein, as total of these reality-making non-tangible abilities and agilities, loving. One needs not tomes on psychology or spirituality to know this, simply a moment of quiet unencumbered introspection tinged with even the slightest shimmer of hope.
[ix] Not only do we have our collective dreams as cultures and as a species, but some opine all creation—in a certain sense—dreams. Cf: the works of scientists such a David Bohm, Stephen Gould, Alister Hardy, Rupert Sheldrake.
[x] I cannot say my use of architype to reference the role of Christ corresponds directly with Jung’s usage of the term. I do, however, understand it as an architectural blueprint of the all-integrating “Self”. It is a formatting schema built up throughout evolution by the species out of the experiences, expectations, and idealizations of the species. It is, thus, a universal, but its goal is to assist the individual in the journey toward wholeness by being the platform about which may coalesce the individual’s unique experiences. Its purpose is to fully activate and animate the individual as being-in-the-world. In the more convoluted terminology of theology that reads thus: the breath of the Divine-Word set into man from the creation of Adam and ripened throughout the history of salvation is liberated and summoned forth from its darkened recesses by the light of that self-same divine breath (the spirated Spirit) in the revelation of Resurrection wherein the ever Creating-Word validates itself in the world-role of Christ. The “Christ-architype” references a psychic formatting that activates holistic, unencumbered (free, creative and loving) integration into the truth of self and world. Another civilization, another cult, may call it another name, but the formatting is the same, or as the Apostle Paul would say: “There is one Spirit”. In Christian iconography, around this architype of holistic man (Christ) set out by man’s core integrating voice (God) orbit the sundry metaphors, the word-pictures, that capture aspects of its dynamic and form: “Come to me all ye that labour and are heavy laded”, “I am the way, the truth, the life”, “I am the bread of life”, “No man can see the reign of God unless he be born again”, “Unto you this day is born a saviour”, and its primal and most ancient enunciation: “Christ is risen”.