Christians who are attentive to the Christian calendar that structures the year around the great mysteries of our faith are aware that we are now in the season of Lent. This season of preparation for Holy Week and Easter began, as it always does, on Ash Wednesday. The liturgy of this day is one of my favourites. Perhaps you, like me, received the imposition of ashes, smudged onto our foreheads in the sign of the cross. In my tradition, this is accompanied by the priest saying ten simple but powerful words: “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Each year these words haunt me, not in a morbid or negative way but in a strange but powerfully comforting way. I think the reason they are so comforting has to do with the big story of Lent and Holy Week and that is what I have been thinking about this season.
The most basic statement of that big story is found in the ritual words: “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” This isn’t intended to explain what is called the Paschal mystery – the mystery of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus – merely to present its essential elements in a form that will hold us. I was raised in a tradition that offered a theory that was supposed to explain this mystery. Substitutionary atonement was the name of the theory and it suggests that by his death, Jesus rescues sinners from the anger of God. This particular theory hasn’t made sense to me for a long time. My own thinking leans more to understanding the death of Jesus as the perfect and fullest possible illustration of self-emptying love. But regardless of what understanding of these profound mysteries we might hold it will never be big enough to hold us. Only the mystery that lies behind our imperfect understandings is big enough to hold us. The understandings are, therefore, quite unimportant and are certainly not worth arguing about.
The Paschal mystery that lies at the core of the Christian faith is a big enough story to make life meaningful, regardless of what comes our way. It is, therefore, big enough to hold us. The Paschal mystery connects our past (Christ has died), present (Christ is risen), and future (Christ will come again). It connects suffering, death and hope – the most basic elements of human existence (suffering and death) and the one thing we need (hope) to respond to them with openness and trust. This is religion at its best – connecting us to the realities of our life while offering a framework of mystical hope.
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“The understandings are, therefore, quite unimportant and are certainly not worth arguing about.”
You’ve made me laugh (in a good way). Coming from a non-creedal background, I’ve been wrestling–more like body-slamming–the Episcopal liturgy for several years. Love the poetry but not the theology. If I keep reading this post, maybe it can mark the beginning of a truce. Many thanks.
You are welcome! Body-slamming can be a good thing when it leads us to change our tack. As Marcus Borg points out, reading things literally and focusing on factuality inevitably usually results in missing the meaning (the big story), and that – of course – should be the whole point!
You speak about “union with God/becoming one with God.” Most Christians I know are nervous about even the idea of “union with God”, let alone “becoming one with God.” Many of them hold these notions to be sacrilegious. ‘Being in Christ’ seems a different languaging or proposition. Or is it the same? Jesus’ spirituality is clearly not mine, so is it that we now are ‘in Christ’, and through the journey of transformation we journey towards our ‘becoming one with God’, but will never attain it this side of our unholiness?
Great questions! The nervousness that Christians often experience around the question of union with God comes from a number of sources. Some of it rises from psychological factors, and this is what I addressed in my blog (fear of loss of control and fear of loss of the safety of a separate self that I can think of as “mine”). But your are right, talk of union with God also raises theological questions and uneasiness for many people. I would suspect that behind your comment that “Jesus’ spirituality is clearly not mine” is conditioning that has come with a theology that emphasized the divinity of Jesus at the expense of his humanity. I don’t see why Jesus’ spirituality should not be your, or mine, or that of every one. Whatever uniqueness Jesus may have in some ontological and therefore theological sense, that’s the stuff of creeds – not spirituality. His spirituality (this is his experience of God) can be ours. That is what the mystics testify and it is what the NT teaches.
Our words, of course, can’t do more than point in this direction. And every word we speak about God – and therefore about the human experience of union with God – has at least as much misrepresentation in it as representation. Me in Christ and Christ in me is language that speaks of the reality of our union with God. But theologically, people have so neutered the concepts of Christ in us and us in Christ that it is just a cliche. However, this is the reality that the mystics tell us can become part of our experience. Here’s the key, however. It isn’t a state to be achieved but a state to be realized. It is already a reality, just not our experience. And this is why the transformation of consciousness is at the very core of the realization.