( I am beginning an extended informal explanation of some recent thoughts I’ve had that’s shaping how we are forging a spiritual community here in Eugene, OR. )
Puzzlement, Estrangement, and Evil
Being human is a quizzical thing. Full of variety and drudgery, common sense and mystery, delight and suffering, our life on this world is like no other species we have yet encountered. The human spirit in so many ways indomitable, and simultaneously always walking around never fully able to defeat the evil that plagues us.
One of the most curious things about us humans is our dissatisfaction. The entire ethos of post-enlightenment thinking is that we desire a better day tomorrow than today and we think we can actually bring ourselves there. We strive, we invent, and we addict ourselves because there is something we long for that is just outside of our reach.
The other curiosity of humans related to our dissatisfactions is our pursuit of the spiritual. Us humans tend to either divinize everything, nothing, or mere abstractions that are out of reach. We pursue the spiritual because we sense a distance, an absence, with a simultaneous longing.
In the face of evil around us, and our own intentional or instinctive participation with it, we’re sinners who pretend and long to be saints.
In my generation, I hear frustration over all the different ways to pursue the spiritual, is one more true than another? Are we all clinging to different parts of the elephant or are we even confident enough of whether that metaphor is true?
When I read the sayings of many religious writers, there are great insights, but I am frustrated by how often it comes down to me fixing myself up, getting my act together, contorting my body, mind, or spirit to manufacture something “spiritual” as a solution to my felt needs. Is the spiritual just another organ in the human body devoid of any power outside of ourselves? The karmic arithmetic of life is fairly popular, the idea that we reap what we sow, but what about most of us who have sown salt and toxic fertilizers in the lush soil of our youth, reaped too many weeds in various seasons of life, and are in desperate need of renewal and wholeness? Is there any hope outside of this cycle, the hampster-wheel toil of regular consequences? Our addictions to self, sin and substances enslave us, blind us, and slay us.
The Divine is ever-present, but we feel distance because of what we’ve sown. We get tastes of the Greater when we study a delicate flower, hear a symphony, or experience the wonder of a child. Is the solution to our woes a mere tweaking of ourselves, engineering philosophical or spiritual algorithms to justify ourselves, placate our self-negating, or a work out of our spiritual muscle until we are attuned to the “whatever-it-is”?
What if knowing the divine life was more than an experience on a mat, prayer rug, or mountain peak? What if it is something that shapes all of life, from the day-to-day hum-drum to the grand forks in the road, something that calls out of our addiction to self-driven habits and tolerance of evil and invites & empowers an actual u-turn?
What if the divine took initiative and showed up in our midst? What if It was more than an abstraction but had personhood of some sort? Would it not make sense that the Divine ought to have more personhood than we do, not less? What if It was more than mere rules to follow or exercises to do or warm fuzzies to feel? What if the Power that wired up the universe and keeps in motion decides to show up at our door one day wanting to sit on our couch and have a conversation?
This is the assertion of an ancient bishop of Alexandria, Egypt, Athanasius. He says that the First-Century Jewish construction worker, Jesus, who started a movement eventually called Christianity, is the Divine who put on humanity so that we might look at God eye-to-eye (On the Incarnation, §15). In doing so, he asserts that Jesus is the divine blessing the physicality of humanness, thereby nullifying platonic dualism that curses the physical. He shows a new sort of human, one driven by the Divine. Not a hybrid so much as a mystical union that we shouldn’t try to parse out too precisely (lest we audaciously presume to know more than we know about divine workings). We are human, but we are broken. Jesus is human, but the Apostles asserted that he needed no repair, but rather healed whatever he touched (Mt 8:2-3). He was a 100% divine working as a 100% human, not as two beings, but two natures in one person. This is a puzzling mystery, but why not, if it is true that God is greater than our intellect.
What if our repair is not trying to fix ourselves but to let the divine fix us, to woo us, to work in us, to craft, repair, reconstruct, heal us, until when people were to experience us, they aren’t sure whether they are experiencing a god or a human? Athanasius described it as God becaming human to “renew God’s image in mankind” (§13). Not divine in our being, but having the divine work in us so much that there is a hybrid of sorts, where our life becomes a literal miracle. We are taken out of the momentum [entropy] of the natural course of our lives and directed towards a life driven towards wholeness the Spirit of God.
It’s a life not defined by ourselves, but by the ever-creating power of God, so thus, it is always a “new life”. New not because it involves new ideas, for God’s truth is as ancient as infinity past, but new because it is new for us, as individuals and a community. It is not a one-off newness, but the always-new life characterized by its eternality.
There is much more to say on this, but thus I have begun.
