Advent is a season of watching and waiting. We watch and wait with John the Bpatist, Zechariah and principally Mary.
This speaks to me of contemplation. The goal of contemplative prayer is to make us present to the moment where we can encounter Christ. In fact it’s the only locus we can encounter Christ. Christ has come, and Christ will come again – the two great themes of Advent – but we need to watch and wait and encounter Christ in the present, in the NOW.
We are too often asleep, walking around in a daze, perhaps too stimulated to delight in the ordinary (HT R Rohr) and so we are not awake to Christ in the present.
Contemplative prayer should help us to watch and wait.
The St. Theovesia centre in Oxford takes this line too; that it is Christ we encounter through contemplation/ meditation.
I am not sure I have come to the same conclusion, and I am not sure that Christians need the same conclusion either.
In one sense, you’re describing that beyond words, and putting form to the formless, which is always inadequate as a description of the formless – so Christ is one way to describe. In another sense, it’s a theological statement: it is Christ that we encounter, not God, or the ground of all being, or spirit.
Jesus the man pointed to the kingdom, as you say in another post, related to what he called ‘Father’ as greater than himself, and also said, ‘you are the light’. If Jesus the man was connected to the source, is it Christ we encounter? Or are we having the same experience, exactly the same, as the man Jesus – however fleetingly – when we connect?
We can live in the kingdom today. We can be as Jesus today. I think that’s the ‘good news’. We do not need Christ to be the vehicle. We do not need Christ to save us. We can only save ourselves from ourselves through the humility, the discipline, the surrender of the egoic mind, entering the gate of the kingdom, following the example of Jesus the man.
But I do not want to say too much, and certainly don’t want to protagonise. I have not met you!
Namaste.
Hi Trevor
thanks for your comments. This last one made me think! So, for you Christ is an example of the mystical union that is possible for all human beings…and nothing more than that? have I got you right? Or am I oversimplifying?
I think I would say that in Christ human and divine nature is once more reunited and that therefore it is through deepening our Christ consciousness (‘the light that enlightens everyone was coming into the world’) that we realize our true identity as ‘partakers of the divine nature’.
But I would say that Christ makes this possible not just an example of what’s possible. I think!
Matt
Hola Matt. Nice meeting you virtually!
If it is Christ making it possible, then has Christ done this throughout all time – even before he became a person walking the earth? Before death and resurrection? If so, then we are back to Christianity being the only way, truth, life, and nobody gets to heaven but by Jesus. Ayyymen.
I cannot say for sure, because I have never been anyone other than myself (not in this lifetime ;o)], but my discovery of the light/ the source and my personal experience of it, leads me to the conclusion that people from many other faith traditions throughout time have had the same (experientially identical) mystical encounters. Albeit the language/ formation of it is different. Buddha, for example. Siddharta Gautama lived about 500 years before Jesus. Some Jewish mystics also predate Jesus. For example.
So yeah, for me Jesus (avoiding ‘Christ’ here) is an example among others. That doesn’t detract from the flavour he gave to his teaching, or mean that following his example as opposed to other examples is any less valid. He never said he was ‘THE’ son of God. Others said that.
Views about Jesus aside (I think we will differ – after 19 years, I no longer think he was the son of God), it is something else I am cautious of. We are all deprogramming ourselves from centuries in the Western church with a prevailing teaching that the light of the world is Christ. So it can never be our own light. We are always to be secondary. Lesser. Guilt-ridden. Grovelling. Repentant (in the wrong sense of the word). And that is not the good news!
Adopted or not, we are also ‘God’s children’ – as much as Jesus. Lifetimes spent emulating Jesus and failing (working on an egoic intellectual level), or in a charismatic sense, praying for God to make us more like Jesus – is kind of futile to my mind. Or the wrong way about it. Only in the surrender and the discovery of spirit welling up in our bodies and being – only in entering the kingdom – do we realise that it’s a waste of time to talk of ourselves as fallen, unworthy..
I guess it’s a lifetime’s work to be in the kingdom every minute of the day. I’m not saying I Am that I Am this minute. Just some minutes!
The good news, to me, is that I can and do access wholeness, perfectness, my inheritance, in the NOW. Don’t have to wait to die. Don’t have to pray for it to come. Don’t have to try to change my behaviour. (The more time spent in the kingdom, the more my behaviour is transformed upside down and inside out.) And don’t have to wait for healing.. though that’s another subject.
So I’m really uncomfortable with Christology. I guess your’e Anglimergent and if that’s your language then it’s cool with me. I know it’s not about right and wrong. Our heritage makes Christology loaded. Christ is God’s son, not us. Christ is the light, not us. It’s disempowering. Without our painful heritage maybe Christology would be cool; it’s cool in the Orthodox heritage. But they never got intellectual…
I’d rather the emerging church focussed on Jesus the person as an example of what’s possible. Everything else about him becomes metaphor. It makes room for other examples.
There’s only one passage of scripture that says Jesus said, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me’, and we know how dangerous it is to base a whole theology on one passage of scripture. I prefer to read that passage as ‘I am in The Way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to this Way but by the method I live to show’.
Have you read the Tao Te Ching? I’m amazed by the similarities between that ancient text’s description of the natural Way and Jesus’ parables about the kingdom of heaven. To me they are equal descriptions of the same thing.
Missio Dei. Throughout time. Cultures. Languages. Examples.
It’s not pluralism! There is consistency here! Provided it’s not looked at intellectually…
Does that make sense?
Thanks again Trevor. Haven’t got enough time for a long response but I think I would add a couple of things in the light of your comments….
– I think there is a timeless perspective to the work and agency of Christ (there are some rather cryptic verses in Revelation that hint at this) so in a sense in Christ humanity and divinity are reunited wherever we stand in relation to the historical Jesus i.e. before or after.
– in terms of the ‘way, truth and life’ stuff I remember hearing someone say that although Christ is the only way to God then perhaps there are different ways to Christ? I found that helpful although I can hear how it might sound in the ears of a person of a different faith (“so you’re saying it’s Christ we have been following all along”!). So there are different ways of coming to a full realization of a Christ consciousness but I hold to a Christian identity for myself because I do believe that it all happens through and in Christ.
But I wonder how much it matters. You are the light of the world. You. Nobody else. Well, everybody else. But… you. You are as God. You are as Christ. Just as much light. Just as much wisdom. Another Christ walking the earth. Another I AM in the suchness of now. Well, maybe not today, but you can be. That is your potential. That’s the real good news, and it’s what the Christian church has not wanted to teach, because it’s empowering dynamite stuff.
Maximus Confessor b.580. said something similar to this.
Church history is not ‘progressing’. Westernized Christianity is imploding in on itself as it adjusts to the painful truth that it has not been teaching the real good news for over a thousand years. So it changes, or it dies.
The rise in ‘new spirituality’ is entirely our own doing.
The emerging church could be the fertile ground for truly good news to spring out in the West. You are in a position to do something about that. I am not a Christian, so I am not in that position. But you could do it.