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To know the love of Christ, which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Ephesians 3:19

The purpose of the Christian life is divinization.  That is what is meant by being “filled with all the fullness of God,” the goal to which the love of Christ leads us by a route which goes beyond all knowledge.
            The Eastern Fathers particularly have not hesitated to state this startling, indeed, to some ears, blasphemous teaching.  St. Athanasius declares, “The Word of God became man in order that man might become God.” 
            No Biblical author emphasizes this more strongly than Paul, who draws on his own experience of Christ on the Damascus Road.  In his book Paul and Palestinian Judaism E.P. Sanders declares, “The heart of Paul’s thought is that one dies with Christ, obtaining new life and initial transformation, which leads to the resurrection and the ultimate transformation.” 
            The nature of religious experience is introverted; it comes not from without but from within.  We need to remind ourselves of this from time to time, because the despiritualization set in motion by Western culture has placed the emphasis so strongly on the external world, and on our public-political responsibility, that the needs of the inner man can easily be ignored.  J.A. Sanford has written, “The discovery of the inner world, of which we are ordinarily unaware but which greatly affects our conscious life, is the most important religious fact of our time.” 
            When the individual remains unconscious of his inner divisions, the world must act out the conflict, for peace is not simply the absence of war but the resolution of oppositions.  In our first reading the Lord declares, “I lead you in the way you should go.  O that you had hearkened to my commandments!  Then your peace would have been like a river” (Isaiah 48:18). 
            Peace comes to us, and to the world, only when we hearken to the inner voice of holy wisdom.  This week we have been praying for the unity of the church, but more important for the peace of the world is the unity within each human heart.
            Since God is our goal, and since the Father is revealed through the Son, the Christ-image has profound significance.  The image of Christ as the perfect man, in whom sin cannot exist, has led Christ’s followers to an impossib le and illusory quest for perfection, rather than the integrative task of becoming the persons we are meant to be. 
            As the Christian era draws to a close with the beginning of a new millennium, the “inward turn” is forced upon us, if we are not prepared to accept public-political responsibility as a substitute for the individual spiritual task.  The introverted approach to Christianity reveals its connection with the spiritual world which is our collective human inheritance.  Only by becoming reconnected with this world, only through a painful journey through the inner labyrinth, can our spiritual illness be healed. 

January 28, 2007

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