No nationality can control or limit this Flow of such universal love.
These are the ubiquitous gifts of the Christ Mystery, hidden inside of all that
has ever lived, died, and will live again.
I hope the vision is coming clearer. It is in a way so simple and commonsense
that it is hard to teach. It is mostly a matter of unlearning, and learning to trust
your Christian common sense, if you will allow me to say that. Christ is a good
and simple metaphor for absolute wholeness, complete incarnation, and the
integrity of creation. Jesus is the archetypal human just like us (Hebrews 4:15),
who showed us what the Full Human might look like if we could fully live into
it (Ephesians 4:12–16). Frankly, Jesus came to show us how to be human much
more than how to be spiritual, and the process still seems to be in its early
stages.
Without Jesus, the sheer scale and significance of our deep humanity is just
too much, and too good, for our ordinary minds to imagine. But when we rejoin
Jesus with Christ, we can begin a Big Imagining and a Great Work.
*1 Romans 1:20 says the same, in case you’re wondering how this self-critique shows up in the
Bible itself.
*2 This is why the title for part one of this book says “Every Thing,” instead of “Everything,”
because I believe the Christ Mystery specifically applies to thingness, materiality, physicality.
I do not think of concepts and ideas as Christ. They might well communicate the Christ
Mystery, as I will try to do here, but “Christ” for me refers to ideas that have specifically
“become flesh” (John 1:14). You are surely free to disagree with me on that, but at least you
know where I am coming from in my use of the word “Christ” in this book.
*3 See both Romans 8:19ff. and 1 Corinthians 11:17ff., where Paul makes his expansive notion
of incarnation clear, and for me compelling. Most of us just never heard it that way.
*4 For a fuller treatment of this notion, see my earlier book The Divine Dance (New
Kensington, PA: Whitaker House, 2016), which amounts to a prequel to this book.
*5 Scotism entry, Encyclopedia of Theology, ed. Karl Rahner (London: Burns and Oates, 1975),
1548.