And every time you breathe out, you are repeating the pattern of returning
spirit to the material universe. In a way, every exhalation is a “little dying” as
we pay the price of inspiriting the world.
Your simple breathing models your entire vocation as a human being. You are
an incarnation, like Christ, of matter and spirit operating as one. This, more
than anything we believe or accomplish, is how all of us continue the mystery
of incarnation in space and time—either knowingly and joyfully—or not.
If divine incarnation has any truth to it, then resurrection is a foregone
conclusion, and not a one-time anomaly in the body of Jesus, as our Western
understanding of the resurrection felt it needed to prove—and then it couldn’t.
The Risen Christ is not a one-time miracle but the revelation of a universal
pattern that is hard to see in the short run.
The job for believers is to figure out not the how or the when of resurrection,
but just the what! Leave the how and the when to science and to God. True
Christianity and true science are both transformational worldviews that place
growth and development at their centers. Both endeavors, each in its own way,
cooperate with some Divine Plan, and whether God is formally acknowledged
may not be that important. As C. G. Jung inscribed over his doorway, Vocatus
atque non vocatus, Deus aderit, “Invoked or not invoked, God is still present.”*3
God has worked anonymously since the very beginning—it has always been
an inside and secret sort of job.
The Spirit seems to work best underground. When aboveground, humans
start fighting about it.
You can call this grace, the indwelling Holy Spirit, or just evolution toward
union (which we call “love”). God is not in competition with anybody, but only
in deep-time cooperation with everybody who loves (Romans 8:28). Whenever
we place one caring foot forward, God uses it, sustains it, and blesses it. Our
impulse does not need to wear the name of religion at all.
Love is the energy that sustains the universe, moving us toward a future of
resurrection. We do not even need to call it love or God or resurrection for its
work to be done.
*1 John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: James
Toovey, 1845), 39.
*2 Richard Dawkins, “Richard Dawkins on Skavlan,” Skavlan, YouTube, December 2015,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3oae0AOQew.