The Universal Christ

9

Things at Their Depth

One day the religion of Christ will take another step forward on

earth. It will embrace the whole man [sic], all of him, not just half

as it does now in embracing only the soul.

—Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco

As I watch Catholics receive communion at Mass, I notice that some, after
taking the bread and wine, turn toward the altar or the sacred box that reserves
the bread and bow or genuflect as a gesture of respect—as if the Presence were
still over there. In those moments, I wonder if they have missed what just
happened! Don’t they realize that the Eucharist was supposed to be a full
transference of identity to them? They themselves are now the living, moving
tabernacle, just like the Ark of the Covenant. Is this too much for them to
imagine? Does it seem presumptuous and impossible? It appears so.

Likewise, I have known many Evangelicals who “received Jesus into their
hearts” but still felt the need to “get saved” again every Friday night. Did they
not believe that a real transformation happened if they made a genuine
surrender and reconnected to their Source? Most of us understandably start the
journey assuming that God is “up there,” and our job is to transcend this world
to find “him.” We spend so much time trying to get “up there,” we miss that
God’s big leap in Jesus was to come “down here.” So much of our worship and
religious effort is the spiritual equivalent of trying to go up what has become the
down escalator.

I suspect that the “up there” mentality is the way most people’s spiritual
search has to start. But once the real inner journey begins—once you come to
know that in Christ, God is forever overcoming the gap between human and
divine—the Christian path becomes less about climbing and performance, and