or in the rest of the physical universe. That has been our major impasse up to
now. Jesus was supposed to be the code breaker, but without uniting him to
Christ, we lost the core of what Christianity might have become.
A merely personal God becomes tribal and sentimental, and a merely
universal God never leaves the realm of abstract theory and philosophical
principles. But when we learn to put them together, Jesus and Christ give us a
God who is both personal and universal. The Christ Mystery anoints all physical
matter with eternal purpose from the very beginning. (We should not be
surprised that the word we translate from the Greek as Christ comes from the
Hebrew word mesach, meaning “the anointed” one, or Messiah. He reveals that
all is anointed!) Many are still praying and waiting for something that has
already been given to us three times: first in creation; second in Jesus, “so that
we could hear him, see him with our eyes, watch him, and touch him with our
hands, the Word who is life” (1 John 1–2); and third, in the ongoing beloved
community (what Christians call the Body of Christ), which is slowly evolving
throughout all of human history (Romans 8:18ff.). We are still in the Flow.
Given our present evolution of consciousness, and especially the historical
and technological access we now have to the “whole picture,” I now wonder if a
sincere person can even have a healthy and holy “personal” relationship with
God if that God does not also connect them to the universal. A personal God
cannot mean a smaller God, nor can God make you in any way smaller—or such
would not be God.
Ironically, millions of the very devout who are waiting for the “Second
Coming” have largely missed the first—and the third! I’ll say it again: God loves
things by becoming them. And as we’ve just seen, God did so in the creation of
the universe and of Jesus, and continues to do so in the ongoing human Body of
Christ (1 Corinthians 12:12ff.) and even in simple elements like bread and wine.
Sadly, we have a whole section of Christianity that is looking for—even praying
for—an exit from God’s ongoing creation toward some kind of Armageddon or
Rapture. Talk about missing the point! The most effective lies are often the
really big ones.
The evolving, universe-spanning Christ Mystery, in which all of us take part,
is the subject of this book. Jesus is a map for the time-bound and personal level
of life, and Christ is the blueprint for all time and space and life itself. Both
reveal the universal pattern of self-emptying and infilling (Christ) and death
and resurrection (Jesus), which is the process we have called “holiness,”
“salvation,” or just “growth,” at different times in our history. For Christians,