By the time Paul wrote the letters to Colossae (1:15–20) and Ephesus (1:3–14),
some twenty years after Jesus’s era, he had already connected Jesus’s single body
with the rest of the human species (1 Corinthians 12:12ff.), with the individual
elements symbolized by bread and wine (1 Corinthians 11:17ff.), and with the
entire Christ of cosmic history and nature itself (Romans 8:18ff.). This
connection is later articulated in the Prologue to John’s Gospel when the author
says, “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the
Logos was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being
through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come
into being in him was life, and the life was the light of humanity” (John 1: 1–4),
all grounded in the Logos becoming flesh (1:14). The early Eastern Fathers made
much of this universal and corporate notion of salvation, both in art and in
theology, but not so much in the West.
The sacramental principle is this: Begin with a concrete moment of
encounter, based in this physical world, and the soul universalizes from there,
so that what is true here becomes true everywhere else too. And so the spiritual
journey proceeds with ever-greater circles of inclusion into the One Holy
Mystery! But it always starts with what many wisely call the “scandal of the
particular.” It is there that we must surrender, even if the object itself seems
more than a bit unworthy of our awe, trust, or surrender.*4