Christian life proceeds from a deeply converted heart, not as an obligation but as an inevitable outcome of the heart's tenderness and its decent affection through and with and in the Lord Jesus:
| By this ye shall be known as my disciples, that ye love each other. (Jn 13:35) |
This is the soil from which grows all corporal works of mercy!
The Kingdom of Heaven, then, is a non-geographical land in exile. We are strangers in a strange land (Exod 2:22). Here we have no abiding city (Heb 13:14). We are a wandering people whose borders are visible in our love of God and our bonds of love with each other. Alternatively, the landscape of alienation bears very different marks:
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For all that is in the world — the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes,
and the pride of life — is not of the Father but is of the world. (1 Jn 2:16) |
Therefore, the greatest of theologians implores us,
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Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world,
the love of the Father is not in him. (1 Jn 2:15) |
But, as the Master would say, be of good cheer, for this is not our home, nor indeed, a home fit for human habitation.
So sad. The world could have been so much more .... we could have been so much more had we chosen to be.
For the human creature alone was made to be holy and destined for permanence. The world as we see it is neither holy, nor is it permanent.
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And the world is passing away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of
God abides forever. (1 Jn 2:17) |
All of this is plain to see. We need not be a theologian to notice that the world — its ethos of egoism, consumerism, competitiveness, and rejection of God, — is the anti-type of God's Kingdom.
What ought to be the mind of the Christian? It is the mind of godly meditation, one example of which is prayer. Reflection is the atmosphere of the Kingdom of Heaven. Certainly, Christian love traces its origin to the love of God. These are its deepest roots entwined in the eternal rock of Mt. Sinai. It forms the greatest prayer amongst our Hebrew prayers, the Shemah:
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Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one! You shall love the Lord your God
with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. (Deut 6:4) |
And you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two depend all the Law and the Prophets.
As any true heart would do, we awaken each morning meditating on the beauty of our Beloved. We gaze upon His face. We go back and ponder the things He has said. We share His sayings with others with a sense of wonder, filling us with powerful feelings.
In his landmark work De Incarnatione, St. Athanasius the Great answered the question, but after Jesus flipped the telos of the human lifeworld from death to life, how do we retain this redemption? For surely we have the dark power to slip back into the death trance of sin, which is the mind of betrayal and treachery.
When we sin, we betray ourselves. We betray the others around us who trusted us. And we betray God.
The remedy, St. Athanasius writes, is to meditate on the Lord Jesus. We must fix our minds and souls always upon Him, Who is the King of Love. In this, we fulfill St. Paul's injunction to "pray without ceasing" (1 Thess 5:17).
Here is the blueprint and daily life of Our Lady of the Angels Hermitage. We are a community of continual meditation, expressed in prayer — Matins, Vespers, the Divine Liturgy — but hourly in our thoughts which we share. It is meditation which constantly refreshes our life in the Kingdom of God.
Consider the Cross as the great Compass driven deep into the earth. It is the crossroads of the world. It is the intersection of perfect mercy and perfect justice. The cardinal points of this Compass read, in Greek, "A," "D," "A," "M." What could possibly be more elemental in the human scope? This is the subatomic level of the spiritual life. Our lives are laid out bare, stretched wide across this intersection. The life-giving Cross by that same measure must necessarily be life-taking, too, depending on the state of our heart and soul: the intersection of perfect justice as well as mercy.
Consider, also, the word of God which ....
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is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division
of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. (Heb 4:12) |
St. Paul called the Scripture "the oracles of God" .... peering into us.
And here we have come to the deepest reaches of meditation.
For all that we see we discern always on four levels:
This fourth and last level is the watershed moment for the other three. For each of our earthly journeys must end. The world must end. The Great Compass now stands before us in high relief. At its center is the God, Whom God's people have murdered. On His right is the thief who has peered intently into his own soul. He now sees the story of his life with clarity. And he begs entrance into the Kingdom of God. On His left is the thief who refuses to reflect on his life, much less reflect on God. He spits fire in his insolence. His hot mind and spirit cannot be assuaged and his obdurate heart cannot be moved. Here is the death trance.
In high relief upon a hill outside Jerusalem we see the full range of human life in silhouette. Here is the story of God surrounded by His adopted children. Here is the Shepherd with the sheep and the goats. Here is the Lord of Life with the Paradise on one side and the dark kingdom of Pandemonium on the other.
When St. Paul speaks of
| .... the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ .... (Eph 4:13) |
he uses a particular theological word, whose root is pleroma, meaning "a thing to filled" (among other definitions). The idea is that traced upon the earth are the full lineaments of Christ, like a colossus. It is like a ship without sailors. It is His Kingdom, which is yet to be filled with us. And we do this, St. Paul says, by coming
| to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man .... (Eph 4:17) |
That is, by emulating Jesus we grow into His gracious form, attaining — through transformation of our minds in His (Rom 12:2) and through faith — One-ness with the Father, even as He and the Father are One.
We are in a fluid situation. Our exemplar, Jesus of Nazareth, is fully man and fully God. As we follow Him, we see His progress from the mud and dung-stained hay, lying in a feed trough, denied the decent affections of nearby merry-makers at an inn. And we also see Him at the point of His departure, where He prays,
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"And now, O Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory
which I had with You before the world was." (Jn 17:5) |
All too human on one side and truly God on the other.
His desire is the we follow this same progress: born in dust, our clay crazed with the cracks of our faults and our sins, but cherishing within ourselves a treasure. "We have this treasure in earthen vessels" (2 Cor 4:7), declares St. Paul. Through prayer, through meditations of every kind, we seek this same glory, by the grace of God. For the Master has called us to be co-heirs with Him of the Kingdom.
It is a fluid situation. The whole human lifeworld has been cast after the pattern of Jesus. We are human, and we are Divine. Our purely human thoughts draw us back down into the brute animal mind, the instinctual mind of scent and taste and touch .... our sense reign as we descend into the lowest form of meditation.
Our Divine part lifts us up toward Heaven and its impossible lightness of being, no clods of clay and mud weight us down.
Which way will it go for humankind, downward or upward? In the fullness of Christ the earth is filled with Divinity .... or it is desolated.
Seeing the human creation as Jesus does, designed after the blueprint of His own two natures, we grasp more surely His cry of exasperation,
| O ye of little faith! Why do ye doubt? (Mt 14:31) |
Why do you doubt? The Greek verb suggests waiver, which is not quite doubt, but rather belief that keeps shifting .... unsteadiness. This is the basis for faith, whether it be rock solid or "little."
Jesus invites Peter to walk on water following the example of the Master. He would not do this if Peter did not already possess these powers. That is, Jesus summons Peter's Divine part. And his first steps indeed reveal that he does possess these powers. Peter does have the power to participate in "the glory which [the Son] had with [the Father] before the world was" (Jn 17:5).
Walking on water? That is nothing compared to the Glory that wrested order out of the chaos from the monster Rahab or Leviathan representing the unruly sea. And Peter's sure and firm steps upon the waves signify his near mastery over the chaos of life. And yet he is not quite there yet. He keeps slipping.
We follow the Son of God. He is fully human as we are all too human. He knows this human bent to waiver. This shadow crosses His empyreal nature and passes over it as He prays in the Garden of Gethsemane:
| "O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me." (Mt 26:39) |
Yet through a force of will He steadies Himself holding fast to that ideal which our lifeline too:
| ".... nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will." (Ibid) |
On earth as it is in Heaven.
The Son has invited us to be with Him "this day in Paradise" (Lu 23:43). He has prepared a place for us in the Heavenly climes. He would have told us if it were not so (Jn 14:3). He bids us look up towards the highest reaches of our God-given spirits, ever upward. And He calls us to go the ends of the earth to share the good news: the Kingdom of Heaven is near. It is near, and we are always already in it.
In all of this we process with the Cross. The Cross is our symbol and our sign. Its perfect geometery points to the place where we must crucify our waivering humanity embracing that perfect freedom which is service (Gal 5:1). Our Divine part can never be liberated from the chaos of our lives until we align ourselves diligently in the Father's will.
We must be rid of this chaos, of these wandering thoughts, of this self-centeredness, and of this doubt. A waivering mind can never be a Heavenly mind. Yet is the power there, soaring far above our bodies of clay and the highest peaks of the Alps and the Himalayas, ever upward to our home in Heaven, where the Son is glorified in the Father (Jn 17:1).
The earth is our stumbling block.
If you love the earth,
the love of the Father is not in you.
Therefore, draw a circle on the earth beneath the pure skies of Heaven.
And there you must always dwell.
Master this circle.
Push back the world.
And make your borderlands to shine upon a world languishing in darkness.
For in this you and your house have become a city on a hill
and
a light to the world.
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.