Coming to the journey of consciousness through Christianity

For everything there is a season... (Ecclesiastes 1)

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. (1 Corinthians 13:11).

“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth...” (John 16:12-13)

I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me... (Jeremiah 31:33-34)

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In the Easter Vigil services of my childhood, after lighting the new Paschal candle from the fire in the brazier outside, after entering the dark church, after the ancient Exulstet is sung…

Be glad, let earth be glad, as glory floods her,
ablaze with light from her eternal King

…the congregation sits in darkness, holding their fiery candles; or, in some services, the lights of the church come on at this point.

Then the full sweep of Christian scripture is read, from Genesis to Exodus, through the Law and the Prophets, right up to the Pauline Epistles, and a Gospel of the risen Christ.

Saint Augustine called this service, “the mother of all holy vigils”. For me, it’s Christianity in a nutshell. For anyone new to Christianity, who is really serious about wanting to take its full message in, I always hope that they might brave an Easter Vigil, in all its beauty, tradition, and, to use an old Anglican word, “comprehensiveness”.

Of course, the readings are terrifically arranged. They don’t just fall out of the sky in that order. But that’s not a bad thing. It just means human beings are synergistic co-creators of salvation, along with “God” (or that aspect of divinity which is more-than, transcendent, all-encompassing,  and infinite).

Of course, the reading selection, arrangement, and presentation are designed to support the narrative that Christ is the fulfilment of the progressive revelation of the one, true, creator God, as he (he’s always “he”) acts and makes himself (sic) known throughout human history, or in the human history of his special relationship with one small part of human history, the people of Israel.

Personally, I believe that narrative, though not the implied part that God is only revealed in the human history of Israel (only to Israel, or on the side of Israel). But let me not get sidetracked.

Pushed further, Catholic theology is “progressive” in the sense of believing that the fullness of the nature and character of God is slowly, patiently, sequentially revealed: for example, God’s people are first allowed then encouraged to give up their animal sacrifices, and instead offer the sacrifice of an honest, contrite heart.

When we get to Jesus, we are in truly revolutionary territory:

You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.

Heard it said so many times! Throughout the so-called revelation of God in the Old Testament, who, in some estimates, murdered around 300 to 400,000 “enemies”, not including the global homicide of the great flood, in which only Noah and his family were spared.

But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you… (Matthew 5: 43-44).

In my Catholic and mainline Protestant childhood and young adulthood, the progressive revelation of God largely stopped here: Jesus is the crown of history, the seal on divine self-revelation. All else is footnotes and interpretive working-out. Our goal is to ‘get back to Jesus’, ‘return to Jesus’. It’s an initially progressive (i.e. incremental, gradual, active) revelation that after Jesus becomes largely conservative and backward looking (nothing too new please, get back to Jesus). The trouble is it isn’t true, or biblically, Jesus-ly supported. But again I’m getting sidetracked.

Modern Christianity has deeply upset the settled orthodox applecart. It has made the adult decision to accept and work with the consequences of modern rational thought.  It has accepted that biblical texts are not indisputable eye-witness accounts, black-box recordings, or CCTV footage of Jesus and his actual, literal words. But neither are they made-up fairy stories or imperial conspiracy theories, either. The Gospels and New Testament are “Jesus plus”, or Jesus as experienced by fallible men and women, then passed on through several decades of oral tradition, before being written down, and then subsequently translated, interpreted, packaged, and arranged, then re-translated and reinterpreted etc etc. After the death of Jesus, the story of God is continuously being added to and co-created, for good or ill. This is the way it is. 

After my “modernist” Christian phase, in my middle adult years, I encountered Quakerism. Initially, this was a baptism of the Spirit, a sense of being born again (as a Christian, out of the mystical Spirit - not out of water and standardized rituals, and certainly not out of my rational intellect). It was an encounter of the immediate, physically felt, guiding Spirit of God, moving in silence and stillness, illuminating my personal wounds and needs, guiding my life forward in visions, embodied awakenings and dreams, and in a way that was far more original and lively than any Eastern meditation or Christian contemplative prayer I had previously practised.

Then I got exposed - through books and self-study - to the testimony of this strange, spirit-led group. And an early and very logical testimony is that revelation is continuous and ongoing. God is communicating with us now, in continuity with the God-revelation of Jesus Christ, yet expanding that revelation in exciting, uncharted ways. It is, after all, the nature of God to be alive, speaking, encountering, in relationship, making everything and everyone new.

Being good biblically-based Protestants, the early Quakers pointed to the words of Jesus himself (or, as we moderns might turgidly say, to the words of Jesus that are probably true and have come to us though the long traditions and history of the distinctive, early Johannine Christian community):

“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth...” (John 16:12-13)

The present is open to the living God. The horizon is open and beckoning.

Stay awake! Keep enough oil in your lanterns:

And at midnight a cry was heard: ‘Behold, the bridegroom is coming; go out to meet him!’ Then all those virgins arose and trimmed their lamps. And the foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ But the wise answered, saying, ‘No, lest there should not be enough for us and you; but go rather to those who sell, and buy for yourselves.’ And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him to the wedding; and the door was shut. (Matthew 25: 6-10).