1. religion and spirituality
2. christianity
3. catholicism

Sunday - Doing the world
Monday, July 08, 2013
1:44 PM
1. What is the Real World?
Know then that you are double
and that you possess two eyes,
the sensible and the spiritual.
Since there are also two suns
there is also a double light,
sensible and spiritual,
and if you see them, you will be the man
as you were created in the beginning to be.
If you see the sensible sun
and not the spiritual sun,
you are really half dead.
Portland Page 1
Symeon the New Theologian, Hymns of Divine Love,
2. Knowing What is Real Requires Becoming Real
The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so
old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath,
and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He
was very wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to
boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and
he knew that they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For
nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are
old and wise and experienced, like the Skin Horse, understand all about it.
“What is real?” asked the Rabbit one day. “Does it mean having
things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that
happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not
just to play with, but really loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful.
“When you are real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked,
“or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become.
It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t’ often happen to people
who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully
kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has
been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the
joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because
once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t
understand.”
“I suppose you are real?” said the Rabbit.
“The Boy’s Uncle made me Real,” he said. “That was a great many
years ago; but once you are Real you can’t be made unreal again. It
lasts for always.”
Portland Page 2
lasts for always.”
Diakonia Sacraments
10 pp (a) Annunciation and (b) Baptism
3. Receiving the world
Natural eating
The National Digestive Diseases
Information Clearing House
Sinful eating
Screwtape Letters
Ascetical Eating
A: What is Digestion?
"Digestion is the process by which food and drink are broken down into
their smallest parts so that the body can use them to build and nourish
cells and to provide energy."
Q: How is food digested?
Answer: "Digestion involves the movement of food through the
digestive tract, and the chemical breakdown of the large molecules
of food into smaller molecules."
Q: And why is digestion important?
Answer: because "when we eat such things as bread, meat, and
vegetables, they are not in a form that the body can use as
nourishment. Our food and drink must be changed into smaller
molecules of nutrients before they can be absorbed into the blood
and carried to cells throughout the body."
One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His
service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere
propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the
universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures,
whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not
because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to
His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants
who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out.
We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim
is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into
himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still
distinct.
When the good and humble mare, named Hwin, meets Aslan for the
first time, she shakes all over as she trots up to the Lion. And she says
“Please, you’re so beautiful. You may eat me if you like. I’d sooner be
eaten by you than fed by anyone else.”
Portland Page 3
“Please, you’re so beautiful. You may eat me if you like. I’d sooner be
eaten by you than fed by anyone else.”
Eucharistic Eating
Augustine
Confessions, Bk 7, ch 10
When I first knew you, you raised me up so that I could see that there
was something to see and that I still lacked the ability to see it..
[Augustine is still undergoing his conversion ]
And you beat back the weakness of my sight, blazing upon me with
your rays, and I trembled in love and in dread ...
[Not unlike the mare, Hwin, when she first saw Aslan.]
… and I found that I was far distant from you, in a region of total
unlikeness, as if I were hearing your voice from on high saying: "I am
the food of grown men. Grow and you shall feed upon me."
[The voice does not say "feed on me and you shall grow," it seems
to say that every year you grow, you will find Me bigger and be
able to feed on Me more completely].
"And you will not, as with the food of the body, change me into
yourself, but you will be changed into me."
At communion you are given the body of Christ to eat, and you will not change
Christ into you, as with the food of the body, but you will be changed into him.
You will become his body; you will be made Church.
Eustace had to learn the difference between what a star is and what it is made out of; in other words, learn the
difference between reality and materiality. Augustine had to learn the same lesson:
"What you see is the bread and the chalice; that is what your own eyes report to you. But what your faith
obliges you to accept is that the bread is the Body of Christ and the chalice the Blood of Christ. ... How is the
bread His Body? And … what is in the chalice, how is it His Blood? Those elements, brethren, are called
Sacraments, because in them one thing is seen, but another is understood. [Augustine - Sermon 272]
One thing is seen, but our meta-nous can understand another. And then we see also the true reality of the Church.
Augustine continues:
"You, however, are the Body of Christ and His members." If, therefore, you are the Body of Christ and His
members, your mystery is presented at the table of the Lord, you receive your mystery. To that which you
are, you answer: "Amen"; and by answering, you subscribe to it. For you hear: "The Body of Christ!" and you
answer: "Amen!" Be a member of Christ's Body, so that your "Amen" may be the truth. [Sermon 272]
So much theology exchanged between the minister of communion saying "The Body of Christ" and the
communicant replying "Amen"! The Eucharist makes the one body of Christ, and Augustine commands his
parishioners, and us, "Eat your bond lest you disintegrate." [Sermon 228]
(Res tantum)
Portland Page 4
“Exitus is not a fall from the infinite ... No, exitus is first and foremost something
thoroughly positive … It is [the Creator’s] positive will that the created order should exist
as something good in relation to himself, from which a response of freedom and love
can be given back to him.” (32).
Matter is not evil, or the source of evil, or the result of an evil influence.
If it was, then redemption would consist of a reversal of creation, an act of uncreation
that rescinds and annuls natural matter,
and transubstantiation would consist of exchanging the underbelly of the created
thing with some divine substance.
To the contrary, according to Christian cosmology, God exited himself and caused a
locus of space, time, and matter from which a response of love (reditus) could be made
by free and intelligent non-divine beings.
And in this scheme, the transubstantiated Host is “the anticipation of the
transformation and divinization of matter in the christological ‘fullness’” (29).
The Eucharist is the action of God that “is the real ‘action’ for which all of creation is in
expectation. The elements of the earth are transubstantiated, pulled, so to speak, from
their creaturely anchorage, grasped at the deepest ground of their being, and changed
into the Body and Blood of the Lord. The New Heaven and the New Earth are
anticipated” (173). Transubstantiation names the eschatological end at work beneath
the sacramental purpose of creation, even as it sacramentally effects the end of man,
which is communion with God.
4. Faces
(Close of Lewis on asceticism
Portland Page 5
8/4/2013
Living Christ’s Life by Sacrament and Holy Spirit
“It is in the offering of the heart to God that
the Spirit manifests itself and introduces the
human being into the eternal circulation of
love between the Father and the Son, and
this is the ‘Kingdom.’” Evdokimov, “Saint
Seraphim of Sarov,”
"What in fact is a
Christian? 'Another
Christ,' all antiquity
replies. And who is Christ?
The Man-God …."
Columba Marmion, Christ,
the Ideal of the Monk
“God became human so that
human beings might be made
divine. What Christ is by
nature, we are to become by
grace.”
"all the events in the life of our Lord, as
well as happening in Judea, happen in the
soul,” Charles Williams, Essential Writings
in Spirituality and Theology,
1. Annunciation – baptism
2. Baptism of Jesus – confirmation
3. Lord’s Supper – Eucharist
4. Transfiguration - deification
"The mysteries of Jesus have this characteristic that they are ours as much as they are His
…. To each of His mysteries, he attaches a grace which is to help us to reproduce within
ourselves His divine features in order to make us like unto Him." Columba Marmion,
Christ in His Mysteries
1. The Annunciation
Between the Father’s two hands, his Son and his Spirit, there exists a
reciprocal relationship, a bond of mutual service. There is often a
tendency to express the inter-relation between the two in a one-sided
manner that obscures this reciprocity. Christ, it is said, comes first;
then, after his Ascension into heaven, he sends down the Spirit at
Pentecost. But in reality the mutual links are more complex and
more balanced. Christ sends the Spirit to us, but at the same time it
is the Spirit that sends Christ.
At the Annunciation the Holy Spirit descends upon the Virgin
Mary, and she conceives the Logos: according to the Creed, Jesus
Christ was ‘incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary’.
Here it is the Spirit who is sending Christ into the world.
Fr. Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way
“The Holy Spirit will come upon
you, and the power of the Most High
will overshadow you; therefore the
“Then the cloud covered the tent of
child to be born will be holy; he will
meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled
be called Son of God.” (Luke 1:35)
the tabernacle. Moses was not able to
enter the tent of meeting because the
“overshadow” is episkiazei
cloud settled upon it, and the glory of
Epi (upon) Skene (tent)
the Lord filled the tabernacle” (Exodus
40:34).
1
8/4/2013
The Annunciation
Thus the procreation of Jesus is
“symbolically described as the descent
of Yahweh over the desert sanctuary.”
Samuel Terrien, The Elusive Presence
“this time the presence of
God was ... contained in a
human person.” Ibid, 41920.
“Come upon” and “overshadow” connote creativity. Mary is
not barren [as in the case of Elizabeth, whose story has just
been told by Luke], and in [Mary’s] case the child does not
come into existence because God cooperates with the husband
…. Rather, Mary is a virgin who has not known man, and
therefore the child is totally God’s work - a new creation .... If
the prophetic Spirit filled John the Baptist from his mother’s
womb, the Spirit that comes upon Mary is closer to the Spirit of
God that hovered over the waters before creation in Genesis
1:2. The earth was void and without form when that Spirit
appeared; just so Mary’s womb was a void until through the
Spirit God filled it with a child who was His Son.
Raymond Brown, The Birth of the Messiah
The principle of birth which Christ found in Mary’s womb
has been embodied by him in the water of baptism .... The
power of the Most High and the overshadowing of the
Holy Ghost, which brought about the birth of the
Redeemer in the Virgin Mary, also make it possible for the
water of baptism to bring about a rebirth in the faithful.
Pope Leo the Great, Sermon 25.4.
The soul corresponds to the Blessed
Virgin. It recalls the mystery of the
incarnation. And the incarnation is
spiritually extended to holy souls who are
thereby preparing for Christ's return. All
the mysteries of the Gospel are not only
performed in the liturgy but take
possession of us in the spiritual life. The
Word is continually being born in the
stable of our heart … "What came about
in bodily form in Mary, [Gregory writes]
takes place in a similar way in every soul
that has been made pure .… In this way
the child Jesus is born in each one of us."
Olivier Clement, The Roots of Christian Mysticism
Here is born in Spirit-soaked fertility
a brood destined for another City,
begotten by God’s blowing
The Annunciation
and borne upon this torrent
by the Church their virgin mother ....
This spring is life that floods the world,
the wounds of Christ its awesome source.
Sinner sink beneath this sacred surf
that swallows age and spits up youth.
Sinner here scour sin away down to innocence ...
Sinner shudder not at sin’s kind and number,
for those born here are holy.
Fr. Aidan Kavanagh, The Shape of Baptism
Look, mother Church is in labor, see, she is
groaning in travail to give birth to you, to
bring you forth into the light of faith. Do
not agitate her maternal womb with your
impatience, and thus constrict the passage
to your delivery .... [The Lord] too
accepted this slow business of coming to
birth in time ...
Love what you will be. What you will be,
you see, is children of God, and sons by
adoption. This will be given you free,
conferred on you for nothing, at his
pleasure.
St. Augustine, Sermon 216:7, 8
In 1 Corinthians 10 he writes, “I
do not want you to be unaware,
brothers and sisters, that our
ancestors were all under the
cloud, and all passed through the
seas, and all were baptized into
Moses in the cloud and in the
seas, and all ate the same
spiritual food, and all drank the
same spiritual drink. For they
drank from the spiritual rock that
followed them, and the rock was
Christ.”
2
8/4/2013
2. Jesus’ Baptism
Having come out of the baptismal pool we are
anointed with blessed oil according to the ancient
discipline in which it was customary to be anointed
with oil spread on the horn [of the temple altar] to
receive the priesthood. It is with this oil that Aaron
was anointed by Moses; whence comes his name of the
Anointed (christus) which comes from chrisma,
meaning anointing.
Tertullian, On Baptism, ch. 7..
“Now when all the people were baptized, and when
Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the
heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended
"the Spirit of the Lord is upon me” (Luke
upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice
4:18).
came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved;
with you I am well pleased’” (Luke 3:21-22)
mashiah
Hence, since you ‘share in Christ,’ it is right to call you Christs or anointed ones
.... You have become anointed ones by receiving the sign of the Holy Spirit ....
Christ bathed in the river Jordan, and having invested the waters with the
divine presence of his body, he emerged from them, and the Holy Spirit visited
him in substantial form, like come to rest on like. In the same way, when you
emerged from the pool of sacred waters you were anointed in a manner
corresponding with Christ’s anointing. That anointing is the Holy Spirit, of
whom the blessed Isaiah spoke when he prophesied in the person of the Lord:
‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me; he has sent me
to bring good tidings to the poor.’
Cyril of Jerusalem, Sermon 3.1.
Jesus’ Baptism
“[Jesus] was called Anointed (Christos) in order that we
might receive the unction of the same oil with which he
was anointed, and might thereby become ‘christs’ also,
being of the same nature as he and forming a single body
with him.” Pseudo-Macarius, Clement,
All-powerful God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
by water and the Holy Spirit
you freed your sons and daughters from sin and gave them
new life.
Send your Holy Spirit upon them
to be their Helper and Guide.
Give them the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the spirit of right judgment and courage,
the spirit of knowledge and reverence.
Fill them with the spirit of wonder and awe in your presence.
The Rites, 490.
“Through the sacrament of
confirmation those who
have been born anew in
baptism receive the
inexpressible Gift, the Holy
Spirit himself.”
"Christianus, alter
Christus." Columba
Marmion, Christ, The Life of
the Soul
The whole community of believers is ...
priestly. The faithful exercise their
baptismal priesthood through their
participation, each according to his own
vocation, in Christ's mission as priest,
prophet, and king. Through the sacraments
of Baptism and Confirmation the faithful
are 'consecrated to be ... a holy priesthood.'
(CCC 1546)
3
Paul Evdokimov describes the Kingdom of God in this way: “It is in the offering of the
heart to God that the Spirit manifests itself and introduces the human being into the
eternal circulation of love between the Father and the Son, and this is the ‘Kingdom.’”1 I
suggest that living in that eternal circulation of love within the Trinity is the adequate definition
of liturgy. Christian tradition has maintained that the soteriological economy begun in Abraham
and culminated in Christ and awaiting pleroma has the single aim of incorporating us into the life
of God. The single, overwhelming maxim of Christianity, given voice over and over again by
the patristic Church was: “God became human so that human beings might be made divine.
What Christ is by nature, we are to become by grace.” This does not imply any removal of
our human element; we don’t change from human beings into divine beings. But the whole point
of Christ assuming both human and divine natures was so that we may participate in the
circulation of trinitarian life. We become sons and daughters of God when the Holy Spirit
instills the divine attributes in us, and we participate in the circulation of love between the three
divine persons. "What in fact is a Christian? 'Another Christ,' all antiquity replies. And
who is Christ? The Man-God …."2
What I propose to do here is consider four New Testament stories about Jesus and, based
on the above paragraph, understand them as narratives about our liturgical identity also. They are
stories of the Father's action through the Holy Spirit in the life of his Son, yes, but my thesis is
exactly that we may (must!) see them as stories of our own liturgical identity, too, because the
sacraments exist in order to put the life of the God-Man in us. Therefore, none of these Gospel
narratives are only about the past, they are also about the Holy Spirit’s activity in us. It is a most
1 Evdokimov, “Saint Seraphim of Sarov,” The Ecumenical Review, 15 (Ap 1963), 273.
2 Columba Marmion, Christ, the Ideal of the Monk (St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co, 1926) 124.
awful tragedy to read Scripture only historically instead of also liturgically. Charles Williams
wrote that "all the events in the life of our Lord, as well as happening in Judea, happen in
the soul,”3 and Columba Marmion insisted that "The mysteries of Jesus have this
characteristic that they are ours as much as they are His …. To each of His mysteries, he
attaches a grace which is to help us to reproduce within ourselves His divine features in
order to make us like unto Him."4 What the Father accomplished by incarnation with his right
hand in Judea, he does again by sacrament with his left hand in the spiritual lives of the assembly
known as Church.
The four stories we will look at are the Annunciation, the Baptism of Jesus, the Last
Supper, and the Transfiguration, and in them we will see baptism, confirmation, eucharist,
and deification.
The Annunciation
Fr. Kallistos Ware warns us against separating the Son and the Spirit when considering
this intimate miracle.
Between the Father’s two hands, his Son and his Spirit, there exists a reciprocal
relationship, a bond of mutual service. There is often a tendency to express the
inter-relation between the two in a one-sided manner that obscures this reciprocity.
Christ, it is said, comes first; then, after his Ascension into heaven, he sends down
the Spirit at Pentecost. But in reality the mutual links are more complex and more
balanced. Christ sends the Spirit to us, but at the same time it is the Spirit that
sends Christ.
At the Annunciation the Holy Spirit descends upon the Virgin Mary, and she
conceives the Logos: according to the Creed, Jesus Christ was ‘incarnate from the
Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary’. Here it is the Spirit who is sending Christ into
the world.5
3 Charles Williams, Essential Writings in Spirituality and Theology, Charles Hefling, ed (Boston: Cowly
Publications, 1993) 13.
4 Columba Marmion, Christ in His Mysteries (St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co, 1931) 10, 233.
5 Fr. Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way (new York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1986) 123.
Recall the angel's words exactly: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power
of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will
be called Son of God.” (Luke 1:35) The word which is translated “overshadow” is episkiazei,
and is the very word used in the Septuagint to translate the Hebrew description of God’s cloud of
glory when it overshadowed the tent of meeting in the Sinai desert. (It is from epi (upon) and
skene (tent).) “Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled
the tabernacle. Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting because the cloud settled
upon it, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle” (Exodus 40:34). At the
Annunciation, the Spirit of the Lord overshadowed Mary, settling upon her, and the glory of the
Lord filled her womb. Thus the procreation of Jesus is “symbolically described as the descent
of Yahweh over the desert sanctuary.”6 As God was present to Israel when his Spirit
overshadowed the tent of meeting, the implication is that “this time the presence of God was ...
contained in a human person.”7 The same idea is presented in the Gospel of John, even
though it has no birth narrative, when it describes Jesus’ incarnation by saying “The Word
became flesh and pitched his tent among us.” However, this “overshadowing” is more than
passive dwelling. Wherever God is, God is active. So Raymond Brown writes,
“Come upon” and “overshadow” connote creativity. Mary is not barren [as in the
case of Elizabeth, whose story has just been told by Luke], and in [Mary’s] case the
child does not come into existence because God cooperates with the husband ….
Rather, Mary is a virgin who has not known man, and therefore the child is totally
God’s work - a new creation .... If the prophetic Spirit filled John the Baptist from
his mother’s womb, the Spirit that comes upon Mary is closer to the Spirit of God
that hovered over the waters before creation in Genesis 1:2. The earth was void and
without form when that Spirit appeared; just so Mary’s womb was a void until
through the Spirit God filled it with a child who was His Son.8
6 Samuel Terrien, The Elusive Presence (New York: Harper & Row, 1978) 416.
7 Ibid, 419-20.
8 Raymond Brown, The Birth of the Messiah (New York: Doubleday, 1977) 314.
The action of God upon Mary, then, was more like the action of God in Genesis than the action
of God on Sarah (mother of Isaac, who gave birth in the geriatrics ward), or Hannah (mother of
Samuel, who pledged to God a son she didn’t yet have), or Elizabeth (mother of John the Baptist,
whose tongued-tied husband nearly bungled the offer from Gabriel). Jesus is God’s own work; a
child of his own.
Baptism makes children of God, too. Pope Leo the Great said,
The principle of birth which Christ found in Mary’s womb has been embodied by
him in the water of baptism .... The power of the Most High and the overshadowing
of the Holy Ghost, which brought about the birth of the Redeemer in the Virgin
Mary, also make it possible for the water of baptism to bring about a rebirth in the
faithful.9
Christ is the firstborn of many brothers and sisters because Christ gracefully makes us what he is
naturally. The action whereby God conceives a baptized person is more like God's action in
Genesis than the action by which he conceived Isaac or Samuel or even John the Baptist, than
whom no one greater was born of woman (Matthew 11:11). The least in the kingdom of heaven
is greater than John because the person spiritually reborn in the font is not born from a daughter
of Eve, but from God’s own Spirit. The Holy Spirit overshadows, covers, and settles upon the
baptismal font, filling the Church with the glory of the Lord, and a new life begins in her womb.
We do not bring ourselves about; we do not cause our own existence; we are totally God’s work.
Every spiritual birth is a virgin birth. Olivier Clement quotes Gregory of Nyssa to this effect.
The soul corresponds to the Blessed Virgin. It recalls the mystery of the
incarnation. And the incarnation is spiritually extended to holy souls who are
thereby preparing for Christ's return. All the mysteries of the Gospel are not only
performed in the liturgy but take possession of us in the spiritual life. The Word is
continually being born in the stable of our heart … "What came about in bodily
form in Mary, [Gregory writes] takes place in a similar way in every soul that has
been made pure .… In this way the child Jesus is born in each one of us."10
9 Pope Leo the Great, Sermon 25.4.
10
Olivier Clement, The Roots of Christian Mysticism (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1996) 251.
St. Augustine called the baptismal font the uterus of the mother Church,11 and in his sermons to
the catechumens he enjoins them to remain patient and hopeful:
Look, mother Church is in labor, see, she is groaning in travail to give birth to you,
to bring you forth into the light of faith. Do not agitate her maternal womb with
your impatience, and thus constrict the passage to your delivery .... [The Lord] too
accepted this slow business of coming to birth in time ...
Love what you will be. What you will be, you see, is children of God, and sons by
adoption. This will be given you free, conferred on you for nothing, at his
pleasure.12
In the baptistery of the Lateran in Rome there is an inscription, perhaps composed by
Pope Leo the Great in the 5th century. One can hear the breath of the Father upon the waters in
these words.
Here is born in Spirit-soaked fertility
a brood destined for another City,
begotten by God’s blowing
and borne upon this torrent
by the Church their virgin mother ....
This spring is life that floods the world,
the wounds of Christ its awesome source.
Sinner sink beneath this sacred surf
that swallows age and spits up youth.
Sinner here scour sin away down to innocence ....
Sinner shudder not at sin’s kind and number,
for those born here are holy.13
Before anyone is dipped in the font the Church prays the Spirit to come upon the water to make
it vivacious and effervescent. This pneumatic jacuzzi is no plastic pool for wading in, it is the
storm center of the universe.14 I don’t know why we have to think of the breath of God only as
11 Henri de Lubac, The Motherhood of the Church (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982) 52.
12 St. Augustine, Sermon 216:7, 8 in The Works of Saint Augustine, Part III Sermons, Vol 6 (New York: New City
Press, 1993) 167-68
13 Fr. Aidan Kavanagh, The Shape of Baptism (New York: Pueblo Press, 1978) 49.
14 “When we are dealing with baptism we are discoursing about Christian initiation; when we are into initiation we
are face to face with conversion in Jesus Christ dead and rising; and when we are into conversion in Jesus Christ
a muffled, inaudible whisper. If the voice of the Lord thundering on the waters is capable of
splintering the cedars of Lebanon (Ps 29), then do not the waters of baptism crash upon us with
the force of a sacred surf?
The Apostle Paul was among the first to connect the cloud of Israel with the Spirit of
baptism. In 1 Corinthians 10 he writes, “I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and
sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud, and all passed through the seas, and all
were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the seas, and all ate the same spiritual food,
and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that
followed them, and the rock was Christ.” At every baptism, salvation history happens again.
In case someone missed the first party, the Church throws a personal Genesis for every
catechumen, a personal flood, a personal exodus, and the Spirit of God broods and heaves and
pants over the waters once more. The pillar of fire & cloud which led the Israelites through the
water, and overshadowed the sanctuary, is the Spirit who overshadowed Mary at the
annunciation and is present when the Church’s water breaks and from the baptismal font a new
Christian is delivered.
Jesus’ Baptism
It is a mistake to forget that Christ was not Jesus’ last name (the Christ family of
Nazareth: Joseph, Mary, Jesus). The Greek title Christus translates the Hebrew title mashiah
which means “anointed one.” That is not especially clear in the English term “Messiah,” so we
might keep in mind the prophet Samuel wandering around with that drippy, unctuous cornucopia
anointing kings of Israel, or remember Moses pouring the anointing oil on Aaron to ordain him a
priest. Tertullian did.
dead and rising we are at the storm center of the universe.” Fr. Aidan Kavanagh, Made, Not Born (South Bend:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1976) 2.
Having come out of the baptismal pool we are anointed with blessed oil according to
the ancient discipline in which it was customary to be anointed with oil spread on
the horn [of the temple altar] to receive the priesthood. It is with this oil that Aaron
was anointed by Moses; whence comes his name of the Anointed (christus) which
comes from chrisma, meaning anointing.15
To be anointed is to be consecrated to a task, or to be given a commission by God to fill. Aaron
is given his task by Moses, and the King of Israel is anointed to rule in Yahweh's stead, and
Isaiah even calls Cyrus, the King of Persia, “messiah” because the prophet believes that when the
Persian king released the Israelites from their Babylonian captivity he was acting on commission.
Jesus is Messiah because "the Spirit of the Lord is upon me” (Luke 4:18). Jesus is
Christus - the shortest creed in Christianity. To call Jesus Christ is complete triadology. “Now
when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was
praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form
like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am
well pleased’” (Luke 3:21-22) But John, at whose hands the Messiah received water baptism,
had already foretold that the Messiah would baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire. By going into
the water, Christ united the fire to it and now we share the same anointing by the same Holy
Spirit. That’s what gives Christians their name, as Cyril of Jerusalem reminded the
catechumens:
Hence, since you ‘share in Christ,’ it is right to call you Christs or anointed ones ....
You have become anointed ones by receiving the sign of the Holy Spirit .... Christ
bathed in the river Jordan, and having invested the waters with the divine presence
of his body, he emerged from them, and the Holy Spirit visited him in substantial
form, like come to rest on like. In the same way, when you emerged from the pool of
sacred waters you were anointed in a manner corresponding with Christ’s
anointing. That anointing is the Holy Spirit, of whom the blessed Isaiah spoke when
he prophesied in the person of the Lord: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because
he has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good tidings to the poor.’16
15 Tertullian, On Baptism, ch. 7..
16 Cyril of Jerusalem, Sermon 3.1.
Jesus quoted that oily passage from Isaiah in one of his first homilies. Luke tells us Jesus was
anointed by the Spirit after his baptism (ch 3); that he was full of the Holy Spirit when he
returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness (ch 4:1) where he resisted
the temptations of gluttony, wealth and reputation; and that he was filled with the power of the
Spirit when he returned to Galilee to begin preaching (ch 4:14) and came to Nazareth where he
proclaimed that he himself is the anointed one foretold by Isaiah to bring good news to the poor,
to proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. Jesus is the Anointed One of God, and those plunged
into his life become Anointed Ones, too. In the Church’s sacramental use of the word, to
become a Christian was not just to think approvingly about Christ’s teachings, it was to become
a christos yourself. "Christianus, alter Christus."17 To be a Christian meant to participate in
the anointing which Christ received. Pseudo-Macarius says, “[Jesus] was called Anointed
(Christos) in order that we might receive the unction of the same oil with which he was
anointed, and might thereby become ‘christs’ also, being of the same nature as he and
forming a single body with him.”18
Now the careful wording of the title of this essay comes clear. I did not say, “Living the
Christian life ...” but rather, “Living Christ’s life.” Being a Christian is a sacramental identity,
not an ideological identification. We are not called to mimic a paradigm, but to dwell in a person.
Fr. Alexander Schmemann said that faith is not our memory of Christ, it is Christ’s memory of
the Father realized in us.19 We are a christianos when we are anointed with the same anointing
as Jesus; when we are filled with the same Holy Spirit as was Jesus; when we possess as our own
17 Columba Marmion, Christ, The Life of the Soul (St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co., 1926) 42.
18 Pseudo-Macarius, Clement, op. cit., 90.
19 Fr. Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist (St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1988) p. 128.
the faith, hope & love which Jesus had in the Father; and when we receive as our own the same
commission which Jesus received.
Such an understanding could help with the confused sacrament of confirmation, the point
at which our baptism is perfected by the bestowal of the very spiritual gifts enumerated by the
prophet Isaiah:
All-powerful God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
by water and the Holy Spirit
you freed your sons and daughters from sin and gave them new life.
Send your Holy Spirit upon them
to be their Helper and Guide.
Give them the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the spirit of right judgment and courage,
the spirit of knowledge and reverence.
Fill them with the spirit of wonder and awe in your presence.20
Confirmation stands to baptism like life stands to birth, like marriage stands to wedding. This is
why the RCIA urges the connection in our minds (if not in our literal practice) of the three
sacraments of initiation. The rubrics say that in the anointing, the neophytes receive forgiveness,
adoption, and the character of Christ by which they are made members of the Church and
become sharers in the priesthood of Christ. “Through the sacrament of confirmation those
who have been born anew in baptism receive the inexpressible Gift, the Holy Spirit
himself.”
For what purpose does the christianos receive the gift of God’s own Spirit? For the very
same purpose for which Jesus received the Holy Spirit. First, the Spirit drove him into the
wilderness to face his ascetical discipline (Luke 4:1); then, filled with the Spirit, he began his
public ministry in Galilee (Luke 4:14). Commissioning, which anointing does, is the act of
granting certain powers, or the authority to carry out a particular task or duty. The Holy Spirit is
20 The Rites, 490.
our commissioner who grants us power and authority, first to fulfill our internal ascetical task of
extinguishing the passions, and second to carry on the public labor which Jesus began. There are
still poor who need to hear good news from our lips, captives who need to be released by our
service, oppressed who need to be set free. This is a prophetic and priestly duty, and Lumen
Gentium reminds all the people of God that they possess such a priesthood. They do not possess
it in order to mimic or dispense with the ministerial priesthood, but in order to exercise, by the
unfolding of baptismal grace, a life of faith, hope and charity - a life according to the Spirit
(Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) 1547).
The whole community of believers is ... priestly. The faithful exercise their
baptismal priesthood through their participation, each according to his own
vocation, in Christ's mission as priest, prophet, and king. Through the sacraments
of Baptism and Confirmation the faithful are 'consecrated to be ... a holy
priesthood.' (CCC 1546)
Portland Close
Transfiguration
In The Last Battle, Narnia ends as every creature goes through the Door of Judgment, it
was not destroyed; rather, it was made new. The whole concept of the New Creation involves the
belief that whatever estrangement there is between spirit and nature will be healed. We await the
day “when Nature and Spirit are fully harmonized—when Spirit rides Nature so perfectly
that the two together make rather a Centaur than a mounted knight,” as Lewis wrote in
Miracles.17 The new one is the deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looks
as if it means more.
Jewel the Unicorn is the first to understand. He declares, “I have come home at last!
This is my real country! . . . The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it
sometimes looked a little like this.”
Lewis presents asceticism as making us stronger, sturdier, more robust. “Behind all
asceticism,” he wrote in Miracles, “the thought should be, ‘Who will trust us with the true
wealth if we cannot be trusted even with the wealth that perishes?’ Who will trust me with
a spiritual body if I cannot control even an earthly body?’” Our present bodies, small and
perishable, are as ponies given to schoolboys, and we must learn to manage them “not that we
may some day be free of horses altogether but that some day we may ride bare-back,
confident and rejoicing, those greater mounts, those winged, shining and world-shaking
horses which perhaps even now expect us with impatience, pawing and snorting in the
King’s stables.”19
The ascetical discipline means training our desires for something more potent than
anything we are accustomed to—and better than anything we now like or even imagine. In his
famous sermon “The Weight of Glory,” Lewis said, “It would seem that our Lord finds our
desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with
drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who
wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the
offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”20
Further Up & Further In
It is also, and therefore, the discovery of reality—of what we might call the real reality.
In The Last Battle, Prince Tirian has been thrown into a stable to die at the hands of an enemy
within. But he is surprised to find himself standing in a green meadow with the High King Peter
and Queen Lucy. “Tirian looked and saw the queerest and most ridiculous thing you can
imagine. “Only a few yards away, clear to be seen in the sunlight, here stood up a rough wooden
door and, round it, the framework of a doorway: nothing else, no walls, no roof. He walked
round to the other side of the door. But it looked just the same from the other side: he was still in
the open air, on a summer morning. The door was simply standing up by itself as if it had grown
there like a tree.” Peter assures him that it is the door through which he had been thrown into the
stable, and invites him to look through it. He did, and could see the darkness of Lantern Waste
where he had fought his last battle.
“It seems, then,” said Tirian, smiling too, “that the Stable seen from within
and the Stable seen from without are two different places.”
“Yes,” said the High King Peter. “Its inside is bigger than its outside.”
“Yes,” said Queen Lucy, “In our world too, a stable once had something
inside it that was bigger than our whole world.”
What the space contains can be bigger than its container. So also, what time contains can
be bigger than history – it can contain eternity.
A little later, Lucy realizes that the garden they are in “is like the Stable. It is far
bigger inside than it was outside.” Of course, replies Mr. Tumnus, the Faun. “The
further up and the further in you go, the bigger will everything gets. The inside is
larger than the outside.” She then realizes that this transfigured creation “is still
Narnia, and more real and more beautiful than the Narnia down below, just as it
was more real and more beautiful than the Narnia outside the Stable door!”
We discover the Kingdom by going further in to find a pathway further up. Isaac the Syrian
said, “The ladder of the Kingdom is within you, hidden in your soul. Plunge deeply within
yourself, away from sin, and there you will find steps by which you will be able to
ascend.”23
It is the human mystery to celebrate the eternal in time. Our soul is a receptacle that can
be capacitated to contain the Eternal One. “Do you realize,” Gregory of Nyssa asked, “how
much your Creator has honored you above all creatures? . . . All the heavens fit into the
palm of God’s hand. And though He is so great that He can grasp all creation in His palm,
you can wholly embrace Him; He dwells within you, nor is He cramped as he pervades
your entire being.”25 Our inside is bigger than the universe, and a single one of our spiritual
moments is bigger than all the time that has ever washed over the inanimate matter in it.
Lewis talks about “completed people” and in The Great Divorce says that “One gets
glimpses, even in our country, of that which is ageless—heavy thought in the face of an
infant, and frolic childhood in that of a very old man. Here it was all like that.”31 This is
the face of an ascetic who has mastered time. The ascetical saint practices the art of iconography
on himself. The icon, in the words of a modern Orthodox writer, “is the Christ, the God who
became a face.” Additionally, the icon is the face of all the friends of God who are our friends,
too, and wish to include us in the circle of saints.
The Kingdom of God is anticipated, either starting from the beauty of the world,
though this is an ambiguous beauty, or starting from certain faces, certain old faces,
fashioned by a long life, faces which have not been plunged into resentment or
bitterness or the fear of death, faces of those who do not flinch as they approach
death, faces that know precisely where they are, and have found again the mind of a
child.32
Lewis thought this transfiguration made the person complete, and that already these
completed people were dotted here and there, all over the earth. “Every now and then one
meets them.” In Mere Christianity, Lewis offered an intriguing description of these ascetics.
“Their very voices and faces are different from ours; stronger, quieter, happier, more
radiant. They begin where most of us leave off.” The ascetic who is being conformed to
holiness is recognizable, but Lewis thought you must know what to look for, because they will
not be like your general idea of religious people.
They do not draw attention to themselves. You tend to think that you are being kind
to them when they are really being kind to you. They love you more than other men do but
they need you less. They will usually seem to have a lot of time: you will wonder where it
comes from. In that way, to become holy is rather like joining a secret society. To put it at
the very lowest, it must be great fun.34
The ascetic has patience, which Evdokimov considers a form of “interiorized
monasticism,” because it is the opposite of despondency, which so often results from a desire for
instant gratification. The ascetic trusts time because he does not live in “merely ordinary
time, where death has the last word and where time erodes . . . but [in] time mingled with
eternity, as it is offered to us by the Resurrection.”33
"Oh, children," said the Lion, "I feel my strength coming back to me. Oh, children,
catch me if you can!" … A mad chase began. Round and round the hill-top he led
them, now hopelessly out of their reach, now letting them almost catch his tail, now
diving between them, now tossing them in the air with his huge and beautifully
velveted paws and catching them again, and now stopping unexpectedly so that all
three of them rolled over together in a happy laughing heap of fur and arms and
legs. It was such a romp as no one has ever had except in Narnia; and whether it
was more like playing with a thunderstorm or playing with a kitten Lucy could ever
make up her mind. And the funny thing was that when all three finally lay together
panting in the sun the girls no longer felt in the least tired or hungry or thirsty.”
All appetites had been satisfied.