Written by Gord Alton, Apr 13, 2020 Due to COVID-19, the celebration of Good Friday and Easter has taken on new meaning for me. We, as a world human community, have been and are experiencing profound suffering, a trauma that we are, in many ways, powerless to stop. All we can do is witness and hold this suffering...just as many people witnessed the innocent suffering of Jesus, the Christ, on the cross two thousand years ago. This ongoing COVID-19 tragedy is our modern day Good Friday experience of the suffering of Christ, except the spirit of Christ is not embodied in the historical person of Jesus, but in the universal body of humanity. In other words, the spirit of Christ is embodied within the body of humanity. If what I am saying is true, then what does the resurrection of Christ look like when seen through this lens? This is the question I plan to explore in this blog. The Person and Way of Christ Being a Christian pastor for twenty-five plus years, I know how strange this idea is of understanding the body of Christ as the world body of humanity. I certainly was not taught this theology when I attended seminary in the early 1990’s. Then, the emphasis was that the spirit of Christ resided within one historical person, namely Jesus of Nazareth, believing that Jesus was the Christ, and that we, as Christians, were to believe that Jesus was the Son of God and follow in the ways of Jesus Christ. As a result, Good Friday and Easter were about the suffering and death of this Christ on the cross, and Easter was about the resurrection of Christ, that not even death could contain the person of Christ. This is the dominant understanding of Christ within most churches today, that the spirit of Christ dwelt within the historical person of Jesus, and we, as Christians, are to follow Jesus as a model of how to live our lives. The Archetype of Christ I soon became dissatisfied with this understanding of Christ, partly due to my spiritual direction training (1996-1998), partly due to relating to people outside the church who embodied many aspects of the spirit of Christ, partly due to studying the Bible and discovering that there are many New Testament scriptures that talk about Christ in other ways. I began to see Christ as the spirit of Christ that dwelled with Jesus but also could dwell within any human being, including myself. I began to see Christ is an archetype, as Carl Jung, a prominent Swiss psychologist, understood it, “a collectively inherited unconscious idea, pattern of thought, image, etc., universally present in individual psyches” (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/archetype). Below is the icon of Jesus which shows both his humanity in the human portrayal of Jesus and his divinity through the Christ archtype evident by the sacred heart and the halo around his head. This way of understanding Christ opened up a whole new Christian spirituality for me where the focus shifted from mental beliefs and ethics about God, Christ, and Spirit to that of relationship with the archetypes of God, Christ, and Spirit found within the human soul. The only way to truly understand these relationships is by helping people focus on their experience of their relationships with God, Christ, and Spirit. There are many texts that teach this way of understanding Christ, especially if we look at these texts through a relationship framework instead of a belief framework.
As you can imagine, this way of viewing Christ changed how I preached the incarnation of Christ at Christmas time. No longer was I just teaching about the birth of Christ in Jesus, but I was also helping my church people explore how the spirit or archetype of Christ could be birthed in them, how the spirit of God can hover over the womb of our human soul in the same way as God’s spirit hovered over the womb of Mary leading to the incarnation of Christ. For me, Christmas involved celebrating both the birth of Christ within the baby Jesus but also within ourselves, as human beings. A similar shift happened in how I approached Good Friday and Easter. No longer was the Good Friday service just revisiting the suffering and death of Jesus on the cross, but now the focus was on helping my people join Jesus in his suffering experience, so that we, as humans, learn to bear the sufferings and sins of humanity and our world, just as Jesus did. In other words, Good Friday was all about embodying the suffering Christ, both within the historical Jesus, but also within ourselves as followers of Jesus. The same shift happened at Easter time. In celebrating Easter, not only did we celebrate the risen Christ within Jesus, we also celebrated the risen Christ within ourselves, that even though we will someday die, due to the risen Christ living within us, our human soul would not die but live on eternally. The Field of Christ In recent years, I have begun to see and experience another dimension of Christ, one that goes beyond the Christ archetype found within the individual souls of people. I became aware of this dynamic after many years of being part of a Diamond Approach school in Toronto, a spiritual work school that I have participated in for the past 14 years. For example, when I did spiritual direction with people, I became subtly aware of a broader sense of soul, a spiritual field one could say, that formed between my directee and myself. This field included my directee’s soul and my soul, each which contained our historical conditionings and psychic structures from our respective pasts, but I found that there was a common experience arising between us in response to what the directee was sharing. When my directee shared some painful experience, I notice compassion arising in the spiritual field that we shared. Sometimes, a common anger would arise due to the wrong or evil that had been done to my directee. As a Christian, this experience of the common field brought new meaning to Jesus’ teaching, “when two or three are gathered in my name <that is, when people become aware of their experience and look for Christ within that experience>, I, <Christ> am with you” (Matt 18: 20). I came to realize that Christ was not just an archetype within the human soul, but a dynamic within the spiritual field that transcends the individual soul. In other words, the dynamics of Christ can be found within the spiritual fields or souls of couples, families, organizations, faith communities, etc. Where two or more people are gathered, and become present to the experience of their spiritual field that arises amongst them, they will notice the dynamics of Christ and all the fruits of God’s spirit arising in their midst. How many of you have attended a funeral, and upon entering the chapel, you sense a heaviness and grief in the space? Or upon arriving for a wedding, you sense a lightness and joy as you enter the sanctuary? As I explore these experiences, I have come to realize that these dynamics of heaviness and grief or lightness and joy have their roots in the spiritual field created by the people gathered, which I have just joined. This way of viewing these dynamics may seem strange to you, but I invite you to explore the different ways that Apostle Paul talks about the Body of Christ in the New Testament. It is actually quite startling for Paul is describing the body of Christ as a spiritual field. Let me give you a taste of his teachings:
The Web of Christ Now, I am finally getting to the goal of this blog, that there is another dimension of Christ that we need to embrace, namely the Universal Christ that Richard Rohr, prominent Catholic teacher and mystic, describes in his recent book, “The Universal Christ” (2019). Can we broaden the above concept of “field of Christ” to include the whole body of humanity? Science has taught us that life is all interconnected biologically through what is often called the “web of life.” Could something similar be true at the spiritual level, that all humanity is spiritually connected through what could be called the “web of Christ.” (For those who don't identify as Christian, please don’t get hung up with the word “Christ”; this is what Christians would call this spiritual dynamic. For Jews, they would probably use the term “Yahweh” or “Lord”, for Muslims, “Allah”, for Buddhist, “Buddha”, and so on.) Many Christians consider the gospel of John their favorite gospel. The gospel of John begins very differently than the other three gospels by focusing on Jesus’ relationship to the Word that God created first before physically creating our world. John writes that “all things came into being through the Word, and without the Word not one thing came into being. What has come into being in the Word was life, and the life was the light of all people” (John 1: 3-4). This Word was the source of all life and, John claims, this Word became flesh in the human Jesus who became a light to a world of darkness. And all who received Jesus and believed in his name, that is, form a relationship with the Word within him, he gave power to become the children of God (John 1: 10-12). Many Christian theologians see this “Word” as the pre-existent Christ, the universal Christ, who became incarnated in the flesh of the human Jesus. But if we take John seriously, this Word, the Christ dynamic, became not only incarnated in the historical Jesus but in all things created, including all humanity. I have come to understand that this is what it means for humans to be made in the image of God, that all people have this Christ dynamic within them, that all people are connected to God, the Ground of all Being, as prominent theologian Paul Tillich named it. Humans are all connected to the Web of Christ and the Ground of Being. When we see humanity in our world in this way, as part of a spiritual field, we see that humans are all connected to one another. While there may be boundaries based on national identities, racial identities, economic identities, religious identities, and individual identities (based on our biological bodies) at the physical or surface level, when we look deeper into our experience, we see that we are truly connected emotionally, spiritually, all part of the oneness of God. When one part of the universal body of Christ suffers, we also suffer, and if we don’t experience this suffer, we need to realize that there is something wrong. Some form of structural sin is blocking the flow of God’s spirit within the body of Christ. When one part of the body of Christ is honoured, the rest of the Body of Christ rejoices, and if this mutual rejoicing is not happening, we need to investigate why. Some form of structural sin within our national, communal or individual spiritual field or soul is blocking the flow of the spirit of joy and goodness. The Suffering of the Universal Christ During our world's COVID-19 pandemic, I have been struck by two things, one which ties into the experience of Good Friday, the other which gives hope to the coming of Easter. First, I have been deeply troubled by what the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed about our world, and hopefully many of you are deeply troubled too. We are noticing all the ways that our economic frameworks don’t support well the flow of God’s spirit through the web of Christ. We are observing how many people don’t have access to the health care they need. We are seeing the major gaps between the rich and the poor, those who have health care and those who don’t, those who are isolated and those who are not, those who have secure jobs and those who don’t, those who are vulnerable and those who are not. We are witnessing all the ways that structural sin is blocking the flow of God’s spirit from the Ground of Being throughout the web of Christ. All these structural sins existed long before the pandemic, but they were hidden from our awareness by band-aid fixes or denial. Now, thanks to the pandemic, these structural sins are exposed as open wounds for all of us to see. One could say that we are experiencing the suffering of the universal Christ in ways we have never felt before. We are experiencing the pain from the network of Christ within our world. And like Jesus on the cross, these suffering people are suffering for the same reason Jesus suffered. Jesus suffered and died, not because he was a bad person, but because of the structural sin within the political establishment, the religious institutions, many individual people, even by his own friends and followers who denied or betrayed him in the end. This is true for most who are suffering now in the world due to this pandemic. They are victims of structural sin embedded within our economic frameworks, government institutions, health care systems, national and racial identities, religious communities, even within our families and friends. Those, like myself, who benefit from our current world order and structure are all guilty for some of the sufferings these people are experiencing due to the pandemic. We need to see and experience this suffering within the network of Christ. It is important we experience their suffering for we are part of one humanity, and if we don’t, it is evident that we are not connected to the Web of Christ or to the Ground of Being that gives us all life. This suffering is the suffering inherent to the experience of Good Friday which should really be called “Bad Friday” for it was a very bad day in history then, as this pandemic is bad now. The Resurrection of the Universal Christ However, I have seen something else during this time of pandemic. I have seen many signs of the spirit of God flowing through the universal web of Christ within our world humanity. Health care workers decide to keep caring for those who have COVID-19 despite the risk to their health and the health of their loved ones. Some retired health care workers are willing to return to work to help our government care for the many health care needs. Provincial governments like Alberta are sharing medical supplies with other provinces like Quebec who are badly in need of these supplies. Many individuals are reaching out with compassion to those in need through making masks for those who need protection or delivering groceries or making phone calls to those who are isolated. We are seeing holy anger arise as people raise questions about the care happening in some of our nursing homes leading to investigations to discover the truth, so changes can be made. We are starting to see the sharing of medical supplies even between nations. And I could go on. I have been impressed about how many governments have seen their role as addressing the many issues behind the suffering coming through the network of the Universal Christ. I am very thankful for all the ways people, communities, organizations, and nations are responding with compassion, kindness, courage, anger demanding truth and justice, and resilience during this difficult time, all signs of God’s spirit flowing upward from the Ground of Being into the Web of Christ that connects all of humanity together. For me, these have been signs of Easter coming, signs of the resurrected universal Christ breaking into our world reality.
Within the Christian tradition, we have a teaching about the second coming of Christ, a time in in the future when Christ will come again and restore the Reign of God on earth. For me, this second coming of Christ refers to the rising of the universal Christ within humanity on earth, a time when a new earth and new heaven will emerge, a time when God’s home will be among all mortals who realize that Christ dwells within them, a time when God’s spirit will comfort every tear from their eyes for death will no longer have power over us, mourning and crying and pain will no longer control us, for the old has passed away and the new has come (Rev. 21: 1-4). I see this pandemic helping us move toward this realization of Easter within our whole world. Questions to ponder:
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