More thoughts on becoming Human

This is a follow up to my other two stories on the Christ person. I’m sure there will be more.

The Person as Story

A person is a complex integration of habits, roles, characters, personas. A person is a self-aware human body interacting with other human bodies and with things of the earth and the universe to form a world of time and space. A person is a being that projects its own experience of space and time into the world by naming, cataloguing, analyzing, and relating things that become things when named. A person is a spatial-temporal body who in relating to other temporal-spatial bodies makes and tells stories. The person is her or his story, a dynamic integration of episodes, recollections, interpretations, narrations. The person is a story of stories: A compilation of observations, desires, identifications, similarities, reflections, and analogies. I am my story. You are your story. Toni Morrison is her story and all the stories she told. Together we make our story. My story and your story would not be without our story.

The Jesus Person I want to be

Let me try a description of the Jesus person that I want to be. This is a person that is always becoming, always learning, always passing beyond old beliefs by incorporating new ones. This is a person who is an insatiable openness to infinity in experience, a dynamic presence in the here and now reaching back to the origins and finality of all, a singularity sucking in energy to distribute throughout the universe where there is none. This is a person who is embodied, sexual, immersed in matter, fascinated with the beauty of the world including men and women, who enjoys touching, hugging, and massaging and being touched and hugged and massaged — but never to exploit or use another for self aggrandizement.

This is the person of integrity with balance achieved by holding all the poles of extremity in tension. This is a person who knows that power arises from and depends on everyone else’s power and so acts for the day and the place in which power is shared equally. This is a person who realizes that the Future which is the objective of human transcendence, resides in the little ones, the children, the disinherited, the struggling, the humble, those yet to become — not in mighty, forceful rulers. This is a person who shares in the suffering of people, recognizing that solidarity arises from shared suffering. This is a person who claims not to be a god or superhero. He does not claim to know everything or be master or a boss of servants or have extraordinary powers or even be good — much less the paragon of goodness. It is in this way that he points beyond himself and his situation to greater possibilities, to the transcendence that exists in all of us.

Christ and Caesar

In the early written memories of Jesus. it is clear to whom Jesus is in contrast. Jesus is the antithesis of Caesar according to these early followers. The reign to which he is commited is not that of Rome which is held together by force and violence. Jesus eschews all violence and is willing to suffer it to unite with others who suffer under the patronage of the Empire. He recognizes and suffers the Empire as a fact, a condition of his very existence and who he is as a resister of the violence that holds people down and the Empire together. But he points beyond to a time and space without violence, where people voluntarily gather in their homes and cities to speak with one another, to share food and other necessities of life with each other, and to act together as equals, beyond race, tradition, religion, wealth, and station to expand that space to include all the children of whom he calls “Abba,” Father. He hopes that this new reign of peace and justice can begin with him and his companions. It is clear to me that Jesus was not promoting another monarch. He was not setting up another class of holy men to run the world. Nor was he asking people to be patient and wait for some savior to come or some life after death (though many of his later followers, discouraged with the slow pace of progress, imaged him that way). Jesus asking his companions to begin now with who they were, where they were, and what they had, to organize themselves into places of equality, freedom, justice, love, and peace.

Jesus After Christianity

We discussed the Jesus before Christianity — before the communities who gathered around him, who proclaimed him, who developed their own memory of him and wrote him into their story. Yet we admitted that the only way to approach this Jesus was to listen to and read these stories entering into the idiom and patterns of speech and imagination of these early communities. And of others who came after them, reflecting on these stories, using their imagination and the worldview and language they inherited, developed their accounts (just as Ignatius had urged his Jesuits to do in order to journey with Jesus).

These communities interpreted the accounts according to the philosophies or systems of thinking they used to search and find meaning in their world. Early on as poor Jews they used the image of the Christ, the anointed one who is to come, to free the oppressed to describe him. Later on, in the spread of the Christ description into the Roman Empire, they used the great Greek and Latin philosophic teachings and eventually settled on a set of doctrines to create an orthodox theology to unify the communities into a Universal Church of Rome and Constantinople and the far-flung reaches of the Empire. So Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christianity continues the memory of Jesus into many nations often adapting their accounts to conform to the imagination and experience of other places and times.

Now into this world transitioning from modernity and, I would argue, the break up and decline of Christianity, what does it mean to be sojourning with Jesus. New science, beyond classical Newtonian physics and even Darwinian biology has impelled us to relinquish the metaphysics of Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas and Hegel. Our faith in the human drive to infinity also impels us to subject not only our assumptions but even our theories to continued inquiry. Even so, contemporary philosophers (including Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Whitehead, Dewey, Rorty) identify a constant principle which is in the inquiry itself rather than the results of that inquiry.

In other words, human existence as perpetual questing into the universe, gaining truths on the way to infinity, is the principle beyond and behind all principles. The transcending dimension of human existence is the wonder that begins philosophy, the inquiry that starts science, the fascination that starts art, the awe that starts religion. In the experience of the world and its objects, we experience ourselves in wonder, inquiry, fascination, and awe. The internal background experience of ourselves connected with other selves as together we face our world is our experience of self-transcendence reaching out to infinity.

The Christ person is not a fixed supernatural entity out there but an expanding transpersonal process which begins before birth and continues after death, a process of becoming what Paul called the Anointed. Jesus the man who was born and died in history took on the Christ persona which is always becoming. Those who continue to engage with that person and magnify the accounts of that person continue the neverending Christification process of humanity and the world — the next and final coming of Christ. I know that Francis of Assisi, John Wesley, Helen Keller, Dorothy Day, Harriet Tubman were exemplars of the Jesus spirit. Stop that process by

But I speak in my own tradition and language game. And to be honest, I often avoid Jesus and Christ talk. I often have a hard time being around Christians who do not walk the Jesus walk but use the language, the rituals, the books of Christianity. They often speak of God or angels as having given them a special, sometimes secret, revelation. They declare themselves prophets and special emissaries of divine truth confusing their beliefs with the truth. They are the professional holy men, the Pharisees in the temple who demean the poor seeking justice in the back pew. Some offer charity, for the recognition, without changing the structure of justice. They make laws that exclude others not like them. They think they are chosen by God to fix all things according to their divine plan. In the name of Christ they practice torture and cruelty towards those whom they deem are not on their side.

Christ and Art

Literature is full of the Jesus character. Huck Finn is one that Mark Twain portrays. Sydney Carten is Dicken’s Jesus figure. The Brothers Karamazov are three dimensions of the Christ according to Dostoyevsky. Then there’s Shaw’s Joan of Arc, the “first protestant,” and Guido the Jew in Mussilini’s Italy in A Beautiful Life. Don’t forget the Lion in CS Lewis’s Narnia.

I find the Christ person in the apostatizing Jesuit priest in Endo’s (and Scorsese’s) Silence. And Graham Greene’s Mexican whisky priest in the Power and the Glory. And I cannot forget the lonely pastor in the film First Reformed.

Star Trek Captain Picard and his staff are Christ figures always reaching out to others. They mix in with the outcasts and left behinds to promote their growth of power from within. They observe the prime directive to not do for others what they can do for themselves, thus not interfering with the progression of others but assisting in removing the obstacles to that progression. They engage to explore the universe by going to where no one has gone before. And so are millions of others of us who take on the mission of the enterprise.

And, recently deceased, Toni Morrison, who told the story of black women slaves, is telling and being the story of the Jesus who became the Christ. That story is part of, as well as contends with, the American story — a continuing story of masters and slaves seeking their freedom. Toni Morrison lives.

How can we recognize the Christ story in culture, art, and politics?

How do we recognize the transcending consciousness in humanity? Unless we are so stilted by narcissism or, worse, by socio pathology, where we cannot feel or identify with others or believe that others are simply objects to be used for our personal pleasure, we know in our moral consciousness, the awareness we experience in our behavior with others, in what direction our inner compass is pointed. We encounter it in our own transcending consciousness in community with others.

Without judging a person as categorically evil, we can also recognize the sociopathic and narcissistic traits in characters who, willfully or not, speak and act them out. We see those traits especially in those with whom we are forced to deal: their grandiose sense of self, their lack of empathy, their lack of remorse, their manipulative conning, their superficial charm, their shameless lying, their divisiveness into sides, their disdain for losers. We see them in contrast to stories of human compassion, integrity, and faith that surpasses ego. We can learn from the narcissist and sociopath in everyday life, at work, and certainly in politics. Such a man we say has no soul.

I know such a man and pity him greatly. I see him not as the cause, but as the epitome of our present malaise. I grieve for all who follow him whether by trick or by force. But not enough to pity and grieve, we resist and we restore by taking the time and building the place where people form inclusive open and democratic community where all are respected as equals with the power and support to live long and prosper.

This brings me back to my original story: the story of the current often self-afflicted obstacles in our journey to the Beloved Community: prioritizing private wealth or economy over public happiness; denying the anti-democratic history of cultural, racial, or national supremacy in history; forgetting our collective soul in our worship of individual gain; neglecting the spiritual transcending holistic dimension of the mind; and refusing to take responsibility to tell and continue the story of our universal and neverending quest for the infinite.