Made Whole

… [A]n inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.  In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials … 1 Peter 1:4-6

We might think of it this way, just for an exercise, that the unity of the cosmos was shattered at the Fall.  What we need, as humans – as the keepers of creation we were meant to be, is a restoration of that perfect, primordial communion.  Salvation means that we become whole.  The break is healed. 

I am beginning, slowly, to understand why there is so much chicanery and silliness associated with Christianity and enlightenment in general.  It’s very difficult to talk about the relationship between selflessness and tribulation without sounding as though the problems of life are illusions or that God is some kind of sadist or something. 

We are going to grieve in this world, and our grief and our pain are real.  God does not waste our suffering if we are willing to hand it over to Him.  We do not ever have to “go through all this for nothing”.  He will order the broken and jumbled, seemingly random chunks and pieces of life into a stairway that we might ascend. 

The inheritance that is being kept for us is exactly that wholeness or oneness and the barrier to heaven is the self to which we are so attached.  My fear is that an end to my “self” is the same as non-being.  It isn’t.  The one who enters heaven has detached only from the illusory persona, the mask of thoughts and emotions and attitudes that is the old carnal mind.  We mistake the mask we wear and the character we have come to create and inhabit for our being. 

Shatter my illusions, O Lord, that I might be unbroken.

Who Do You Think You're Fooling

Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to those that by nature are not gods. -- Galatians 4:8

Those who reject God are not escaping some servitude or slavery.  They are not free to think and do as they please.  The great deception of the world is that I can, as “Invictus” says, be The master of my fate/ The captain of my soul.  We are never without “gods”.  If we lack knowledge of the true God, we are drawn to follow the false ones, as Matthew Henry says, adding then:   Those who forsook the God who made the world, rather than be without gods, worshipped such as they themselves made. 

Paul expresses the same idea in Romans 1:25 in speaking of those who … exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator….  And, again, in 2 Thessalonians 2:11, we learn those who chose to remain in ignorance and deceive themselves will be sent “a strong delusion” by the Lord Himself that they may be locked and held captive by that which is false.  Only in Christ do we have peace with God and liberty.   

For this reason, among others, we do well to remember that our struggle in life is a spiritual one.  The creatures of flesh and blood that would oppose us, do us harm, and otherwise oppress us are themselves deluded to a greater or lesser extent.  Do not fear them.  At the end of Fargo, Marge chides her prisoner for his bloody crime spree saying it was for a few dollars.  You can look at the men who have held the title of “leader of the free world” over the last hundred years, and, aside from a couple of exceptions, they are mostly small, shallow men, perhaps clever, some decent enough, but not anyone you would want your child to emulate.  Most sought power and adulation to fill the emptiness in their souls, thinking that by ruling over others, they might find freedom.  It never happens.  They, too, sell their souls for false, vain promises and illusions.  Do not envy them.  The bill is due, and Mephistopheles knocks.

All in All

For He has put everything under His feet. But when He says “everything” is put under Him, it is obvious that He who puts everything under Him is the exception. And when everything is subject to Him, then the Son Himself will also be subject to Him who subjected everything to Him, so that God may be all in all. – 1 Corinthians 15:27-28

That’s a lot of third person singular pronouns to figure out, but look at the very last phrase that God may be all in all. Let’s go back a few chapters in this same book: [Y]et for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and we for Him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and we through Him (1 Corinthians 8:6). All things are from God and all of it comes through Christ Jesus. There’s no pantheism in this statement since God is not the universe, rather the universe is that secondary reality that came from Him. We are included in that, not as an accident or afterthought but as co-creators. He is the Vine; we are the branches. Though the life comes through the Vine, fruit is borne only on the branch. We are of Him, as is everything from archangels to atomic particles. We begin to realize that everything is from the One, of the One and through the One.

I pray not only for these, but also for those who believe in Me through their message. May they all be one, just as You, Father, are in Me and I am in You. May they also be one in Us, so that the world may believe You have sent Me (John 17:20-21).

An illusion is something that appears real and is not, yet the illusion must be created from something that is real. An illusionist using smoke and mirrors fools us. We do not see the mirrors only the illusion they create; the mirrors are real. We see the multiplicity of physical existence; the unity of the Spirit is real.

As we often say, though, we don’t like to even use the word illusion since it connotes our material existence being something we might safely ignore or manipulate. This is not the case, so we say rather that the universe is derived, and material existence is a secondary reality, a function of the primary reality. Anaxagoras said, “Appearances are a glimpse of what is hidden.” Again the material world differs from a magician’s effort in that there is no intent to deceive us. We can know something about the primary reality by studying the secondary. There are correlations between the surface and the depths. Yet we cannot know it fully apart from revelation. God has been gracious to reveal Himself to us at various times and in various ways – most completely in the Incarnation of the Son (Hebrews 1:1-2).

We can know that we have a purpose, that history has a direction, a point to which it sprirals. We can know that we are at peace with God. We can know that we are one with the Creator of all that exists. We can know death is not an end but a transition. There are things we have to resist, and things we have to embrace. We should not resist in a way that further mires us in the quicksand of delusion; we should not embrace in a way that is clinging and anchors us in the material.