We all fear and avoid intimacy, it seems. It is too powerful
and demands that we also "have faces," that is, self-confidence,
identity, dignity, and a certain courage to accept our own unique face. Once
we accept and love ourselves, we must be willing to share this daring
intimacy with another. The brilliant title of C. S. Lewis' book, Till We Have
Faces, suggests how central this is; the archetypal myth of Cupid
and Psyche reveals the human and divine longing for face-to-face intimacy.
At first the individual is not ready for presence. We settle
for tribal customs, laws, and occupations as our identity. Most individuals
cannot contain or sustain trust and love by themselves or apart. So God
starts by giving the whole group a sense of dignity and identity. Yahweh creates
"a chosen people": "You will be my people and I will be your
God," God says to Israel (Jeremiah 32:38). Only the Whole can carry the weight of glory and
the burden of sin, never the part. Western individualism is a large part of
the ineffectiveness of most contemporary Christianity.
It seems the experiences of specialness and of sinfulness are
both too heavy to be carried by an individual. One will disbelieve them or
abuse them, either through self-hatred or by ego-inflation and conceit. It is
almost impossible for a person to stand before the face of God in a perfect
balance between extreme humility and perfect dignity. So God begins with a
people "consecrated as God's very own" (Deuteronomy 14:2). The
group holds the Mystery which the individual cannot carry. This eventually
becomes the very meaning of "church" or the Body of Christ.
Membership in the sacred group should and can become the gateway to personal encounter and inner experience, though too
often it is a substitute for it. Please trust me on this.
We could say, "In the beginning was the
relationship" or the original blueprint for everything else that exists.
John's word for that was Logos (John 1:1). In
other words, the first blueprint for reality was relationality. It is all of
one piece. How we relate to God reveals how we eventually relate to just
about everything else. And how we relate to the world of "the ten
thousand things" is how we are actively relating to God, whether we know
it or not (1 John 4:20). How we do
anything is how we do everything!
Thus, we must read the whole Bible as a school of
relationship. The word trinity, by the way, is
never found in the Bible. In time, it became our way to explain how God
gradually came to be seen as a communion of persons, a perfect giving and a
perfect receiving, an inter-face, a mutual indwelling, or as Charles Williams
beautifully called it, "co-inherence." [1]The
Bible is slowly making humanity capable of living inside of such lovely co-inherence.
As some mystics daringly put it, all creation is in the end drawn and
seduced into the Great Co-inherence, and we are in effect "the Fourth
Something" inside the Blessed Trinity. "I shall return to take you
with me, so that where I am you also may be too," Jesus clearly says
(John 14:3). Salvation is giving us a face capable of receiving the dignity
of the divine embrace, and then daring to think that we could love God
back--and that God would enjoy this, or even care about it. I hope the top of
your head just blew open!
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[1] “Co-inherence”
is found in Bruce Marshall’s Trinity and Truth and Robert Barron The
Priority of Christ.
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