God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, and Church III

It is worth the while to remember that the metaphors used in the Fertile Crescent pointing to the supreme reality that sustains, binds and significates human existence are those of human relationship. “Abba” the father, benevolent and steadfast in its surety, symbolizes the reliability and trustworthiness of it all. The awe and wonder, the mystery that is its core is best understood as that of the child, particularly the son as the progeny of genetic and cultural transmission, the cup brimming with tradition and gratitude, the Christ unflinching in its fidelity and affirmation of the parenthood of the real and authentic.

This sense that life is given as a gift has a universal appeal and religious traditions that feel the truth of its vision and mission would claim the catholicity of its faith and formation. This forceful assertiveness of belief and conviction is fueled and powered by the ‘holy spirit;’ the attendant organization and structure of the adherents and the faithful is the formation process for which the word ‘church,’ or the household of the real, has been found appropriate.

We mention the Aegean’s propensity to dichotomize and the sarx (body) and pneuma (spirit) division has been around so long that we have considered life to be two separate identities, which makes schizophrenics of us all!

In our time, quantum Physics, at the subatomic level, matter exhibits both wave-like and particle-like qualities, affirming the validity of the above dichotomy. The mistake in the last two millennia has been, however, lifting the pneuma to heights of refinements that denigrates the sarx as base, animalistic, and unworthy of human aesthetics to be condemned to the dungeons of the unconscious.

The numinous pneuma gave birth to the ghosts of our taotaomona stories. The duality of our persona has been enshrined.

A more ancient metaphor of the spirit is the Ruah, the desert wind of the Nile, along the twin rivers of Mesopotamia, and the dunes of the Arabian peninsula. The word has since been popularized by western Pacific viticulture as a brand of a distilled fruit of the vine, bit its use in the Book of Genesis refers to the wild, unpredictable, and violent sand storms that wipes out vestiges of tradition and renders every morning as spanking new, fresh and unadulterated.

The genders that usually accompany metaphors of the Christian Triune God is unmistakably masculine on the father, a male child on the son (though progressive theology has since recognized the Chinese saying that “women holds half of the sky”), and the volatile winds of the spirit attributed to the feminine, first in a pejorative fashion as in the lunacy of the moon, but now as Mary, Mother of God, the female attribute in the wholeness of the Trinity.

Think vagina monologue, however, rather than Virgin Mary. The Holy Spirit is earthy and saucy, often referred to as the Left Hand of God (really off left field), as compared to the sedate and sedentary Son that “sitteth on the right hand of the Father.”

So we come to the fullness of text to mirror the totality of the Real in its universal dimensions. Human commonality across cultural diversity affirms that what is true in one clime and time is true on another, what applies to ‘me’ is equally pertinent and relevant to everyone else.

So the ancient Holy Ghost of the High Mass is no glorified and sanctified scary Gaspar of our childhood imaginings. It is that part of our existence where wildness is affirmatively resident and freedom is its abiding style.

Sages of the ages have affirmed the value of tradition in connecting us to the wisdom of previous generations, but in the desert, where the reliance on the constancy of the unreachable firmaments developed, the experience in the here-and-now is the wildness of the winds over the shifting sands of the dunes. The morning after requires that we freely begin again. Yet, in the ruah, we are subject to the force of raging air currents but are also tranquil in the dead calm of the eye of the storm.

Lucidity on the free quality of every moment of life enjoins us to see that the shackles that bind us are often of our own making, or at least, we are bound with consent!

The spirited style is one of total demand – the discipline akin to the military model of sacrifice where the understood language is the covenant to protect and promote, to look after the welfare of another, “over my dead body.”

The Semitic affirmation of l’achaim (the toast ‘to life’) becomes the operating mode, Obama’s ‘Yes, We Can’ is the audacity of hope, and Hillary’s ‘Yes, We Will,’ the appropriate feminine assertiveness that after ten millennia of patriarchal insensitivity and dominance Gaia sorely needs.

Of course, as in every movement in human history, we have come to worship the metaphor and forsaken the reality it was designed to point to. A classmate once asked if my britches have become too big for God, and my young daughter responded: No, your childhood God just remained too small!

I sent the first two of these reflections to a listserv of fellow Methodists. One profusely thanked me for my efforts, while another immediately asked to be taken out of the listing. If there is anything that Lent does to the soul, if one attends to tending that garden like the Muslims do at Ramadan, it renders the quakes of La Aquila and Chengdu minor compared to the shaking of the foundations that sometimes occur when “grace strikes,” as it often does even to a devout Hindu like Gandhi who contemplated on the life journey of the Jesus who is claimed to be the Christ, and was forever transformed.

It is Easter still in many parts of the world, the victory of the resurrected life, and this is Easter Monday if only to affirm that the message of ‘life’s triumph over death’ need to be heard every day of the year. And were we allowed the language of tradition: May the force of the desert wind and the freedom of its wanderings abide with you, now and forevermore.