| There are a number of characteristics that mark Christian spirituality, such as patience, compassion, love, and faithfulness. Another one of them reveals the truth that the Christian path is first a way of descent. Most other spiritual traditions are about making an ascent. Even in the metaphors we use to describe our experience, we say God is “up there” and heaven is “above us.”. To be sure, St. Paul writes about ascending “from glory to glory.” ( I Timothy 3:16) But first there must be a descent, for example, from the mind to the heart (in classical Orthodox terms). This is the very foundation of the Jesus Prayer (The Prayer of the Heart). As His Eminence Metropolitan Kallistos notes: “There is within us a space, a field of the heart, in which we find a Divine Reality, and from which we are called to live. The mind then is to descend into that inner sanctuary, by means of the Jesus Prayer, and to stay there throughout our active day and evening. We descend with our mind into our heart, and we live there. The heart is Christ’s palace. There, Christ the King comes to take His rest.” There are other descents as well — a descent from pride to humility and from power to service, a descent from unbridled ego to selflessness. Why a descent? Because we believe in the Incarnation. Christ’s example is a model for us of what the Christian life entails. The Son of God descended and we must also descend. The first movement of God to earth, was descent – He came down. “For God so loved the world that he gave his Only Son…” is, in the words of St. John the Evangelist, about the descent of Christ into human flesh and into this material world. It is the downwards move of God, not TO us, but INTO us as one of us. He moves downwards not to be a spectator, but, to paraphrase St. Athanasius, to quite literally enmesh Himself in humanity that we humans might enmesh ourselves in His divinity. St. Paul tells us what this means for us in the second chapter of Philippians. “Have that mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God as something to cling to, rather he made himself nothing by taking the form of a servant, being made in human likeness.” (Philippians 2:5-11) We will examine the “have this mind in you” part below, but I want to quote Cynthia Bourgeault, a member of the faculty of the Center for Action and Contemplation, from her book “”WISDOM JESUS” where she writes about this same passage from Philippians. “In this beautiful hymn, Paul recognizes that Jesus had only one ‘operational mode.’ Everything he did, he did by self -emptying. He emptied himself and descended into human form. And he emptied himself still further (‘even unto death on the Cross’) and fell through the bottom to return to the realms of dominion and glory.” Jesus always sought the lower place, not the higher. In His very Resurrection, the Lord immediately descended to Hades, the Abode of the Dead, to usher from death’s grip those waiting there for Him. For us who seek to follow him it must be the same. The way to God, then, is “down” not “up.” We too must empty ourselves of ourselves, and humble ourselves to bend lower and take the last place just as the Lord did. In the words of Abba Poemen, a Desert Father, “As the breath which comes out of a man’s nostrils, so does a man need humility and the fear of God.” Simply put, this means to begin to think like Jesus thought and to see as he saw. Our common vocation is to descend as he did, become empty and die to ourselves. “Dying to ourselves” is not a pious phrase or spiritual “warm fuzzy.” It means eliminating those behaviors and attitudes that resist Christ’s mind. That means descending into our hearts and souls, taking a serious look through prayer and reflection — and then doing some serious “soul cleaning.” The Incarnation of the Word reveals the unity of all things. We speak in our hymns of Christ uniting in himself God and humanity, spirit and matter, and heaven and earth, which is to say, all things. For Christ the interconnection of all things is reality. He is the “Cosmic Savior.” That we do not see it or experience it consciously, means that we have not yet put on his mind. By descending, the Lord integrated all things in Creation that had been disrupted by human sin. St. John of Damascus affirms this when he wrote: “God the Word was made man for this reason, that that very nature which had sinned, fallen, and become corrupt, should conquer the tyrant who had deceived it.” For those who see as He saw all things are filled with God. All creation is saturated with the Holy Spirit. Creation is like a sponge that lives in the water and is also infused with it. We are like that. Sponges. Only we don’t know it because our minds are constantly creating separate categories for everything — good and bad, this and that, mine not yours, us verses them, right ideas and wrong ideas. That is the dualistic mind and not the mind of Christ. It is often said that Eastern Orthodoxy is mystical. And it is. The two preeminent tenants of the mystical path are these: God is not separate from us nor we from him, and each human being is connected inextricably with all other human beings. This is the mind of Christ. Christ’s mind unites. Our minds tend to separate and divide – which was not the mind of the Byzantine Church Fathers. Their minds were decidedly more integrative and uniting. The separating (dualistic) mind says we are separate from God, Christ says we are not. The separating mind says heaven is far away, Jesus says it is right here. (“The Kingdom of God is among you.”) The separating mind says that differences between people divide and separate, Jesus overturned the social norms that divided people due to race, religion, gender, wealth, and everything else. That is also our job in this time of extreme global crisis and polarization. It is most evident that the mind of Jesus is non-dual, it is non-separating, it is non-divisive. He treated everyone he met equally: women and men, Jews and Gentiles, poor and rich, virtuous and sinner. Separation is an illusion, and lived out in life, is a sin. St. Paul encapsulates the Lord’s uniting mind in his famous words, “In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free.” (Galatians 3:28) To adopt the same mind as Christ is, in Paul’s words “putting on the mind of Christ.” This demands a true change of mind from our old separating and divisive way of thinking (Paul calls this “the old man”) to something radically different. To become single-minded is to awaken in us the Kingdom. St. James writes in his epistle that the “double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.” (James 1:8) It is clearly a matter of how we see rather than what we see. Do we see as Christ sees: — the presence of God everywhere and always, in everything and everyone, and the Kingdom of Heaven within them, and us? To put on Christ’s mind is to let go of any thought, behavior, idea, opinion, or ideology and practice, that is unworthy of such a high calling – the calling to a level of consciousness which alone is adequate to the Kingdom of God. We must descend from our separating, divisive mind, and when we do we will discover that descending and ascending are actually one and the same thing! Christ is Risen! Indeed, He is Risen! Faithfully in the Lord’s Resurrection, |
