Not a Patch-up

Mark McIntosh, as he often does, puts the well-known very well ( Mysteries of Faith (New Church’s Teaching Series) ): For early Christians “the Trinity was not a divine game of peek-a-boo in which a playful deity peeps out at them from behind different masks (now the ancient fellow with the beard, now the infant, now the bird, and so on) until God tires of the whole charade. No, when these Christians met God they were swept up into God’s own inner life of mutual relationship. The Word who becomes incarnate and the Spirit who moves over the chaos of human hearts are not temporary patch-up efforts on the part of a bumbling deity who had not quote counted on human recalcitrance. Instead, the Word and Spirit are eternally enacting the communion who is God, and into this communion Christians are drawn. For the Father is never just Father, but eternally delights to pour himself out, give himself away in the ‘othering,’ the speaking, of the Word. The delight that draws the Father beyond simple oneness toward Another is the same love, the same Spirit, who likewise draws forth from the Word an eternal response of loving self-surrender to the Father.”

What does it mean to share this life? It means that we resist the tendency of our “chameleon souls” that try “to blend into the prevailing muzak.” To be in Christ is to “be in a place where the slow and sometimes painful struggle to love one another would draw us out of those cramped caricatures we think of as ourselves and into a new pattern of life, a new identity . . . . the Christian life is a journey from baptism into our new identity toward a deeper discovery of who we really are by means of our relationships with God and one another, celebrated in the eucharist.”