The Paradox of Power and Triumph of Love

The Buddha was right that desire is what chains us.
Lao-Tsu was right that desire distracts us from the Tao, the hidden mystery/source of being.
Jesus was right that the desire for power, greed, and hedonistic pleasure diminishes the quality of being, so much so that it would be better to lose an eye or hand than experience the fiery disintegration of inflated desire.

Desire marries itself to power and control.
To want or desire is to believe that we do not possess something but that we ought to.
To take possession is to enslave and overpower something else.

The problem is that desire enslaves us. It does not give anything but only takes away.

You cannot lose what you do not desire.

To desire, possess, and control steals away contentment, gratitude, and fulfillment.
To let go of desire and possession, to experience the pure "givenness" of reality and the pure reception of human experience makes possible these things: contentment without longing, fulfillment without possessing.

We are already possessed by the world and its source.
We do not even possess ourselves.
But in a sense, we possess all insofar as it is given to us in experience.
But we do not control what we do with it.
We only control our responsiveness, our desire.

Power does not give control.
It takes it away and deepens the abyss in our spirit.
That is the paradox of power.
Giving up control does not take anything away.
It deepens our primordial integration with reality by removing the illusive barrier of power and possession.

To embrace reality without controlling or possessing opens the possibility of love.
Love is the selfless relation to the Other.

Movement toward the Other, not predicated upon a striving to possess it as an objectified other but upon wonder and amazement before the ineffability of the Other, results in the unfolding of love.

Love is the only purpose of relation to the Other.
Love is the only possibility of true relation to the Other.

But power is the enemy of Love.
Power is the abuse of pure givenness, a meritorious corruption from economic thinking.
Love is the acceptance of pure givenness, and participation within it.

Love is the source of fulfillment.
It is the unconditionality of givenness.
It is the heart of blind and wild reciprocity.
It is the source of being itself.

The Primordial Eikon and the Birth of the Second Adam in the Johannine Prologue

In the prologue to John's Gospel, the focal point of creation moves toward primordial time, not time as understood in Genesis which proceeds preexistent chaos and involves the ordering of things and sanctification of time, but time as before all forms exist.

Word, or "Logos," in the divine discourse that undergirds the universe, the rational principle of the cosmos. It finds functional equivalency with "Sophia," or wisdom, in Jewish commentaries which speak of wisdom personified as a woman who accompanies God in the beginning as a guide to bringing order into creation (in LXX, Sophia is the word used for wisdom). For the purpose of understanding "Logos" as symbolic personification here, Sophia will substitute:

In the beginning was Sophia, and Sophia was with God, and Sophia was God; she was in the beginning with God. All things were created through her; nothing was created which was not created through her.

Nothing is created apart from the divine wisdom which accompanies God and finds locality in God's essence. John 1 goes on to describe the life-giving qualities of Wisdom and the light which emanates from her to all who enter the world. It also describes how any who accept her receive a new birth not of blood. This beautiful creation poem then ends like this:

And she became flesh and pitched her tent among us . . . full of grace and truth.

Of course, the elipsis here leaves out the part about Sophia/Logos being the unique Son of God. We will get to that shortly.

Apart from the christological identification, John 1 deals with the impartation of divine wisdom to humanity in bodily form. This parallels the creation of humanity in Genesis 1 insofar that humans are created in the image of God. Thus the embodiment of divine wisdom in human beings in a unique sense in John 1 involves an untarnished new creation separate from the degraded icon of God present in humanity as a whole. John 1 basically recapitulates Genesis 1 as a new creation involving new birth and the re-embodiment of untarnished divine wisdom. For John this recapitulation finds its locus in the theophany of Christ.

This is where christology enters, and in particular Pauline christology. Paul describes Jesus as "wisdom (Gk. Sophia) from God" and the "image of God." The Colossian Hymn  describes Jesus as "the image of the invisible God." In John, Jesus continually mediates wisdom to those around him and speaks constantly of it. For Paul, Jesus in the Second Adam, the recapitulation of primordial humans as the untarnished "eikon" of God. Thus, it can be said that the Johannine prologue describes the birth of the Second Adam and the reentrance of divine wisdom into the world through the embodiment of a sacred mystery "hidden from the foundations of the world."

From an evolutionary perspective, these things happen in reverse. Humanity does not fall from a pristine state but historically gravitates toward something higher. Within this framework the elements can still be re-appropriated without great loss of meaning. The Christ-event does not function as a mediating source of renewal between pristine Eden, inaugural present, and golden future; it functions as a North Star which recapitulates any lost potentialities in history and illuminates the event horizon toward which humanity is being moved by the same spirit of wisdom embodied in Christ. Thus, the new creation is beyond history and renewal and constitutes an event horizon beyond which a glory lies, the glory of the divine embodied in Christ which Paul says remains hidden until the resolution of this age.

Hence, the glory which exists as a pure potentiality in primordial time is that towards which time moves as an actualizing factor in the unfolding of divine perfection as manifest in the concealed revelation of wisdom and love.

Religion without Religion, or the Deconstructive Gesture in Christian Thought

In a world torn apart by religious and ideological conflict, it's easy to see why people are quick to claim that they are spiritual but not religious, or more paradoxically, Christian but not religious. Christianity is a religion, and fully functions as a religious order when it demands either affirmation of certain propositions or conformity to a spiritual path. It seems quite obvious here that Christianity is a religion by definition. But perhaps there is a self-deconstructive nugget of religious criticism present in Christianity, one with the potential to eventually overturn religion altogether one day. This is what I want to explore at present.

In the doctrine of the incarnation, Jesus as icon of God symbolizes a self-restriction on God's part culminating in the crucifixion and confirmed in resurrection. This resurrection ultimately leaves behind not the permanent fleshly body of the rabbi from Nazareth but the mystical body of Christ, the divine body and temple of God's presence on earth birthed in Eucharistic immanence. The human community thus becomes the ultra-particular locale of God on earth, eradicating the holy of holies in the heart of the temple in Jewish tradition. We become the ark of the covenant, the presence of the Holy Mystery. Thus transcendent, universal Being empties itself out (whether in a primordially symbolic or historically ontic sense I cannot say) into the fluid structure of universal Becoming as an immanent Presence mediated through interpretive structures in human experience.

Thus the end of the supernatural-moral-metaphysical God finds historical inauguration in the crucifixion, and the immanent-evolutionary-panentheistic God emerges in resurrection in our very flesh.   This is the Christ-event.

For this reason God becomes most present not in triumphalistic power structures of authoritarian dogmatism or militant coercion but defenseless orphans, friendless widows, and ostracized minorities. God is not found among the religious elite but their victims, regardless of identity.

In fact, since God cannot be kept out of humanity locked in a transcendental structure of blind abstract universal interpretation, God cannot be kept exclusively on the side of one singular culturally-constructed identity. Thus, identities crumble and God becomes present behind all identities and interpretations, in the simple ontic facts of human existence and suffering.

Jesus claimed that he brought a sword which would tear families apart. The family was the central tribal identity in his culture -- not the nuclear family of the West but the patriarchal model of Middle-Eastern life (neither of which represent any sort of permanence in history). Jesus was inviting people into the simple reality of a universal human family of one blood -- that of the human race. "In Christ" they would realize their commonality in one blood - Christ's blood. This is not magical. Christ stands in as a representative of primordial humanity outside of any roles projected onto to him, not because this "identity" can be posited as a distinctive cultural role but the very opposite -- he is the negation of all identities that might have fallen on him during that time. Sure, he is like a prophet, but no regular prophet. Like a king, but no ordinary king. He is crucified outside the city walls over the valley of Gehenna -- a cultural symbol of identity-negation. Thus, "in Christ" identities are crucified and "new creatures" are born into one universal family beyond singular identity. This is why for Paul there are no biological, policial, or religious boundaries "in Christ," epitomized in his erasure of the "male and female" binary (biological), the "slave and free" binary (political), and the "Jew and Greek" binary (religious).

In this sense, Christianity invites us beyond religion, beyond itself, into the Holy Mystery and Presence which encompasses every particle of matter without selling itself out to conceptual interpretations but flowing through them as a life-giving force and empowerment of human beings in relation to each other.