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GOD BECAME MAN

SO THAT MAN WOULD BECOME GOD

This is what all creation is about!!! Therefore, it is pretty important to get it straight! Two useful terms for discussing the whole megillah are the “common good” and “theosis”, which refers more to the process itself of becoming God-like.

I’ll begin with a proposal made by Pope Benedict which should strike a sympathetic chord, especially with the present devastation in our next door neighbor, Haiti: Pope Urges Forming New World Economic Order to Work for the ‘Common Good’

By RACHEL DONADIO and LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: July 7, 2009

VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI called for a radical rethinking of the global economy, criticizing a growing divide between rich and poor and urging the establishment of a “true world political authority” to oversee the economy and work for the “common good.”

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For Christians, Christ is our “common good” – when we see ourselves bound together by any common good opposed to Christ – that’s trouble! But I am totally dismayed at what according to my experience is an ignorance bordering on psychotic denial of HOW this is effected. There is, moreover, reason to suspect that a source of such denial more sinister than psychosis is virtually certain to be at work here. If you guessed I mean the Devil – go to the head of the class!

I lay down the gauntlet in this wise, because St. Paul has so lucidly expounded the whole matter – as, in my case, became apparent when Herbert Schwartz moved me to intently focus my mind on the most pointedly relevant scriptural passages in this regard. When I did so, the whole matter seemed so unmistakably obvious - once you just read the words - that when some of Herbert’s former students would get into discussions of the opposition to Herbert within the Catholic Church, I didn’t want to hear it. I already had had my own problems with the sheer idiocy rampant in Catholic academia, I didn’t need any more. Herbert was teaching us how to LIVE the Gospel, not how to argue over it, so it was with a sigh of relief and release that I embraced the silence that shut out all the - still nevertheless pervasive today - clap-trap.

I believe if you read St. Paul prayerfully together with me, you will share my experience – and we will be able to get busy helping Pope Benedict to form that New World Economic Order to Work for the ‘Common Good’.

Pope Benedict also made a more recent statement which is a propos here:

Pope Denounces Italy Immigrant Clashes
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS January 10, 2010

VATICAN CITY (AP) -- Pope Benedict XVI denounced the riots last week between immigrants and Italians in southern Italy, saying Sunday that migrants have rights, must be respected, and are equally loved by God. Benedict made the unusual commentary on current events during his weekly noon blessing, clearly coming down on the side of the migrants in exhorting Italians to see them as human beings and not just labor to be exploited. ''I invite everyone to look in the face of the other and discover that there is a soul, a history, a life, a person whom God loves as he loves me,'' Benedict said.

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So let’s start in on St. Paul – his letter to the Romans makes a good introduction, no doubt the reason why the Church accords it first place in the section on the apostolic epistles in the New Testament canon.

St Paul writes: I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells [although in our times, it is the case that even in private, as well as in the public forum, NOBODY, BUT NOBODY is willing to admit to having even made an itsy bitsy mistake, much less that they have NO GOOD AT ALL in and of themselves!!!] For to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find. [Yet nobody today can even admit to being bunglers, it’s all just “blow-back”.] For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice. Now if I do what I will not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. [Surely this is the everyday experience of all persons of good will, yet who among us will admit to this inner schiz which continually operates in our subconscious, frustrating everything we try to do – cf. “Murphy’s Law No. 1: ‘If anything can fail, it will fail.’” St. Paul understood how this is the law of our very being way back when!!!] I find then a law, that evil is present with me, the one who wills to do good. [But St Paul, instead of settling for a life of frustration - the only hope for relief being to air it on Oprah or some such - addresses the source of this radical schizophrenia:] For I delight in the law of God according to the inward man, but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. [And instead of dulling the pain with Prozac, Paul actually – however paradoxical it would seem to the average US citizen or non-American trying to act Americanized – Paul rejoices precisely in the very wretchedness he discerns within himself!!!] O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God—through Jesus Christ our Lord! (Rm 7:18-25)

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Yet if the average would-be Christian turns to God, this is will typically take the form of some verbal discourse, delivering such a discourse or subjecting oneself to such, then writing on some blog - or chat replete with ready-made Facebook emoticons - how it helped or didn’t help ….. So rather than wallow in our habitual hopelessness, let’s stick with St. Paul, whose approach is not something cerebral. The very word usually translated “knowledge”, or “knowing” in our frankly lousy translations of the Bible is the word used in the beginning of Genesis to relate how Adam “KNEW” Eve, and she conceived Cain. Such knowledge is thus an organic union, not facts at however many removes from real blood-and-guts reality – much less can such “knowledge” describe our union with the SOURCE and PURPOSEFUL DESTINY of BEING AS SUCH, EACH AND EVERY BEING, ALL BEING!!!

Yet it surely is a singular irony that we nevertheless actually pride ourselves on sending out all over the world our English-language Bibles, which so radically misrepresent and degrade the very fundament of our very life from its inception: our UNION WITH GOD, THE SOURCE AND RAISON D’ETRE OF ALL BEING, AND OF OURSELVES AS CUSTODIANS OF CREATION.

So it is hardly any wonder that people miss point I want to make here - the Bible is a book to be LIVED, not STUDIED!!! In fact, in the Russia Church, as has been the case since before Englishmen and other Europeans even came to the hemisphere we today know as America, the Bible is not so much read as it is SUNG, in all the beautiful services, all throughout the day and even at night, so that the musical tonalities embed the Bible in all the most intimate recesses of the very SOUL of the believer (it’s very effective, just consider how the current “popular” music possesses the souls – and bodies – of people, you can tell what is pulsing through them by their bodily gyrations when the cars are stopped, waiting for a red light to change; in the Orthodox Church, also, our bodies meaningfully conform to and reflect the prayers being sung) – which is how that wretchedness St. Paul so deplores becomes displaced by more salutary aspirations until these become even more spontaneous than the laws and motivations of what the Apostle calls our fleshly nature. Paul himself concludes: “O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

This is how theosis, divinization, deification, is realized. For when the psyche is attuned - radiating out from its innermost being - to the goodness, the mercy, the blessings, of God to even such a wretched sinner as myself, then it is that anger and judgment against all the other wretched souls hungering for mercy like ourselves melts into com-passion – which means union-in-what-we-suffer-together – and we can look in the face of the other and discover that there is a soul, a history, a life, a person whom God loves as he loves me.