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a priest refused to wash the feet of any women on the basis that only men were present at the Last Supper. The message being sent about the value of women and their full inclusion in the body of Christ is only too obvious.
Most important, however, the new picture is more spiritually spacious, and it is far more comfortable with the idea of love as a spiritual path than was ever conceivable within the celibate and increasingly sexually phobic line of church fathers that eventually became the voice of orthodoxy.
he set his disciples upon the only known path to integral transformation: the slow and persistent overcoming of the ego through a lifelong practice of surrender and nonattachment.
Like most of the world’s great spiritual teachers, Jesus affirms that attachment to matter is the root of all suffering.
The subtlety of Jesus’s metaphysics remains largely unknown to Christians—and sadly so, for it is the missing ingredient that makes his path comprehensible and doable.
When the heart is aligned with its eternal image, abundance cascades forth from that place of origin, infinitely more powerful than the scarcity and constriction of this world.
“Do not lay down any rules beyond what I have given you, lest you be dominated by them.
“that in-between zone where spirits become embodied and bodies become spiritualized.”9
We should be ashamed of ourselves! As he taught us, we should be clothed instead with the cloak of True Humanity, and following his command announce Good News without burdening it further with rules or laws he himself did not give us.
But if God is the subject of love, the place from which love emerges, then one could far more reliably claim—as poets, mystics, and lovers have claimed throughout the ages—that love does not divide the heart, but is in fact the sole force strong enough to unite it.
The core icon of the Christian faith, the watershed moment from which it all emerges, is not enstatic but ecstatic—love completely poured out, expended, squandered.
And right here, I believe, we come to the fundamental problem with these celibate models of transformation. It’s not merely their monochromatic viewpoint or the implicit devaluing of a whole other stream of Christian spiritual wisdom whose roots are in passionate human love. Rather, it is the fact that at key points they seem to be slightly out of kilter with the path of transformation that Jesus himself walked and taught.
Jesus himself seemed to be constantly pushing the envelope in the opposite direction—toward radical self-abandonment, reckless self-outpouring, and the transmutation of passion in complete self-giving.
Ten years later, I still remember clear as day the sense of startlement that went through me in a small Catholic church in Seldovia, Alaska, when I suddenly found myself standing before a bas relief carving of the fourth station of the cross—Jesus bidding farewell to his mother—and suddenly realized with every fiber of my being that it was not his mother he was bidding farewell to, but his beloved. What told me this I can’t tell, or whether the sculptor even intended it. But something in the body language between them, the quality of the yearning one could still feel arcing through the
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And so it is on the morning of resurrection, her firmness drawing his circle just, that with an astonished cry of “Rabboni!” she recognizes that he has, indeed, ended where he begun. She is the last person he sees before he leaves the human realm and the first person he sees upon returning.7 Together again, in that garden where life and resurrection life have become a single flowing river, they once again gaze into each other’s eyes, exchanging their unspoken joy. Then, with a forceful “Go and tell the others,” he sends her forth from the bridal chamber to take up her post as a cosmic servant.
