Incarnational Reality: Learning to See

I've been thinking about paying attention to life. Which means I'm thinking more about incarnational reality and belovedness and how we move--or don't--in these realities. The thing I'm aware of is that immersion in them is not accomplished by mere cognitive assent, nor is the acquiring of a new piece of spiritual information the point. Because these things are true, we cannot make a project out of entering incarnational reality or living as the beloved of God.

So what is the end-game? Where does this receiving lead us? Cynthia Bourgeault says of the Enlightenment: "From 'blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God,' the Christian West had become stranded in 'I think, therefore I am.'" Seeing. Seeing God--so much of our growth in faith is about seeing differently. This seeing certainly involves sound theology, but that is the starting gate, not the finish line (it's the difference between knowing the command to love and the capacity to see others with the love of Christ).

I think I'm about to dabble in the third reason why conservative Christians can be mean--a dscipleship based on intellectualized self-effort. Such folks can limit faith to what the intellect is capable of doing. But that will not take us into the depths of Jesus Christ. In Everything Belongs, Richard Rohr says:

I think Christianity has created a great problem in the Western world by repeatedly presenting itself, not as a way of seeing all things, but as one competing ideology among many....We've usually presented Christianity as an ideology competing with communism, materialism, or some other "ism."...The Gospel is not a competing idea. It's that by which we see all ideas in proper context.

In as much as I'm walking in incarnational reality--one result of which is a deep, abiding sense of my and others' belovedness--I begin to see reality more like Jesus does. As this work of the Spirit happens, I am taken out of my own intellectual awareness and graced with a larger place.

And living out the Gospel as a participant in God's kingdom compels me to a God-focused awareness, a deeper, different way of seeing. Bourgeault goes on to say,

The farther one strays from the wellsprings of spiritual awareness and the seeing that flows from them, the most one is dependent on the only other processing mode: ordinary awareness and the egoic identity that emerges from it....Ordinary awareness per se is incapable of carrying out the gospel....The gospel requires a radical openness and compassion that are beyond the capacity of the anxious, fear-ridden ego.

I'm taken by the idea that left in my ego-based awareness (and the identity that goes with it) I cannot truly be free to be a living emblem of the Gospel. Maybe that's the miracle of abiding in incarnational reality--the escape from the chains of the self my ego creates and clutches apart from Christ. I come closer to being who I really am, not the person I try to create for public consumption. Now, that's good news.