Life in all its fullness
Bringing yourself to life might be a very good, brief description of what motivates me as a Christian priest. John 10.10, “I have come that you may have life, life in all its fullness” is, as readers may know already, a core text for me. Life in all its fullness is what my soul seeks. Life in all its fullness is a quality I perceive to be in decline in the contemporary church.
Our Selves, souls and bodies
In the course of my life I have discovered that “life in all its fullness” is something to be discovered and ‘worked on’ in our Selves, our bodies, emotions, energy, breathing. In the here and now of our being is where we encounter God and where our spiritual work is to be done, the work that enriches, enhances and energises our experience of God and his Son Jesus Christ, the life-giver and unconditional lover whose way is “life in all its fullness.
The encounter with God in creation begins with and within your Self. We are divine gift, our bodies are divine gift, the place of encounter and engagement with the divine.
Traditional practice
Traditional, orthodox Christianity as currently practiced doesn’t teach this because most of its teachers and adherents don’t know ‘it’ or understand that our bodies are the essence, the key ‘resource’ through which we experience the Mystery of God, the spiritual energy, the source of ‘life in all its fullness’. The Church knows the past, the historic formularies, an archaic metaphysics, a dualistic world view of heaven and earth, and an impoverished awareness of the Bible in its fullness and the wisdom of Jesus expounded in the gospels and epistles, building on the wisdom of the Hebrew Scriptures.
Contemporary church
But the contemporary church doesn’t know the dramatically transformed world we have come to know for the first time over the last century and a half and that I have come to, in confirmation of my youthful intuition, over the course of my post-teenage life, the world of an apparently infinite and evolving cosmos, expanding and creatively evolving over a period of 13.8 billion years, evolving into the future (where else, of course?!). Creation is seamless, woven throughout with energy and ‘Mystery’ divine, a reality the author Charles Williams labelled coinherence and my spiritual guide always referred to as co-creative.
The divine essence is as fully present ‘in us’, ‘within us’, integral to our being, as the divine essence is fully present and integral to all creation, all time and space, every dimension of being in creation.
This is what Jesus knew in his being and taught in his parables.
Something different today
In later life I have come to want something very different from the church and Christianity, different from what worked in previous decades. Maybe it’s too late to want something different – except in Biblical, Gospel, Jesus terms, it’s never too late – the right time is always now – “Quick now, here, now, always – a condition of complete simplicity (costing not less than everything) and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”
Incarnation
I want something different from today’s church and today’s Christianity. Maybe my wanting is too late. Maybe the conservative’orthodox/traditional/evangelical/mission-shaped/”bible-based” contemporary church, too bureaucratic, systems-oriented, barely contemplative, reluctant to commit to justice, is destined to further decline, further loss of energy and vision. Maybe it has to die.
Christianity is an incarnational, embodied religion, empowered by the transformation and resurrection of a crucified man’s body, re-energised and reconfigured in the bodies of his group of followers.
Our bodies are our essence. We don’t exist apart from our bodies, bodies that barely experience resurrection now, not having been guided on the journey “through the unknown, remembered gate when the last of earth left to discover is that which was the beginning.” The poet expresses the wisdom we should be seeking better than today’s bishops, theologians, preachers and teachers.
Resurrection
The resurrection body is a here and now on earth reality. Throughout most of its history and most certainly in the here and now of today Christianity has had a very uneasy, unhealthy relationship with human bodies.
There follows a list of books and authors, theologians and mystics, whose writings have helped me explore myself and my faith to the place where I am now, still exploring and seeking and questioning and discovering. Try them, try some of them (some of you will certainly have read many of them already) if you want to better understand yourself and find your own way to life in all its fullness in a more fully present in the here and now, incarnational, body-centred presence of God the Mystery, unconditional, infinite, intimate love.
Those who began to get it in the first half of the twentieth century
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: The Heart of the Matter; Activation of Energy; Christianity and Evolution
Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Letters and Papers from Prison; Life Together
Paul Tillich: The Shaking of the Foundation; The Courage to Be; The Eternal Now
Those who began to get it mid-twentieth century onwards
Henry Nowen: Reaching Out; The Inner Voice of Love; The Way of the Heart; In the House of the Lord
William Johnston: Silent Music; The Inner Eye of Love; The Wounded Stag; Being in Love
Bede Griffiths: The Marriage of East and West; The Golden String; Return to the Centre
Sebastian Moore: The Crucified is No Stranger; Being in Love; The Fire and the Rose are One
Harry Williams: True Wilderness; True Resurrection; Becoming What I Am
John Powell: A Reason to Live! A Reason to Die!; He Touched Me; The Christian Vision
Those who were getting it towards the end of the twentieth century
James Alison: Knowing Jesus; Raising Abel; On Being Liked
John Dominic Crossan: Jesus, A Revolutionary Biography; The Historical Jesus; Who Killed Jesus?
Marcus Borg: The God We Never Knew; The Heart of Christianity; Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time
Diarmuid O’Murchu: Incarnation; Our World in Transition; Religion in Exile; Reclaiming Spirituality
Jack Spong: Why Christianity Must Change or Die; Jesus for the Non-Religious; Here I Stand
Twenty-first century explorers
Richard Rohr: The Universal Christ; Immortal Diamond; Falling Upward
John D Caputo: The Folly of God; Hoping Against Hope; The Weakness of God
Richard Holloway: A Little History of Religion; The Stranger in the Wings; Paradoxes of Christian Faith and Life; Beyond Belief; A New Heaven; The Sidelong Glance; Anger, Sex, Doubt and Death
Ilia Delio: From Teilhard to Omega; Christ in Evolution; The Unbearable Wholeness of Being
Catherine Keller: Cloud of the Impossible; On the Mystery, Discerning Divinity in Process
Cynthia Bourgeault: The Heart of Centering Prayer; Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening; The Wisdom Jesus; The Wisdom Way of Knowing
Eckhart Tolle: The Power of Now
Jessica Martin: Holiness and Desire, What Makes Us Who We Are
Chris Scott: Goodbye to God; The Jesus Myth
Julian Baggini: The Godless Gospel
Nicholas Peter Harvey and Linda Woodhead: Unknowing God
John F. Haught: God After Einstein