Hearing Christ's Voice: A Response to Reed Dressler

In our Wednesday Groupthink essay, my friend Reed Dressler takes on an important contemporary topic, one that is close to my own heart and that is difficult to talk about at our denominational conferences and church coffee hours: hearing the voice of God. Dressler points to the importance of remembering God’s continuing presence in God’s creation, a remembering which breaks down traditional barriers between the sacred and the profane.

I sincerely appreciate Dressler’s writing on the topic, but I am often nervous about discussing contemplative theology. Such discussions can quickly become overly abstract and self-absorbed, focusing (no less than evangelical pop theology) on the individual’s relationship with God to the neglect of a larger narrative of God’s action in history.

The best way, I think, to avoid the problem of atomizing individualism in the spiritual life is to hold the truths Dressler points us to in tandem with a spirituality that centers our union with the crucified and risen Christ within the community of his Body, the Church. Private contemplative practice will lead us astray if we pursue it overzealously and without equal commitment to our “common prayer” and service with others who commit their lives to the Way.

Authentic spirituality, for Christians, should always begin with the One we consider the ultimate expression of God’s being and character, “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” (Colossians 1:15).

I don’t say this to denigrate anyone else’s religious traditions or to imply that only Christians can pray or meditate or know God. I do believe, though, that as people of faith, we best honor the traditions of others by living faithfully the best of our own, not by appropriating and generalizing until nothing is left but abstracted “spiritual but not religious” feelings of goodwill. Poet Christian Wiman likes to quote George Lindbeck: “You can no more be religious in general than you can speak language in general.” In Wiman’s own words, “the only way to deepen your knowledge and experience of ultimate divinity is to deepen your knowledge and experience of the all too temporal symbols and language of a particular religion” (My Bright Abyss 141). For Christians, those symbols and that language must center on Jesus Christ.

Many of the early Church Mothers and Fathers spoke at great length about Christ as Logos, the Word by which God made and sustains the world, the divine creative principle of the universe. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins had just this conception of Christ in mind when he formulated his vision of every molecule of creation giving praise to God simply by being what it is truly is:

"As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came. 

"I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces"

For Hopkins, and for many of us who see the beauty of his vision even if we have trouble with his metaphysics, it is not only the First Person of the Trinity we experience in creation and providence, but Jesus Christ as well.

I used to dismiss this talk of the Logos as so much overbaked Platonism, an aberration of the original concrete and social vision of Jesus.

It is true that, when overemphasized, a theology centered on the Logos can be used as a way of avoiding the most difficult teachings of Jesus found in the gospels.

However, a healthy understanding of the Logos in creation helps us to move beyond abstraction and see Christ’s face in this action, this experience, this experience this person. We need the actions, experiences, and presence of others to understand fully what Christ is doing among us. I think that is what our Orthodox siblings mean they greet each other, not with the familiar “The Lord be with you” “And also with you” found in my church, but with “Christ is in our midst” “He is and shall be.”

Jesus chose a meal with his friends, not solitary meditation,
as the main way we are to remember him.

One great way to begin cultivating a Christ-centered and communal spirituality is by reflecting on the sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist. Baptism, and the remembrance of our baptism, is a way of partaking in Christ's death and resurrection. In baptism, we are initiated into Christ's new creation, the world as God intended us to see it, with Christ the Logos visible, if only faintly, in all things. Whether we were baptized as infants or as adults, it remains true that none of us baptized himself or herself. It's a gift that only comes to us through the actions of other Christians.

Similarly, in the Eucharist, we remember our place as "living members of [God's] Son, our Savior Jesus Christ," in the words of the Book of Common Prayer. Here, St. Augustine says it best:

"If you are the body of Christ and his members, your mystery has been placed on the Lord's table, you receive your mystery. You reply 'Amen' to that which you are, and by replying you consent. For you hear 'The body of Christ,' and you reply 'Amen.' Be a member of the body of Christ so that your 'Amen' may be true. ... Be what you see, and receive what you are" (Sermon 272).

Spirituality is, as evangelicals are fond of saying, about one's "relationship with God," but it is also about our relationship with God. It's about who we are discovering Christ to be and ourselves to be in Christ as we gather in his name.

Christ is in our midst. He is and shall be. Amen.