A Flourishing Life? The tension of life lived between the 3rd and 4th dimensions and the paradoxical pathway through, Part II

[Reading Time: 10 minutes]

Review

“…And this kind of dying is gonna make you come alive because you’ve got to die to the delusional false self that isn´t really you, that you may not even know is there because it´s so covered with repression, suppression, delusion, false images, lies that people put upon you...

For the crucifixion is a perpetual event…”

With this quotation our first writing opened.

And we found that the Scriptures together with the Fathers of the Church taught that we must undergo a perpetual crucifixion literally at every moment of every day…to all of the false realities that have actively embedded themselves in the fallen structures of our lives. Because if we do not, then they—not the Gospel—will reshape our personalities according to this dying Now Age.

Yet this pathway is a narrow and hard way (literally a “having suffered way” [τεθλιμμένη from thlíbō]); but it is the only pathway through which we may be opened up to the eternal, life-giving and life-healing Truth of 4th dimensional reality.

This is the only path wherein these eternal, healing truths may progressively transform and transfigure the structures of our person in accordance with (κατά) the Kingdom of God.

This eternal working articulated through paradox

This working of the eternal Kingdom into our Fallen Age, however, is articulated to us in terms of paradox:

Everlasting riches, depths of wisdom, heights of flourishing, everlasting freedom is worked into our person through…the experiences of…poverty, foolishness, self-denial, slavery.

In short,

Everlasting life flows into our personalities through our…moment-by-moment crucifixion and death.

This is the pathway to flourishing within Christ’s Kingdom.

The pathway begun with a rightly-ordered desire operating through the dimensional interconnections of faith

And we found that this begins with our desire—a desire that leads us by the operations of faith from the 3rd into the 4th dimension, where flourishing extends beyond the confines of time and circumstances.

Yet we asked,

How can we desire a 4th dimensional desire?

And we responded with the words of Jesus:

“If anyone desires to come after me, let him deny himself…”

We then traced this back through the example of the desperate desire of the woman with an “issue of blood” who “came from behind and touched the hem of His garment…” in a way that brought to her immediate healing. And we witnessed it in the extraordinary humility and perseverance of the “Canaanite woman” whose magnificent faith liberated her “severely demon-possessed daughter.”

And we concluded that such a rightly-ordered desire must operate in us so as to bring us “behind” Jesus, Who meets our present needs and, at the very same time, opens to us the Kingdom pathway of 4th dimensional flourishing.

And with this review we continue.

4th dimensional flourishing through the “shock” of a 3rd dimensional cross

But when our needs are met and “all these things” are “added” unto us, it may not be “health and wealth,” so to speak. Again, only what we need.

And what we need may specifically not be the good things of life…as those may further deaden our spiritual senses to the 4th dimensional realities. Rather, in Flannery O’Connor’s words, what we may actually need is to be shocked out of our near continual “spiritual complacency and comfort” in this temporal world.

As she wrote in one of her essays addressing young authors,

“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

Maybe this will help us better understand Christ’s somewhat mystifying words (that led to the title of Flannery’s second novel),

“And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence,

And the Violent Bear It Away” (Mt 11:12).

Though, no doubt, a shock to us, Christ Himself had already made plain to His disciples the violence inherent in the Christian life.

“Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth,” Jesus says.

“I did not come to bring peace but a sword” (Mt 10:34).

How is that possible?

For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;

And a man’s enemies will be those of his own household.

The dividing line of the Gospel cutting into our very families, revealing whom it is that we truly love.

He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me.

And he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me.

Our desire, our love, when trapped trapped in the 3rd dimension, paradoxically cuts us off from the Source of all love. For

Love is of God;

And everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.

He who does not love does not know God, for God is love (I John 4:7-8).

Jesus continues, marking out the pathway for us to move from our temporal, 3rd dimensional love (which we come to find out is not really love) into the eternal, life-giving love of the 4th dimension….which comes through a cross:

And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me (10:35-38).

And so we return to Jesus’ direction to His disciples,

“If anyone desires to come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me” (Mt 16:24).

A summary from the end that allows a beginning

To start from the end, we cannot follow Jesus, unless we take up our cross, which means continual self-denial. And no matter how long, it seems, that we have been a disciple, this truth continues to be quite shocking:

Christ speaks, not of peace, but of violence; not of unity, but of division; not of self-fulfillment, but continual self-denial; not of life, but the death of a cross!

And yet we find, in the paradox of orthodoxy,

This is the only violence that can truly “make peace” (eirēnopoiéō); the only division that can bring vital unity; the only denial that can “fulfill the word of God” in us—“the mystery which has been hidden from ages and from generations, but now has been revealed to His saints”; and the only death that opens us up to the reconciliation of life.

Is this why He, a Rabbi, a spiritual Master, does not merely direct us, but commands us to take up our cross? And more to the point, only does so by first bearing it Himself so that in the cross He might

“obliterate (exaleíphō) the handwriting of requirements that was against us, which was contrary to us…nailing it to the cross.”

And in his own nailing to the cross,

“disarmed principalities and powers, leading them forth as His prisoner in a triumphal procession” (thriambeúō, Col 2:14-15).

This is the victory we proclaim in the euangélion.

It is not us taking up our cross in a wonderful, religious procession amidst the praises of the adoring crowds. It is us being nailed to the same cross together with Christ (systauróō), not praised as saintly martyrs, but despised as traitors from the faith, heretics, criminals.

The Life in the Passion

And there, in the words of St. Matthew’s Passion, we see

Whom? - The bridegroom,
How? - Like a lamb!
What ? - His patience,
Where ? - Our guilt;

See how from love and grace
He bears the wood of the cross himself! (1)

And in response, we proclaim,

Willingly I shall bring myself
To accept the cross and cup,
I drink as my saviour did
For his mouth,
Which flows with milk and honey
Has made the cause
And bitter taste of suffering
Become sweet through first drinking Himself (23).

A perpetual and hidden martyrdom that leads to flourishing in Christ’s eternal Kingdom: Closing questions

But…lest we be too quickly carried away by a dramatic vision of our coming martyrdom, the great majority of our Christian lives are not so public as an execution. They are, for the most part, unseen, unknown.

And they will require, therefore, in the words of the monastics, an unseen and“perpetual martyrdom.”

And in this we follow Paul who was an imitator of Christ (mimētḗs, I Cor 11:1), remembering that his pathway led him to, just like Christ, become forsaken by all (II Tim 4:16-> Mt 26:56). Yet, in the very same sentence, this forsaking, according to the Apostle, was precisely the way wherein

“The Lord stood with me and strengthened me”

Delivering me “out of the mouth of the lion” with the promise that the “Lord will deliver me from every evil work and preserve me for His heavenly kingdom.

To Him be glory forever and ever. Amen!” (II Tim 4:17-18)

But we know that Paul wasn’t delivered from the mouth of the lion.

He was thrown into it.

He wasn’t delivered from every evil work.

He was handed over to it…almost continuously.

He wasn’t preserved for Christ’s Heavenly Kingdom…

He was…or…wait…maybe…he was actually…preserved?

We know that he was.

For his very confinement in prison opened the 4th dimensional doors of the Gospel that its life could flood into the ancient world as he, though himself being bound,

“received all who came to him, preaching the kingdom of God and teaching the things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ with all confidence, no one forbidding him” (Acts 28:31..the final verse of the Acts of the Apostles).

From the Acts of the Apostle to the life-giving death and reality-restructuring “blood of the martyrs”

And as Paul had learned to practice dying, he was ready when his real end came. Condemned and finally put to death in the “extraordinary madness” of Nero, his martyrdom would eventually seal the downfall of the Rome itself…as it planted underneath it, in the words of Tertullian, the “foundations of this church” with the “blood of the Christians” being its “seed” (Semen est sanguis Christianorum).

And with his great Apology, we bring this writing to a close:

Yet no cruelty of yours, though each were to exceed the last in its exquisite refinement, profits you in the least; but forms rather an attraction to our sect. We spring up in greater numbers as often as we are mown down by you: the blood of the Christians is a source of new life.

Many amongst yourselves have exhorted to the endurance of pain and death, as for example Cicero in the 'Tusculan Disputations,' Seneca in his book 'On Chances,' Diogenes, Pyrrho, and Callinicus.

Yet they, by their words, secured not so many disciples as the Christians have gained by their practical example. That very obstinacy which you assail is the teacher.

For who is not aroused by the sight of it to enquire what the inward motive can be?

Who, when he has enquired, does not adopt it?

And who, when he has adopted it, does not choose to suffer, in order that he may acquire the whole grace of God, and also obtain all pardon from Him by the yielding up of his blood?

For all sins are pardoned by this act. Hence it is that, at the moment of your sentencing us, we give thanks: and since there is an antagonism between divine and human things, when we are condemned by you, we stand acquitted by God.

In the upcoming writings, we will examine this paradox of the flourishing life still further in a series on the seven Greek verbs:

sympáschō (συμπάσχω): To suffer with

systauróō (συσταυρόω): To be crucified together with

syntháptō (συνθάπτω): To be buried with

synegeírō (συνεγείρω): To be raised with

synzáō (συνζάω): To live with

synklēronómos (συγκληρονόμος): To inherit with

syndoxázō (συνδοξάζω): To be glorified together