Now here's one way of starting a new day. Forget the to do lists, the diary commitments, the ordinary routines that kick in as soon as eyes are open and brain in gear. Instead think of your life as that of a human being glorified by the life of God in Christ, caught up into the eternal beauty and purpose of that Goodness without remainder that is God, generously and creatively radiating light and life in the outward movements of renewing Love.
Just for some minutes, ignore the background hum of a culture that says you are what you do, and you are what you earn, and you are what you consume, and you are whatever the culture gives you permission to be. Instead read a chapter of Kathryn Tanner's new book, Christ the Key.
Oh, I know. It isn't exactly the first alternative thought that enters the mind at 5.50 a.m. But it is what I did, as I browsed this new book, started reading, kept going, and began thinking the kind of thoughts I've just written. This is serious theology in the service of Christians longing for an alternative vision of God that starts and ends with God revealed in Christ, rather than being reduced to the needs-meeting God so celebrated by Christian consumers. The life God intends and offers for a world of creatures, including humans like ourselves, is not only imaged in Jesus, but is divine gift conferred by the power of the Spirit, opening the human being to the life of God, through the Word made flesh, crucified and risen.
This kind of theology is not your usual thought for the day. More thought for the rest of your life. Here's a couple of paragraphs of what this kind of theology reads like - it isn't easy to read. The best theology isn't easy; it's task is not to indulge us, but to open us up to that which transforms us.
"The humanity of Jesus has that perfect attachment or orientation to the Word in virtue of his being one with the Word, nothing apart from it; and we gain the capability of something like that through our connection to him. By the power of the holy Spirit, the first person of the trinity sends the second person into the world so as to be incarnate in human flesh, one with the humanity of Jesus. That same power of the Spirit comes to us through the glorified humanity of Christ in order to attach us to him, make us one with him, in all the intensity of faith, hope and love.
In virtue of such close attachment to the divine image, humans would be the images of God, not just in leading borrowed lives, but by living off God, so to speak, by drawing their very life, that is, from the divine image to which they cling, in something like the way an unborn baby lives off the life of its mother, living in, with, and through her very life. Or - to use the more common biblical imagery perhaps - they would exist as images by being like branches living only off the alien sap on the vine to which they have been grafted. They would be images in the way otherwise empty mirrors enjoy brightness only by receiving from outside themselves the light of another."
(Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key, Cambridge: CUP, 2010), 14-15.
Now having read something like that, our to do lists, diary and daily routines are put in their proper place, and life recovers some kind of proportion, eh? Like mirrors of God in Christ, we enjoy brightness by receiving the light of another. Oh you Beauty!
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