A Fish Out Of Water

We can not improve on Christ and His Church, for it is through Christ and His Church that the Christian is improved. It is an arrogant people and culture that believe God can be boxed and packaged. It is a false present from the ego, for the ego. A God that is limited to being practical is very small indeed. With that said, the Almighty has chosen time and time again to meet His children in their experience. The Christian God knows that His children, on the way to authenticity and healing, will walk all over Him. He has made it clear as a Father, He can take it.

Christ was in the Jordan, in the wilderness, at the marriage feast, next to the tomb of Lazarus, on the cross and transformed at Easter, for He went where we would experience Him. He wished to be in to transform. He refuses to hesitate and runs to where we are. He does not wait for us to get it right before drawing close. “I call You Friend.” Time and time again He is not afraid to be the doormat, if that is what it takes to be near His child. He has made it clear as a Father, it is worth it.

Christian orthodoxy believes God entered our world to transform it. The divine furnace that forged the universe is and can continue to forge us. His transforming love and sacrifice when He entered our world are extremely hard to ignore. History was changed for the secular; souls were transformed for the believer. Someone who knew this intimately would be Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Her theology can be debated, but even the secular take notice of the authentic relationship of knelling with others. A relationship that says, “What can I do for you, even if there is no way you can or will be able to do for me,” changes our definition of relationship and authenticity. She had external experience.

There are real results when allowing God to be God, the mysterious lover. The first is we improve and are freed by His rush to embrace. He rubs off on us with gracious joy and a greater sense that we His child, an icon of Him self. The divine furnace continues to forge on our ability to shine through. The Eastern Church calls this “divinization.” The second is that we learn to love deeper with a greater spectrum of love, when we thought not possible. The beauty and mystery of this is that it was not! He changes again our definitions of the possible and moves us from our experience by putting us into His, Him self.

It is from our experience from within Him that we learn that getting up to love again is much more valuable than our falling in the calculation of divine arithmetic. We are taught to love with a love that is beyond. From a life and cross one Divine Yes broke into pieces the entire No’s of hell. Evil could not calculate against such great odds; neither can we.

This is why Christian orthodoxy transforms, because it does not rest on the fragile, surface experience and pop philosophy of the moment. The Source is divine, not human, when the divine mystery is embraced it forms the greatest “icons” humanity has ever seen. Orthodoxy opens us up to the realization of this “divinization” and “iconic” process within us, God can and will change us when we experience Him on His ground. St. Catherine of Siena once said, “If you are who you should be, you will set the world ablaze.”

We can not improve on Christ and His Church, for a Christian to believe otherwise is like a fish telling the ocean “let me show you a thing or two,” as it flaps around on dry sand. The Church is the ocean from which we breathe, like a pregnant mother breathes for her child. The Trinity carried Mary in a special way, so Mary could carry God who entered our experience in humanity. Our experience of Him is the greatest when we allow ourselves to be incorporated into His Body, Him self, His experience, and breathe in from the Breathe of God.