Sundance, etc. ..............................................107

                    Epilogue: Hearing the Ancestors.................... 118

The Battle of Pine Ridge: A Theological Journal of Riffs, Ramblings and Semi-Fictional Personal Reflections from a Sojourn among the Lakota; which is to say, meanderings through narrow slices of life and religion, or a collection of variously (dis)connected essays dedicated to Ben Conquering Bear

1.

To Start With…

Where I come from, Arkansas, the winters are brown: bare trees, dead grass, harvested fields, and dirt. The only relief is the geese. Arkansas lies beneath one of their flyways. They carry my soul with them as they fly south beginning in late November, flying both by God’s Spirit and evolution's gift of navigational genius. They fly by nature and grace, in other words, which is what this journal is about—not geese; nature and grace.

I am following the Spirit-led geese home to Arkansas from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. "Reservation" refers to Indian Reservation, of course. Since they call themselves "Indian" on the reservation, I will do the same here. If I were to call them "First Peoples," for example, many of them would not recognize themselves. The Indians on the Pine Ridge Reservation are Oglala Lakota. Occasionally they will call themselves "Sioux."

I have just finished a two-year term among the Lakota as Episcopal Missioner. That means I oversaw the thirteen Episcopal congregations on the reservation and directly served six of them. I worked with three non-stipendiary priests (all Lakota women) and two lay readers (both Lakota men). I learned from all of them, especially Ben Conquering Bear, to whom these reflections are dedicated.

The tuition is high for learning Indian things, religious or otherwise: you have to live with them. Life on the reservation is a difficult and wonderful education. The reservation is a place of painful and beautiful contrasts. It takes significant desire to stay there long enough to learn anything. I am not sure I did.

The Pine Ridge is the largest Lakota reservation in the country; in fact, it is second in size only to the Navaho reservation in Arizona/New Mexico (I think). Pine Ridge is located in southwest South Dakota, partly in the so-called Badlands (where outlaws hid out in the wild-west days).

There is a casino there, but it is so removed from anything besides Indians that Indians are its chief customers. Since most people who bet at casinos lose most of the time, the Lakota people themselves are the big losers at their own casino. They aren’t as lucky as the Seminole in Florida, for example, who bought out the Hard Rock Café chain with their casino profits.

The Tribe runs the casino on the Pine Ridge. So, I guess the money the individuals lose there gets recycled through the Tribe. It seems that only a few insiders really know where the money goes once the Tribe gets their hands on it, however. Charges of corruption are common.

The Lakota casino, "The Prairie Winds," has a billboard on the property of Holy Cross Episcopal Church in Pine Ridge Village, the "capital" of the Pine Ridge Reservation. The Tribe sends the church a check every year. I never asked the church leadership about the propriety of advertising gambling and getting paid for it. I can imagine the discussion beginning and ending with: "People are going to gamble, anyway, so why not?" When one lives in a survival mode, which is frequently the case on the reservation, practicality often decides the issue (but not always. I learned that the Sioux have not accepted the millions that the U.S. congress allotted to them for having stolen the Black Hills from them. The Black Hills are sacred and not for sale, the Indians say. They don’t want the money; they want the land back).

When I arrived on the reservation, the people had just elected a new Tribal President: the first woman to hold the office. She seemed to be in trouble with the Tribal Council from the beginning and stayed that way for most of her tenure. The Council required her to attend "anger management" classes twice. She did not win re-election.

To pay off the tribe’s debts, she borrowed money from another Indian tribe, which like the Seminole, had more profitable casinos. The Lakota had to mortgage land to get the money. Understandably, this made a number of people anxious and angry.

The Indians seem to have a mystical relationship with the land. The land is a living character in the drama of their lives. This is also true for other people, of course—I noticed it when I served a church on farmland in Arkansas—but it seems different with the Indians. Or maybe it is more of the same. If so, then quantity morphs into quality.

Anyway, ferreting out the truth of the various charges and counter-charges of corruption scattered in the wind of reservation rumors would be nearly impossible for a native Lakota, never mind a white priest. Besides, it is their business, not mine. I did not pay much attention to what was happened at the Tribal Council level.

This may seem to be a cynical attitude, but the fact is, it was not my business. I was there to administer the gospel, not to get myself involved in Indian affairs. They have had enough of that kind of white-man "help." Historically, when the white man has helped the Indians, the Indians regularly ended up losing something; land, for example. Being white (not to mention ignorant), I should stay out of Indian business unless explicitly invited in.

As is true anywhere, however, many people on the reservation see a priest as a variously equipped "resource person." So, I was invited in occasionally…as a priest, a "holy man." I could also offer mundane kinds of help when I suspected that it was needed and when it fit within the tradition of white pastoral care on the reservation. For example, when a trailer burned down near one of the churches, I offered the family some money from the discretionary account that I managed. This account was regularly funded by donations from around the country, mostly from church groups. This kind of help was usually noted and appreciated.

However, sometimes the help individual Indians expected from me would not have really helped them, in my opinion. Sometimes the help they wanted perpetuated what they wanted help with. This is true anywhere, of course, but there seemed to be a historically conditioned twist to it with the Indians and whites.

There is an undercurrent of ambivalence running through Indian-white relations on the reservation (I say "whites" and not "non-Indians" because that is the way the cultural divide historically evolved and how it is identified still. There are few African-Americans on the reservation, for example. There are a surprising number of native Germans on the reservation, however). One aspect of this ambivalence in the Indian-white relations is what I would call, "resented dependency." The kind of oppression that the white man has visited upon the Indians over generations has taught them to depend on the white man’s help, and to resent it. Superior armed forces, lies and broken treaties put them in this position. Because of their character as a proud, independent and warrior people, being forced to rely on one’s enemy for survival is crazy making.

This socio-political mixture of dependence and independence is stirred in a myriad of ways by reservation life and produced unpredictable concoctions. Indeed, it made me crazy at times. I revised my hypothesis of "what’s really going on here" daily, if not several times a day. This was particularly true at first. After the first year, I gave up trying to figure things out with much specificity.

I did come to one conclusion that provided me with some guidance, however. I learned that it was absolutely crucial that I be reliable and consistent in my relations with the Indian people, all of them, all the time (of course, other virtues, including ironic humor, were appreciated, too). Given their history with the white man, the importance of a white man being reliable and consistent is a no-brainer. Maybe that is why I understood it. Indeed, I decided that if the Indians could figure me out—if they could see that I was relatively reliable and consistent—then it may not be so important for me to figure them out. They would tell me what I needed to know. Of course, reliability and consistency are steps in the dance of trust. Without it, nothing will work. Some of them betrayed my trust, and I know that some felt that I did the same to them.

Anyway, the reservation dialectics of resentment and appreciation were impossible to analyze, much less anticipate. The people often seemed to resent help both if I gave it and if I didn’t. And yet even when they apparently resented the help I gave, at another level, they also seemed to appreciate it, and vice versa. It was confusing. Thankfully, there are exercise gyms on the reservation (run by the American Diabetes Association—diabetes is prevalent among the Lakota). I worked out my frustrations there. Also, I got a cat.

I found a black and white kitten under the steps of one of the churches the day before my first Halloween on the reservation. Figuring this to be a sign of some kind, I took it home and fed it, etc. In return, it helped keep me sane. She turned out to be an interesting conversation partner.

One evening the cat did not come home from her daily prowling. The next morning, I found her crumpled beside the road. She was alive, but she looked so mangled that I assumed she would die soon. I took her into the house and put her in her chair. When I came home that night, she was still there and alive, but looked as if she hadn’t moved all day. The next day was similar and the days following. She would eat, etc. and then go back to the chair and hardly move. This went on for several weeks. Apparently, she was healing herself. After a month or maybe two, she was well, except for a limp. I was impressed. I thought of this episode as a parable.

The Indians I knew seemed to be moving out of the culture of ambivalence toward themselves and the white man. But because it has been there for a long time, it is a slow process. It takes patience.

*

I came to believe that the confusion between myth and history hinders the Lakota on the Pine Ridge from reaching some of their goals. To defend against the unacceptable reality of generations of oppression, the Indians believe in their myths as if they are history. Until they distinguish between the two, giving to each its proper place and value, they will continue to struggle within themselves. They cannot truly understand their present unless they come to grips with their actual past. But they cannot do this when they do not recognize the difference between myth and history.

It is not so much that they do not know the difference between myth and history, however. It is rather that they regularly argued with me as if there weren’t any. That is, they would as likely argue with me that they own the land as much because of mythological inheritance as because of a treaty with the U.S. government.

Historically, the Lakota migrated into the "Dakotas" from the east, and acquired land like any migrating population does: by treaty and force. This historical version contradicts the mythical one, however.

The mythical story is that the traditional trickster, Uktomni, fooled the ancestors. Uktomni convinced them that life on the surface of the earth would be better than living in their current home under the Black Hills. Once they surfaced, they spread over the "Dakotas" as its first human inhabitants looking for the paradise that Uktomni had promised them. Even though the land was not as Uktomni had described—he is a trickster after all—nevertheless, it was good and it was theirs.

As the protracted debates over evolution and scriptural interpretation within the Christian tradition indicate, distinguishing myth and history, or science, is difficult for all people. When people relate to their myths as history, or science—the six day creation and talking serpents, for example—their myths blind them to the facts of history and science. Of course, myths tell their own kinds of truths, but they are not the truths of history or science. Problems arise, however, when we fail to distinguish the truths of one kind from the truths of another.

For the Lakota to give up the history-like nature of their myth of origin would force them to confront the unacceptable truth that their actual migration is not as unlike the white man’s as they would like to think. They prefer to view myth as history because it differentiates them from their oppressors.

I realize that there is a fair amount of hubris involved in me analyzing the history of the Lakota. This is an example, however, of the kind of hypotheses that one is forced to make when attempting to grasp the dynamics of reservation life. I may want to revise this hypothesis later; but this is how I saw it at the time.

As suggested, and in fairness to the Indian’s alleged distortion of their actual history, we all employ myth to explain our current historical situation, and for various reasons, not the least of which is to defend against the less edifying truths of our histories. The American myth that rationalized much of our greedy expansion into the west over the dead bodies and cultures of its original inhabitants was entitled, "Manifest Destiny." The migrating Europeans defended their immoral behavior as being God’s will!

Moreover, I am amazed, amused and angered at the way Americans of European ancestry often talk about the immigration issues today. They talk as if they are the Native Americans!

None of this should be taken to mean that the Indians did not listen to me. It is only to say that there are some "others" from whom "we" cannot hear the truth about ourselves (and again assuming that any of the above analysis is true). For example, growing up in Arkansas, the word, "Yankee," represented to me much of what I imagine "white man" represents to the Indian. In fact, I have to admit that even now a correcting truth spoken to me by a Yankee is uniquely irritating (especially with those accents of theirs!).

I suspect that I am no more willing to accept a correcting truth from the lips of a Yankee than an Indian is willing to hear such a truth from a white man. Indeed, a correcting truth spoken by anybody has the potential to turn that person into an enemy. "Speaking the truth in love," as Paul admonishes the Ephesians, is hard enough; hearing the truth spoken in love—even by a friend—is often harder; hearing it from a traditional enemy may require a miracle.

This is an obvious, but nonetheless key, point. Some people who study communication dynamics note the difference between relationship and content. Two people may argue over content when in fact the issue is their relationship. Sometimes when my wife and I finish arguing, we will go out to eat. If we cannot agree on a restaurant, I know we are not finished with our argument. It is not that either of us really cares so much where we eat; we care who decides where we eat. It is not a question of content (where we eat), but of relationship (who decides).

Again, and with a few notable exceptions, I was treated with admirable respect by the Lakota people, both church members and otherwise. The people respected my status as a "holy man," and would listen when I spoke in that capacity. This was apparent at the many funerals at which I—usually along with a Lakota medicine man—officiated. The majority of people at the funerals were not active members of the church, but without exception they listened respectfully when I spoke. I’ll say more about the funeral ceremonies later.

In spite of the church’s historical complicities in the oppression of the Indian, this "designated holiness" is still honored. Many of the early missionaries to the Indians were, in fact, noble and loving souls, even if the larger picture of the church’s involvement in Indian life was sometimes neither.

One of the former boarding schools for Indians is on the reservation next to Pine Ridge, Rosebud. The school was named for an Episcopal bishop. Giving everyone the benefit of the doubt, the boarding school experiment was not the blessing for the Indians some imagined it would be. Using soap to wash out young Indian mouths that spoke their native language was one of many traumas the Indians experienced from this not so enlightened Christian benevolence.

However, the Episcopal Diocese of South Dakota under Bishop Robertson made a noble—or at least, just—gesture to the Indians on the Pine Ridge Reservation during my tenure. Nearly all the church land on the reservation was "originally" donated to the church by the Indians themselves, so legally the church owns most (not all) of these plots of land. When the diocese closed a reservation church, it gave the land back to the Tribe (if the tribe would pay whatever taxes might be owed on it) rather than selling it for a profit.

In this seemingly simple transaction of the "gift" of the land to the Tribe, the complexity of reservation life begins to show through, however. For these lands were not originally given to the church by the Tribe, but by an individual Indian family. So, it is not correct to say, as I just did, that the church gave the land back to the Tribe; it was never the Tribe’s in the first place.

But that is not quite accurate, either. It was the Tribe’s land before the Dawes Act, passed in the late 19^{th century, parceled out the tribal land to individual Indians, assuming that the government found the individual Indian "competent" to own land. (Really! After the Indians had lived and thrived on the land for untold generations, some white bureaucrat in D.C. decides which Indians are competent to have land!) Some documents say that the land was held "in trust" by the government—an ironic turn of phrase if ever there was one—for the Indian judged to be "incompetent." It was portions of these allotted parcels of land that were donated to the Episcopal Church by, one must assume, a "competent" Indian, on which to build a church house.}

Some of these lands were not an outright gift, however. Some deeds specify that when the land is "no longer used for religious purposes" it "reverts back to the original Indian owner." When discussions over land get heated, most Indians claim that all the deeds say this, and the representatives of the church forget that any of them do.

Of course, these arguments beg the question of "the original Indian owner." By "original Indian owner," the deeds obviously mean the Indian who came to own the land by virtue of the Dawes Act. But that is not the "original Indian owner." It is only the "original Indian owner" according to government accounting, that is, according to the U.S. government’s "punctuation" of Indian history.

[The above is the best sense that I was able to make of the history of church lands on the reservation. I am willing to be corrected by those who know it better than I.)

In some of my conversations with people who work for the Tribe, I was told that the church land that was "returned" to the Tribe would be "returned" by the Tribe to the family who donated it. With all due respect, I doubt it. First of all, legal records of transactions to verify ownership would be hard to find.

Furthermore, the original allotments of family owned land are legally inherited by the descendents of the "original owners," and there are many descendents by now. In some cases, each individual descendant winds up owning no more than a single square foot of property. Is the Tribe to track down each of these descendents to give them their square foot?

Well, you may say, the family members could all get together and agree to sell their land to the Tribe (or to someone else; white ranchers, for example) and divide the money. First, as I suggested, finding the descendants would be hard enough. Second, getting them to agree to sell the land, much less on a price, would require the wisdom Red Cloud. But that great Lakota leader at the turn of the 20th century on the white calendar, and at the turn of the ages for the Lakota, has been gone for long time.

Furthermore, a bit cynically but nevertheless obviously, it is to the Tribe’s advantage to hang on to the land. Like I said, they mortgaged land to pay off debts.

Finally, the Dawes Act made the reservation property that was not allotted to Indians available for sale. As I understand it, the white ranchers got it at a good price. One need not be inordinately cynical to imagine this to have been the point of the Dawes Act in the first place.

One of the stated goals of the Dawes legislation was to help individual Indians become more responsible ("competent"?). The apparent logic was that a landowner is a responsible individual. This forced conversion of a tribal culture into an individual one shredded the fabric of the Indian life and community that had sustained individuals for generations. At many points, but not all, the circle of Indian life was broken.

Anyway, everything has always already begun. Or as Ecclesiastes put it, "There is nothing new under the sun." When- and wherever you jump into the stream of history, there is always a "before that" that looks remarkably similar. There were Indian tribes on the land before the Lakota got there. The Lakota took the land from them like the U.S. took the land from the Lakota, more or less. The Lakota do not go that far upstream, however, when they tell their story. They punctuate history, too. Ask the Omaha and the Crow. I’ll say more about that later.

Returning to the point—if there is one—just because I was seen as a "holy man" did not mean that the Indians did not tell me the truth to my face, that is to say, in my face; nor is it to say that they always told me the truth. It is to say, I felt safe there.

Indeed, even when some of them were lying to my face, I felt a kinship with them. A love grounded in a shared humanity is the only way to describe it. That sounds weird because loving and lying do not go together—"Love rejoices in the truth," as St. Paul put it—but in the unique reality that is Lakota history, loving and lying live together, often for the sake of survival.

To understand much of what happens on the reservation, one has to keep in mind something I noted in passing above: many people on the reservation are living in "survival mode," and have been for as long as they can remember. This was another conclusion that guided my decisions. The practices of this mode of life are part of the culture. Although it goes against the stream of Lakota virtues, one of these cultural practices is not telling the full truth if it means that you might get money for propane to heat the house when it is near zero and you are responsible for the several generations of extended family that live with you. Caring for family is another Lakota virtue.

Sometimes, when someone would ask me for money for propane or gasoline, I felt that we both knew that we both knew that it was a lie. And we both knew that they couldn’t tell me the truth… for some reason. This awareness grows from our common humanity, and reveals it. As rocky as this ground may sometimes be, trust can bloom there. It is another miracle. If I had the money, I gave it to them; and prayed that it was not for meth or booze.

Along with the respect that was given (although it could also be taken away) to a "holy man," maybe I felt reasonably safe among the Indians because I did not grow up there and was too ignorant to feel otherwise. I was surprised to learn that many whites that had grown up near the reservation did not feel safe on it. In fact, members of the one primarily white church I served rarely came to mission-wide meetings when held on the reservation.

There were exceptions. For example, two more-or-less white sisters (they had some Indian blood) from this more-rather-than-less white church (a few self-identified Indians attended) regularly traveled on the reservation. They had jobs there. To be specific, they worked for the reservation college, the Oglala Lakota College. I was fortunate to teach there as an adjunct.

This college is a locus of hope for the future of the reservation. Indeed, it is a locus of hope for the relations of whites and Indians and for the Christian faith on the reservation.

Let me briefly defend this extravagant claim. As may be clear by now, land on the reservation grounds nearly everything. When Indians and whites meet together, the land on which the meeting is held significantly affects the character of the meeting (and whether the meeting will be solely in English, or if speaking in Lakota is assumed to be equally appropriate). For example, a discussion at a white church among Indians and whites would be different from that same discussion at an Indian church. There is no neutral ground. This non-neutrality affects everything. The land constitutes a sphere of life.

My dream, based in part on my somewhat idealistic understanding of the nature of education as the communal search for truth, is that the college would become neutral ground, a place where Indians and whites could learn and tell the truth together. It is not that yet.

The college is Indian country. It intentionally nurtures Indian culture over-against white culture. This seems justifiable given the historical fact that that Lakota culture has been demonized for generations by much of the white population. My hope, however, is that in time the college will become one place where the full range of truth can be openly discussed without fear of censure. For example, historical questions about the origins of the Lakota migrations into the "Dakotas" could be explored without fear of treading on sacred ground, as could the legal ramifications of the treaties ceremoniously made and unceremoniously broken by the whites. I will say more about this later.

Pine Ridge is the home reservation of Wounded Knee. Many people have heard of Wounded Knee from the infamous Wounded Knee Massacre of the nineteenth century (if not, see below), and/or the book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and/or from the 1972 Aim—American Indian Movement— standoff with the federal government there. Actually, Russell Means, an AIM leader at the time of the standoff, lived over the hill from me. I never met him; I was scared to. I had heard rumors, and I had seen one of his books at the grocery store in Pine Ridge: Where White Men Fear to Tread. Pine Ridge Reservation is where this story begins.

As a footnote, let me suggest a theme that runs throughout these reflections and my experience on the reservation. It is ambivalence. Well, not really. Rather, it is that no one is innocent here—or there for that matter, because there is always also here, one way or another.

2.

An original kind of sin

Of course, the story begins before that. Everything has always already begun, as the German theologians like to put it. Take original sin: it is always already there. This makes original sin a contradictory notion for time-constrained creatures like us—which is not to say that it is false, but to say that if it is true, it is profoundly true. The traditional teaching seems to be that original sin is always already there, but/and there was a time when it was not. This is to say, the story of original sin in Genesis is a myth, the time in which it happened is "mythical time"—which again is not to say that it is false, but to say that if it is true, it is profoundly true.

Along with our mythical ancestors, Adam and Eve, by the time we know what original sin is, we have already done it. In fact, we could not have known what it is without having done it because it is an experiential kind of thing.

[To anticipate, original sin points to the sense of each of us having always already chosen against God, and so, of being organized and oriented apart and away from God. "Original sin" represents the beginning of humanity’s inherited disjointedness from God. It denotes a shared human destiny grounded in existential choice. Like all myths of origins, it assumes the somewhat paradoxical notion that timeless events, events in mythical time, produce historical consequences; in particular, these timeless events limit historical choices. The story of original sin portrays the historical establishment of a spiritual/existential relation with the historically transcendent reality that is God. Consequently, it can only happen once in history, but/and it must be valid for all history. It is a historical act that changes existential history. It is this because it is the point at which humanity established relations with its creator within the emergent freedom that distinguished it from the rest of earthly creation.]

This is what Adam and Eve discovered when they ate the forbidden fruit. They did not merely acquire objective information about good and evil; they came to know good and evil from the inside, subjectively. Their knowledge of good and evil was the experience of becoming guilty of evil.

Things changed for Adam and Eve after they ate the forbidden fruit. Pushed out of the garden by their original sin and God’s judgment, they lost significant options. East of Eden the potential harmony of nature and grace is lost. Creation becomes a reservation, that is to say, an inescapably large prison.

*

Because of original sin nature and grace are disjointed. Traditional Indian spirituality and traditional Christian spirituality seem to differ over how disjointed nature and grace are. Indians seem to believe that the boundaries between nature and grace—such as they will admit to—are much more flexible and porous than Christians seem to think. Indeed, they might ask, "When you Christians point to the incarnation of God in the human being of Jesus, what is that but the acknowledgment of a union of nature and grace?" Christians might respond, "Well, after the fall, human nature and grace (divine nature) are fully united only in Jesus." "Yeah but," the Indians might retort, "how could anyone recognize this perfect union of nature and grace in Jesus unless something of it is experienced elsewhere than in him and explicit faith in him; namely, in us?"

[Of course, the Indian/Christian distinction I just made in the above paragraph is inexact and somewhat misleading since many Indians are Christian...which reminds me of an interesting twist that highlights the tensions between whites and Indians. The predominately white school—located in Martin, a small town just beyond the current boundaries of the reservation—calls their sports teams the "Warriors." The school on the reservation at Pine Ridge calls their sports teams the "Missionaries."]

In any case, Jesus is the union of nature and grace. That is my story, and I am sticking with it. Moreover, this is basic Christian teaching, more or less. When the early Christians asked themselves, "Where does nature stop and grace begin in Jesus?" they answered: "nowhere." Each is always already "in" the other, somewhat like the yin/yang symbol (although I am sure that many Christians would refute that comparison).

[Now, for those theological sophisticates out there, I know that to equate grace with God, as I just did, is also somewhat misleading, in particular since the human being Jesus is Son of God by virtue of his "divine nature" rather than by "grace." Jesus is the "only begotten" of God, while the rest of us are children of God, insofar as we are, by "adoption and grace." While this distinction is true and important, it is a bit beside the points that I want to stress here. These points are that created nature outside of Jesus is: 1) not God; 2) alienated from God (but not because it is "not God," rather, because it has turned away from relation with God); 3) its reunion with God whereby a creature of God is made a "child of God" is due to grace, "unmerited favor."

In fact, confusion inheres in the word "nature" itself since there are various "natures" out there. I want to call attention here to the difference between created nature, the nature of creatures as such, and God. This distinction needs to be maintained even as it is patient of a most intimate union, a union that is accomplished in creatures by the grace of God. This union is in Jesus, as well, but it is not so by grace; rather it is his by nature, that is, in virtue of the divine nature that he shares (being the incarnate Second Person of the Trinity) with the Father and the Spirit.

This, of course, raises the issue that was intensely debated for generations early in the tradition—and that has been revisited periodically since the catholic conclusion in the Nicene Creed—did Jesus have a "human" nature and a "divine" nature? And if he did, how could that be, since—particularly at the time it was first rigorously discussed in the tradition—the two natures were thought to be essentially mutually exclusive? One person could not be both.

Be that as it may, here "nature" refers in the first instance to created nature, the nature of creatures, in contrast to the nature of God, the divine nature. The favor that proceeds from God to creatures that makes them more than creatures, that makes them "children of God," is grace. The status of child of God is not, in other words, a given of humanity’s created nature, many current and ancient religious anthropologies not withstanding. In other words, insofar as we "are partakers of the divine nature," as First Peter puts it, we are so by grace. Jesus was like us in that he was a human being and a partaker of the divine nature; he was unlike us in that his partaking in the divine nature was his by nature as the incarnation of the Second Person of God.]

The early Christian theologians said that from his conception Jesus was always already human and God; his human nature was from its beginning (as manifest/expressed by his miraculous/mythic conception by Mary) fully united to his God-nature. Jesus is the union of God and human being "by nature" all the way down. Similarly, as redeemed creatures, we are to be the union of God and human being "by grace" all the way down.

We are not that now. There are cracks in this union of nature and grace in us. Orthodox Christianity claims that human nature has "fallen" from its intended union with God everywhere except in Jesus.

*

Human nature is not fallen from its original perfection, as St. Augustine for example, would have it. Rather, it is truer to say that human nature is fallen from its original potential, as St. Irenaeus for example, would have it.

The actualization of the potential that is human nature occurs only in trusting obedience to the Creator. This relation is fundamental to the person of Jesus; its absence is fundamental to the rest of us (apart from grace). The willful forfeiture of this relation by us human beings (other than Jesus) entails the loss of our potential to be "a human being fully alive," as Irenaeus once characterized Jesus. Basic Christian teaching is that human beings are not able to realize our created potential apart from the intended relation to our Creator. This "failure to be," as John Macquarrie put it, haunts every human being apart from Jesus.

To fill the relational vacuum left in the wake of its abandonment of God and to compensate for the concomitant loss of being, humanity twisted in upon itself in a perpetually imploding narcissistic tangle. In this condition of being alienated from God, humans have no hope of fulfillment. As Augustine would have it, and paraphrasing his famous saying: "You have made us for relation with yourself, O God, and our creation is unfinished and self-corrupting without it." (Augustine’s exact words are: "You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.")

Furthermore, all human cultures carry the social wreckage of original sin. The "world," in the pejorative meaning of St. John the Apostle, is the collection of social systems that are created and perpetuated by human nature apart from the grace of relation with God, the Creator. The "world" in this pejorative sense is human society built on the foundation of alienation from God.

In other words, human nature without grace is the problem. It is like sex without love: good, perhaps, but not good enough.

*

Before I begin (although I have, of course, already begun), I want to defend the length (not to mention the tedium of some and to some) of the following riff on original sin. Along with God’s salvation in Christ, original sin is the great leveler of human being. Original sin is as much the heritage of American Indians as it is of Europeans and Asians and Africans and whatever else is out there (excluding extraterrestrials, perhaps). Original sin unites all human beings in a common existential/spiritual condition. Furthermore, without the background of the fall, crucial elements of salvation in Christ are under appreciated if not unnoticed. Original sin puts us all on the same sinking ship. Christians have traditionally believed that ultimate rescue comes by the grace of God in the person—the life, death, resurrection and heavenly intercession—of Jesus. While temporary respites from the existential/spiritual disaster of original sin can be found in other religious traditions and spiritual beliefs—lifeboats, so to speak—orthodox Christianity sees Christ as the final step onto the solid ground of eternal salvation.

This exclusivist claim for Christ, however modified by the recognition of grace and truth in other spiritual traditions, is the thorn in the flesh of inter-religious dialogue. Indeed, it was always in the back of my mind in conversations with Indians who practiced traditional Lakota spirituality. It may be worth pausing to consider this.

One of the most poignant of these conversations for me was with a young mother who asked me if she should have her child baptized. She was one of many young Lakota adults who are in the process of recovering their traditional ways of life and spirituality that were nearly destroyed by the colonizing and proselytizing of the white migrations across her familial land and culture. This recovery is integral to healing.

But, I believe, the final and crucial turn on the journey of ultimate healing, of salvation, is into the path of Christ (a turn that may, by the way, begin with the recognition that Christ is the way that one is already on). So, what was I to say to this woman who sincerely wanted the best for her child? Was I to reprise the arrogant religious triumphalism that has marked much of her peoples’ experience of Christianity? No. But how could I avoid that and proclaim the uniqueness of the salvation that I believe God provides through Christ? How would you?

Many people would simply drop the unique claims for Christ altogether (and that not just for tactical reasons; rather, many Christians today believe that the traditional assertions of the uniqueness of Christ overstate the case). I could not. But neither could I proclaim them to her. It was a dilemma.

In general and with only slight exaggeration, the dilemma can be put this way: the church cannot preach Christ on the reservation now without at the same time preaching not-Christ because: 1) the proclamation of Christ on the reservation is regularly heard within the context of the European oppression of native peoples in which Christianity is historically complicit; and 2) this figure of oppression is not Christ. Christ is the redeemer, healer and liberator; Christ is not the enslaver, destroyer and accuser.

The point is: one cannot start from scratch. The preaching of Christ has always already begun—for good and ill—when any of us arrive on the reservation to preach him. Christian preachers need to remember this history. The people do.

Some Indians are not torn between Christianity and traditional Lakota spirituality, as this young mother seemed to be because they have written Christianity off entirely and are totally committed to the traditional ways. The church needs to respect their integrity. My experience is that most of the practitioners of native spirituality will return the favor.

Many Indians with Christian backgrounds are not torn for a significantly different reason, however. It is not that they have chosen traditional spirituality over Christianity (or vice versa); it is that they do not recognize a serious conflict between the two.

This is not to say that they have constructed an explicit theological synthesis of the two traditions. But neither is it to say that they do not recognize the differences. Rather, it is to say that they are bi-religious: they try to adhere to the good that they see in each tradition as their situation in life warrants. As they speak two languages, so they practice two spiritual traditions. For example, the Sr. Warden at one of the churches I served was a host to a large gathering of the Native American Church (which practices ceremonial use of peyote) and regularly participated in the Sun Dances in which his relatives danced. He saw no reason to discuss this mixed religiosity with me, his priest; nor did I see a reason to bring it up with him.

It is unfortunate that I never talked to him about this dual practice, however. He may have achieved synthesis of the traditions (conscious or not), and it would have been helpful to hear him discuss it. But since I was a white priest, it would have taken a long time for him to have become comfortable enough with me to have had that discussion, and vice versa.

But what word does the church say now to those Indians who are in fact torn between traditional ways and Christianity? Given the Indians’ history with Christianity as an import of the European civilization that destroyed their way of life and took their land, how does the church preach Christ now? How can the church be faithful to the good news of Christ and bring healing to a people who have been radically damaged by the bad news that sometimes accompanied the advancement of the "white-man’s religion." What do I offer the young woman who asks, "Should I have my baby baptized?"

I sometimes think that the church ought to leave the reservation for a generation or two. Give the people a chance to become thoroughly re-grounded in their traditional spiritual ways without us. Then the church could return and engage the people with the gospel on level ground. But as logical as this may seem at times, it also seems a council of despair. But despair can be contagious on the reservation.

If you are wondering what I said to this woman, I don’t really remember. I had accidentally taken an extra dose of one of my medications the morning we talked, and I was a bit loopy. I do recall saying that baptism is not a "vaccination," but a ceremony of identification with Christ. And I said that all God’s ways are grounded in God’s nature, which is love.

She did not have her baby baptized in any of the churches that I served while I was there. I have since talked to her by phone about other matters, but I did not ask her about this.

*

To begin with—knowing that we have always already begun and as fantastic as it may sound—according to Christian faith, the historical epitome of original sin and salvation from it meet in a single event: the cross of Christ. Let me explain.

The original sin is the human rejection of God and God’s will. This sin is original because it is the first one committed by humans (according to the myth of the "fall" in Genesis) and because it is prior to and indwells all subsequent personal and corporate sins. It is the first sin and the continuing origin of all sins.

Because of original sin’s indwelling and informing pervasiveness, all sins reproduce it. All sins are characterized essentially by the treacherous disobedience to the Creator that is original sin. As the psalm puts it, "Against you [God] only have I sinned." That is to say, "Against you [God] I have always already sinned and continue to sin in all my sins." In our day-to-day sins, the original sin of Adam and Eve continues. This sin is mythically portrayed in Genesis, and it is historically embodied in the rejection and crucifixion of Jesus.

Because Jesus is the "express image of God," the rejection of him is the rejection of God himself. As portrayed in the gospels, Jesus encounters this rejection to varying degrees throughout his career, and it climaxes in his crucifixion outside Jerusalem in approximately 30 CE. Then and there, the mythical sin of the Garden of Eden enters history with devastating clarity and finality. Jesus’ crucifixion is the historical expression and revelation of this mythical original sin.

As Adam and Eve chose to eat a piece of fruit in the mythical Garden of Eden because it seemed to them a better idea than obeying the Creator, a representative sample of human beings from first century Jerusalem crucified a radically good teacher, prophet and healer for the identically same reason. As the logically deduced, mythical first human beings refused to trust and obey God’s warnings about eating that fruit, this representative sample of humanity refused to trust and obey God’s promises and warnings spoken and enacted by Jesus of Nazareth. And because Jesus would not keep quiet about these promises and warnings, they killed him. I think it is as simple as that.

Adam and Eve could not appreciate the significance of what they did until they had done it. That is the point of the seemingly arbitrary command to not eat this fruit. Since it looked like any other, more or less, they must have thought, "Why not?" It was only as the deed was done that its true treachery was revealed to them; then its "exceeding sinfulness" (Romans 7) was exposed. The same spiritual dynamic is at work in the crucifixion of Jesus.

The spiritual significance of crucifixion of Jesus was likely no more apparent to the historical perpetrators of it than was eating the fruit for Adam and Eve before they ate it. As one of the apostolic speeches in Acts puts it, the people who rejected Jesus "acted in ignorance" (albeit culpable ignorance). Some saw nothing in the crucifixion of Jesus but another lynching of a good person who spoke his mind, a "bitter fruit" left hanging as a lesson for others, or as Caiphas put it, a political "expediency." To some people the history of Jesus is no more than history, just as the eating of the forbidden fruit is no more than "myth."

The full truth of the cross is spoken in language taught by the Spirit. It is the language of human existence as it encounters the love and truth of God. The cross is the place of God’s righteousness, the place of God’s judgment and salvation. It is the place where God judges and condemns sin "once and for all," and where God saves all who would be saved from it, saved from the reign of sin and its condemnation, saved for eternal life. This eternal event happened in history to eternally save history…from itself.

At Christ’s crucifixion, where humanity’s primal sin is historically and fully manifest, God’s historical and eternal salvation from it is fully accomplished and offered. Here the sin of the world is committed and forgiven. Jesus’ words from the cross, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do," says it all...well, almost.

At the cross, by the grace of God, Jesus the Lamb of God suffers the fullness of the world’s sin and its divine punishment/consequence. By God’s will, and Jesus’ obedience to this will, Jesus’ crucified body becomes the locus of sin’s final victory and its ultimate defeat by God. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil becomes the tree of life. This is God’s doing, that of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

"This is the Lord’s doing and it is marvelous in our eyes," as a psalm puts it. The eyes that see the marvel of the Lord are those that see and understand the Spirit’s interpretation of the crucifixion. There is no proof that this interpretation is true beyond the conviction inspired by this Spirit, however.

The cross as God’s instrument of salvation is the proclamation of the church. While the church can offer explanations of it that are more or less reasonable, they are not irrefutable. These explanations should, of course, be crafted in meaningful expressions within different cultural contexts (for example, within some Indian cultures, one might identify Jesus as the universal and ultimate "Sun Dancer"), but meaningful expressions are not always convincing. Reason and experience can argue against them. The various explanations of the church, its theologies, are aids of Spirit that may create the meaning in which true faith may be born.

Preaching Christ on the reservation, as elsewhere, eventually boils down to a witness. It has ever been so. Theology helps articulate the witness in a reasoned fashion. But it too is essentially witness. To witness is simply to say what one sees and/or believes to be true. It does not of itself convince. It may only get someone to look in the direction that the witness points. The church is ever and always John the Baptist who points to Jesus and says, "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world." Maybe some will see and/or believe he is. Maybe some will not. Whether they do or don’t is not in the witness’ hands, but in God’s and those of the one who chooses to take a look.

[Which is to say…

According to the Genesis myth, no sooner had the human race gotten off the ground than it fell from grace. Human freedom was not the cause, but it was the occasion of sin. Sin is the cause of sin. Or, as Soren Kierkegaard put it, "Sin presupposes itself." Sin is always already there in the Garden as possibility in the freedom that comes to earthly light in the first human beings. Emergent within the evolution of complex brains, the freedom of human imagination becomes enamored with itself. It attempts to recreate human nature after an imaginary image of itself.

Mark Twain once quipped: "God made man in his own image and man has returned the favor." True enough, but before man remade God in his own image, man first remade himself out of his own imagination.

Not that imagination is bad, necessarily. It is morally neutral; it can be the stimulus of good as well as evil. As it turned out, however, the foundation of human nature could not sustain the edifice that human imagination tried to build upon it. Human freedom created an imaginary world that could only be maintained by repeatedly imagining it to be real. In the continuous feedback loop of this fallen-ness, we create artificial worlds that return the favor: these worlds create an artificial us. This cycle traps us in a Matrix-like system from which we cannot unplug. Eden’s exit has become an entrance into a world from which there is "no exit" (Sartre): the human reservation.

Before my rhetorically exaggerated distinction between human nature and human freedom leads us astray, we need to pause to be more precise: human freedom is part of human nature. Freedom is not something added to an always already completed human nature. Human nature is open at one end; it is a project to be realized in freedom. Freedom necessarily makes an otherwise complete nature incomplete.

Human nature includes freedom and potential. It is neither the product of our genes nor our cultures, nor a random combination of these. The natural processes of evolution do not fully account for it. Human nature is these genes and cultures, this evolution, as organized according to the character of its relation with the Creator, a relation in which human freedom is integral. Genes and society are necessary but not sufficient ingredients in the human nature cake. It still has to bake in the oven of relation with the Creator. Human nature exists only as it comes to be in and by this relation constituted in freedom.

As was mentioned and contrary to some readings of the Fall myth, it is not true that we are now alienated from the perfected nature we enjoyed in the beginning in that perfected Garden of Eden because we misused our perfected freedom. Our nature was not perfect—that is, complete—in the beginning, after which we inexplicably and perhaps maliciously screwed it up by the willful misuse of our freedom. Rather, our nature was not set in the beginning and we screwed it up by a willful misuse of our freedom! Again, it was not fully set because it included freedom as an integral aspect.

The idea that the logically deduced first human couple was a seed that was intended to grow to maturity in relation with God in freedom is found in contemporary representatives of the so-called Irenaen theodicy (see John Hick for example, Evil and the God of Love). The Irenaen theodicy is the way that Irenaeus, the third century bishop of Lyons (France), explained the creation of man in the "image and likeness of God." The former was given; the latter was potential. Some theologians use this distinction to account for the human condition of fallen-ness so that God is not blamed for it—to justify the ways of God to men," as poet John Milton described his own theodicy in Paradise Lost—and to explain the otherwise inexplicable "fact" of the fall.

Humans, Irenaeus said, were not created complete, but with a potential to realize in relation to God maintained in freely given trust and obedience. The "not yet" that was "present" in this potential, however, was just wide enough for the serpent of sin to slither through and sidetrack human beings from the path down which lay the actualization of our nature in a mature and free relation with the Creator. It is in this sense that humans are fallen: we are fallen from the potential that was actual only in the mind and intent of God.

In other words, human nature can only be found and realized in a natural development that conforms in freedom to God’s desire for us (grace), communicated to us through an open, trusting obedience to God (faith). Apart from this conformity-in-freedom (which does not include sacrificing freedom in order to conform), we will never reach our potential or be happy ("blessed").

Because the French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre did not believe in God he was right to say that there is no human nature. Without God to provide that standard to which homo-sapiens conform or not in freedom, there is nothing to guide our construction of human nature other than the necessities encoded in our genes, and to a lesser extent, the rest of nature and society, our environments. Otherwise, we are absolutely free. In this sense, as Sartre pointed out, freedom itself is the essence of human nature, which means, of course, that there is none other than that which we create in freedom. Sartre’s only rule in the construction of human nature is that it be grounded in authentic freedom and not skewed by the "bad faith" of social conformity. Christianity would add that it be guided by the image of humanity in the mind and intent of the Creator. Christians believe that Jesus is the full historical manifestation of this image.

Again, human nature is a project. We were to co-create it, so to speak, as we grew into it in a relation of freedom, trust, obedience and love (and somewhat in that order, perhaps) with the Creator. Our essence, that without which we are not ourselves, is this relationship (which means that Sartre was half-right: freedom is essential, but not sufficient). Human nature cannot be found within the chemical-biological-physical-psychological-social structure of human being alone. Rather, it is this dynamic structure shaped by relation to the Creator. Within this relation lay the blueprint of our creation; the archetype of humanity is our image in the mind of God. When God judges us, this image of humanity-in-relation to God is the criterion, which is to say, Jesus is this criterion.

Assuming that human nature fell from this potential by abandoning its relation with the Creator, one may wonder if the rest of creation fell also. Some theologians think that it did. Because made of it, we carry the rest of creation in us in a realistic and perhaps mystical way so that what happens to us necessarily happens to it.

To my mind, the claim that the rest of nature fell in human beings is true insofar as human beings are of the same "stuff" as the rest of nature. But this does not necessarily mean that all of this stuff fell when we did. Goose nature did not fall when human nature did. The geese themselves were unaffected, even though the nature that they share with humans due to the evolutionary process of nature fell…in humans. Of course, God’s plans for the rest of his earthly creation may have been temporarily dashed when the crown of it fell. I will not venture to guess what this may mean for extraterrestrials.

*

St. Paul is the New Testament author who writes the most about original sin. He seems to have understood Adam and Eve to be historical persons who created the existential/spiritual condition of "fallen from grace" within which subsequent generations are born, raised and die. From within human history they produced the existential/spiritual context of that history (which is a seeming categorical anomaly that will be discussed in a minute). Although he probably would not have recognized the distinction, by contemporary standards, Paul confuses historical and mythical categories (myths being narratives that function as existential/spiritual mirrors). For us, this is a problem.

Most of us probably think of Adam and Eve as characters in a myth that symbolizes human nature, particularly as it relates to God, perhaps. We may have various opinions about how our nature came to be the way it is, but we probably do not think that it is the historical consequence of Adam and Eve’s decision to eat a piece of fruit. That is, we may think that the story of the fall from grace of the mythical, logically deduced first humans tells us something of how we always already are, but not how we got this way.

For example, we may think that human nature got this way by means of natural, evolutionary changes. We are the result of a sophisticated brain laid on top of, so to speak, a more primitive, "animal" brain. The result of this combination is not a happy synthesis, but the "torn condition" that some commentators claim Paul had in mind when in Romans 7 he complains: "The good I would, I do not; the evil I would not, that I do." The empathy that emerged from the evolution of the higher centers of the human brain made a moral sense possible, while the survival instinct inherited from humanity’s animal ancestors often presented radically different goals, interfering with the moral good the mind envisioned.

Darwin’s theory of evolution was not within Paul’s worldview, of course; nor did he believe that Adam and Eve were merely mythical characters. For him, the Biblical story of the first humans not only portrays the condition in which the rest of us always already find ourselves, but it also narrates the historical reason for this condition. "Sin came into the world through one man," Paul writes in Romans. The coming of sin into the world was a historical event for Paul; sin was not always already there in creation.

In other words, as historical persons, Adam and Eve made existential history. This sounds a little weird when you think about it (of course, "sounding weird" often has little to do with "being true"). They altered the conditions of human existence by an historical act! The reason for the exclamation point is that one can imagine an historical human act altering human history, but not human existence as such. To claim that an historical human action can change the nature of human existence is to mix categories. It is like saying "acquired characteristics are inherited." They aren’t; nor should a decision within history alter the very conditions in which history itself is located.

Of course, this is what myths do: they portray existential/spiritual truths in history-like narrative. Being a child of his time, however, Paul seems to have taken this myth, this history-like narrative of Adam and Eve, to be actual history. We are children of a different time, and we don’t…usually.

Well, it is history if you consider the existential constraints of history as history. The existential constraints of history are historical in the sense that they constrain history! But they are not history in a proper sense. They are not elements within history, but are meta-history. History is an element within them. Changes within history should not change them; rather, history should express them, in one way or another.

To claim otherwise really is a paradox. It is first order change producing second order change. It is to say that the alteration of a single element in a system alters the principle that organizes the system itself. This is not how things are done. Elements in a system and the principle of organization of these elements—that which makes this system of elements the system it is—are on different logical levels. While such a change may put "bottom-up" pressure on the organizing principle of the system, it of itself cannot change the principle itself. The change of principle, even if one describes as "emergent" from the changes in the elements, is nevertheless of a logically different order. It is logically impossible for a change in a given element in a system, of itself and simply by means of its change, to change the principle by which the system of which it is an element is organized. But this is the Pauline claim for Adam and Eve—and for Christ, by the way.

How could this happen? The short answer is: God did it. In fact, this is the only answer. The second order change of the existential system of human being that resulted from the first order change of Adam and Eve’s historical act is God’s doing. Their act did not of itself produce second order change. It couldn’t. Only that which transcends the system can alter the principles that organize the system. For the human system to be reorganized requires a meta-level reality to act upon it. This reality is God. While the change can be demythologized to some degree, there is no getting rid of God as the ultimate cause of it. In the final analysis, it is the result of God’s judgment.

The forbidden fruit in the garden of creation that the first humans ate was the determinative point of contact with the meta-level reality of their Creator. According to the story, it was the locus of obedience or disobedience. This fruit was the "place" where the human system’s relation with the meta-reality of the Creator was determined. It was determined by this reality, by God, in response to the human choice made there. I’ll say more about this shortly.

With all that in mind—or at least some of it—and pressing on to a conclusion of sorts, we can briefly list the options for making sense of original sin: 1) Adam and Eve sinned by a free choice, and so do we; 2) Adam and Eve sinned necessarily, and so do we; 3) Adam and Eve sinned by free choice and we sin necessarily. (OK, for the logical nerds out there: 4) Adam and Eve sinned necessarily and we sin by a free choice.)

If #1, then that means it is as theoretically possible for us not to sin as it was for them. But this contradicts the Pauline assumption, "All have sinned" (Romans 3:23). If #2, then sin is an integral aspect of the nature we all are born with, which of course makes the Creator responsible. If #3, then something has changed with respect to the freedom to sin or not between Adam and Eve’s sin and ours. If so, what changed and how did it change? As was mentioned above, Soren Kierkegaard claimed that after Adam and Eve, human freedom is "trammeled freedom." #4: I will let the logical nerds, who insisted that I include #4, work out the implications of that one.

Anyway, most Pauline Christians, including me, opt for #3: in some sense we necessarily sin because Adam and Eve freely sinned. The question then becomes: how is the logically deduced first parents’ sin transmitted to the descendants? It is here that much ink is wasted in trying to explain this transmission of "original sin" by some kind of natural dynamic. While illuminating in many ways, these anthropological, scientific and cultural explanations do not illuminate Paul’s thought, which probably cannot be made congenial to such modern and postmodern perspectives. For Paul the connection between Adam and Eve’s sin and ours is, strictly speaking, theological. God’s judgment is the connection; as I said, God did it.

God is the connection between this one particular, historical sin, this contingent action, this disobedience of the logically deduced first humans, and sin’s universality. Adam and Eve’s sin did not alienate all humanity from God because of some mystical, social, genetic unity or "solidarity" among human beings. Rather, God alienated us from himself by consigning all subsequent humans to the alienated condition created by the logically deduced first historical act of disobedience: "God consigned all men to disobedience." We can still choose—we are still human—but we do not have the same choices that we had in Adam and Eve in the beginning. We lost our original potential as a viable option by the first human act of rejecting it and by the subsequent judgment of God.

"Original grace" and "original nature" were lost in the single movement of original sin and its judgment by God. The unity of grace and nature was ruptured. This separation resulted in the corruption of our nature, for it is not capable of integrated life apart from grace.

Apart from grace, we develop a so-called "sinful nature." Contrary to Augustine, the acquisition of a "sinful nature" is not due to a genetic change in the innocent nature with which we were originally created. Sin is not a genetic category. "Mutation" can be used as an analogy, but it cannot be an explanation.

A sinful nature is not a congenital condition, but an existential/spiritual one that is mediated by a fallen society. We are not born with this nature; rather we are born into it. Our genetic disposition is as neutral as was Adam and Eve’s. It is shaped by the society into which we are born and by which we are formed. All human societies are characterized, however, by the categorically inclusive condition of existential/spiritual alienation from God and, because of which, every individual necessarily chooses (!) to sin. We are born into a world that is always already oriented away from God. Raised in this world, its sinful ways become "second nature" to us. Our nature self-corrupts apart from a free and trusting relation to our Creator, precisely the relation that was abandoned in original sin.

In this way we can agree with Augustine’s insight that a sinful nature is always already there in us when we decide to do good (and so prevents us from "doing the good we would"), but disagree with his explanation that it is a natural (genetic) inheritance. We are raised this way. We are raised in the existential/spiritual condition of sin that is mediated by society consequent upon the logically deduced first sin and by virtue of the act of God’s judgment to give us up to the "natural" consequences of that choice.

As soon as I am existentially and morally self-aware, I am aware of having a will and desires that orient me away from the will and desires of God (as far as I know them). This orientation is so integral to my self-awareness that it seems to have been inherited at birth. I seem to have been born this way. But because I cannot not choose it does not necessarily mean that I am born with it. It is a "given," but not such that I can say that I was born with it. I was not born a sinner, even though I inevitably grew to be one. And again, I grew to be one inevitably because I grow within the sphere of life given up by God… because of the logically deduced first human sin of rejection of God and his will. I had no other choice, but I still had to choose (this freedom remains), and so I necessarily choose sin.

So, I cannot say that I did not choose the path of sin. I did. I must say, however, that given the fallen nature of the society that creates me in its image, sin was my only real option. Being born into a society the existential/spiritual condition of which is "given up by God," I have no choice but to exercise my freedom to choose (which distinguishes me from other animals) in making choices that are characterized by this condition.

To sum all this up: somebody first sinned; it was a choice; which is to say, humans were not created (or born) as sinners. All the rest of us fell under the condition consequent upon this mythical, theologically deduced, first sin. This universal alienation from God is the result of God’s judgment of sin (and is appropriate to the nature of sin; indeed one could see it as tautological: God’s judgment of sin is simply a true assessment of the nature of sin; i.e. alienation from God. Or in other words, that sin should alienate from God is karmic; and this karma, this underlying moral/existential dynamic is God’s judgment). In any case, the main point is that the heritage of sin is not tied to genes. The categorically inclusive condition of existential/spiritual alienation is mediated naturally through socialization. We each sin by our free choice, and we have no other choice but to sin. We sin the same sin as Adam and Eve—the sin of treacherous disobedience to our Creator naturally reproduces itself in us as we grow in the society organized as an expression of it—and we do not have the same choice not to sin as they had.

Or to elaborate a saying of Augustine: Adam and Eve were able not to sin; as the fallen descendants of Adam and Eve, we are not able not to sin; as redeemed by grace and given the Spirit, we are (variously) able not to sin; in the kingdom of heaven, we will not be able to sin. Of course, being able is related to will and desire, but this is nevertheless a good summary of the changing relation to sin.

Finally, did Adam and Eve really have a choice, the ability, to not sin? This final turn gets a little tricky and may really be wrong, but here goes.

First, as I said above, the original sin is treacherous disobedience to God. Even given the Irenaeus' view that we sinned in Adam and Eve because we were young and stupid, still, sin is not an innocuous, innocent error. The primal sin of Adam and Eve and my personal sins are characterized on their most basic level by the same treacherous act of selfish disobedience and ingratitude to God that is the sin of the world.

In my personal sins, I am reproducing and recommitting the sin of Adam and Eve. In my sins, I am doing exactly as Adam and Eve did because I am socialized in the society that is organized according to the consequence of their sin. Their sin marks my society, and so it marks me at the foundation of my socialized being. To claim that this socialized being is not the real me is both true and false: there is a "me" that is not this socialized being, but it does not actually exist! That is, it exists only as an unattainable image, a lost possibility.

I could have been different, but I am not. I could have learned to speak Spanish; but, growing up in rural Arkansas, I learned to speak (a form of) English. Now English is integral to the person I am. I think in English, and as anyone knows who speaks different languages, this limits what I can think. So sin: it not only limits what I can think; it limits what I can be.

Second, and more to the point at hand, with the evolution of human beings, something new came on the created scene (forget the extraterrestrials for now). This new thing was freedom from necessity. Within this freedom lay the choice to choose God or not. But to allow us this freedom, God must necessarily be absent in some sense. (John Hick, the religious philosopher mentioned above, calls this absence "epistemic distance."). But God’s presence is the power, the only power, by which humans can choose God. God must be both present and absent for us to choose him. It seems to be a dilemma.

There must have been a moment of "natural innocence," let’s call it, wherein we could choose God—and so, God was in some sense/degree present—even though God was also in some sense/degree absent. Perhaps one could say that God was present and absent as one's future is both present and absent at any moment. It was a moment in which God was present as Creator to creature, let’s say, on the basis of which humans could have chosen a more intimate relation to the Creator; "Father," let’s call it. The Creator-creature relation carried enough presence of God-in-grace, so to speak, to enable the creature to choose to accept the invitation to enter the ontological relationship of parent to child that was implicit-by-grace in the Creator-creature relation. Humans would have been "born again" by the Spirit "naturally;" that is, without needing to die to sin in the process. To reject this option resulted not in a status quo, but in the creaturely relation itself being distorted and with it the creaturely nature.

This moment of natural innocence is the Garden of Eden prior to the sin. This is the moment when nature and grace are one. But this moment could not last indefinitely. Because our nature was one that included potential, this was precisely a moment to choose.

Having evolved to the point humans had, to move forward in grace was necessarily a choice. Creaturely development could only pass through creaturely freedom. And, as was just said, contrary to our situation subsequent to the fall, the grace of conversion would not have been required to choose God, on which choice human development depended. This timeless moment of natural innocence, of natural grace, could not last because it was a moment of choice. The rest is history.

Once done, it could not be undone, for it is the first step into history, into the irreversibility of time. It need not have been this particular step, of course, but it could only have been a step of obedience or disobedience that came when human freedom met God’s will.

And finally, if this is true, and if this primal sin is in all our personal sins, then in all these sins, we necessarily freely chose to sin as did Adam and Eve. We always already and necessarily pass through this moment of original sin, repeatedly confirming it and making it ours, on our way to each personal sin. Original sin is the road no longer to be or not to be, but always already has been chosen, one that we necessarily choose in every significant journey of our lives. Only in Christ is the new road reopened. In him, as one who chose a new way of being human, we find the power to choose it. It is a gift of grace.

So, according to the myth, Adam and Eve’s historical decision was to sin, to do "the one forbidden thing," and it established the existential/spiritual condition in which we, their descendents, must choose: sin. After Adam and Eve, we "cannot not sin," to repeat Augustine succinct, albeit extreme, conclusion. As extreme as Augustine’s conclusion may sound to modern, much less post-modern, ears, he was not as radical nor as desperate as one of this spiritual offspring, Martin Luther, to conclude, "Sin boldly [that is to say, acknowledge the truth and reality of your sin], but believe more boldly still". But in both Augustine and Luther’s defense—if they need any—if Christian faith is not extreme, it isn’t worth much, for the world itself is extreme. Ask the Indians.]

3.

Paul, Sin, Law, Salvation, and so on

"The law Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death" (Romans 8:1).

The fundamental assumption in the following analysis of Paul’s preaching is this: Paul’s world is a (re) configuration of the elements of his life based upon the meaning of Jesus as the Christ. Jesus as the Christ is: (1) the person who is God’s (2) determinative, organizing principle for the salvation and fulfillment of creation. Paul often, but not always, uses "Spirit" instead of "Christ" when he emphasizes the organizing principle that is the effect and presence of the person of Jesus in the church and the world. For Paul, salvation is participation through the Spirit in the new gestalt of creation given by God in and through the history and person of Jesus the Christ. This participation involves both new meaning and being. We will explore the advent of new meaning first, and we will consider its relation with new being later.

The true meaning of created being (and the meaning of God for the creatures) is seen only in the "light of Christ." When Paul speaks, for example, of the new creation in Christ, he means that all the elements of creation are reconfigured in Christ (I Corinthians 5: 17). The meaning of literally everything changes in Christ. Within the context of the meaning and significance of Christ, everything is seen in a new perspective.

The element that Paul most frequently refers to in this respect is the Law. In Christ, the meaning of the Law changes from what it was outside of Christ. It changes from "the Law of sin and death" to "the Law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus." It is a gestalt shift.

For Paul, the Law is a composite element that is interpreted and experienced according to either of two competing perspectives and life orientations: either that of Christ and the Spirit; or that of flesh, sin and death. When Paul speaks of the Law as if he were referring to two different entities ("a different law," Romans 7:23), he does not mean a different element, a numerically distinct law. He means the same element, the one Law given to Israel (for simplicity’s sake, the Law of Moses), within a different system, characterized according to a different rule and principle of organization. This identical Law of Moses is "different" depending upon its basis within a given interpretive and experiential matrix.

There is a complication here, however, that is unique to this particular situation because of the range of meaning of the word, "law." As in English, the word "law" in the Greek of the New Testament ("nomos") could refer to a given element in a system and/or the principle or rule that organizes the system itself. So, "law" in the "Law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus" could mean: 1) the Law of Moses within the gestalt of the Spirit; 2) or the principle/rule of the Spirit that constitutes this gestalt within the parameters of which the Law of Moses is an element. Which is it? Because each understanding sheds light on Paul’s gospel message, I guess we don’t have to decide (although if I had to decide, I would go with #1).

The law (principle/rule) of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus transforms the Mosaic Law into a different law than it was outside of the organizing principle/rule of Christ and the Spirit. Within this gestalt of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus, the Mosaic Law is interpreted and experienced as consistent with, leading to, and fulfilled by the person of Jesus and consequently by those who are "in Christ" by the Spirit. In Jesus and so in the community organized and animated by the Spirit, the Law of Moses is fulfilled. That is to say, it realizes its divinely ordained purpose. The Spirit is God’s presence revealing the meaning (and being) of the crucified Jesus as the risen, living and life-giving Christ, the one promised in the Law, and the one who rescues from the condemning righteousness of the Law.

This is the "law of faith" because it is the law perceived through faith in God’s promise fulfilled in the person of Jesus. It is not the "law of works." It is not the Law as interpreted and experienced as requiring individual works of righteousness for fulfillment. The "law of works" is the "law of sin and death" because works cannot fulfill the Law of Moses since (according to a significant voice in the Judeo-Christian tradition) all human works of righteousness are variously contaminated by sin.

The commandment to love God with all our hearts and our neighbors as ourselves, for example, cannot be fulfilled by our works because none of us loves God completely from the heart nor do any of us consistently love our neighbor as ourselves. And it needs to be emphasized that this complete consistency is what the Law requires. Indeed, the Law requires a life that humanity forfeited at the beginning in Adam. It is impossible for us to keep the Law according to any works of our "fallen life." We do not have the life that the Law requires for its fulfillment. Only Jesus’ life is such that it fulfills the Law, both in terms of its moral requirements and historically as the fulfillment of God’s promise in the Law (and the prophets) to save creation.

Moreover, when obeyed according to "works," the Law facilitates a merit system that is precisely the opposite of the intent of the Law. When obeyed for personal reward, the Law, whose moral intent is self-giving and self-forgetful love, cannot be obeyed. Rather, this kind of obedience is precisely disobedience. It is an imprisoning paradox: we cannot obey the command to love as a command (that is, within the system of reward and punishment). As will be more thoroughly discussed as we proceed, this kind of obedience is obedience "according to the flesh."

[Religiously inclined people often think of the moral law as the cure for sin. It is not. Rather, (and this may be a little tricky) due to sin, the moral law has become an instance of the "‘Be spontaneous’ paradox"’(a well-known paradox in some psychotherapeutic circles). This paradox is: the command to be spontaneous can only be obeyed by being disobeyed. Because of the nature of spontaneity, one cannot be spontaneous as a response to a command to be spontaneous. In obeying the command, one necessarily disobeys the content; in obeying the content, one necessarily disobeys the command.

The character of command and this particular content (spontaneity) are contradictory. One can either be spontaneous or obedient to a command, but one cannot be spontaneous in obedience to a command to be spontaneous. Spontaneity cannot fit the frame of command. It is a bit like Jesus’ observation that putting new wine in old wineskins ruins the wine or bursts the skins. So here: if put in the frame of command, the wine of spontaneity will either be ruined or it will burst through the constraints of command. Other things besides spontaneity are like this: love, for example (which Jesus and Paul both claim to be the definitive command of the law).

Love cannot be produced in obedience to a command to love any more than spontaneity can. Insofar as a person attempts to love (solely) in obedience to a command to love, he or she will never succeed. Likewise, insofar as one does in fact love, he or she is not doing so in obedience to a command to love.

Insofar as the moral law, epitomized in the love commandment, is a system of reward and punishment, it is a system of self-interest. In this system, one does the law in order to acquire merit and reward or avoid blame and punishment for one’s self. One "obeys" the love commandment out of self-interest! But, of course, love and self-interest are contradictory. Within the system of law as reward and punishment, then, the content of the love commandment can only be obeyed by being disobeyed.

As content in the system of law, of reward and punishment, the love commandment constitutes a "be spontaneous paradox." It can only be obey by being disobeyed. And further, religion as an institution typically makes such a law of love.

Protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, religions promote love as law. As human, socializing institutions, religions are reward-punishment systems. This is evidence of the fall precisely within those communities that are commissioned to correct it. But the point that should be clear by now is that we cannot correct the fall: every human attempt to correct it in every religion in every culture is always already an expression of it. Indeed, as theologian, Karl Barth, put it, "Religion is man’s last stronghold against God."

Only where religion is not a "work of man" but is perpetually grounded in and by God’s grace alone can it possibly correct the corrupt and corrupting human selfishness that is manifest in religion as a system of reward and punishment. Only in the existential/spiritual sphere of life that is the presence and effect of God’s grace is it possible to truly love. Christians believe that this sphere is grounded in the act and presence of God in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

The condition of grace is the antithesis of sin, both in its obvious forms of violence and injustice against one’s neighbor and in its more subtle forms of hypocrisy and self-righteousness under the cover of religion and moral law. Only outside of the system of law, only under grace, is it possible to love authentically, and so "fulfill the law".

Grace is more than merely a system of "not-law." Such an "antinomian" view of "grace" is often seen as an opportunity to sin without punishment, but this fundamentally misunderstands the nature of sin. Sin carries its own punishment/consequences within itself, naturally by God’s will. Only when the grace that rescues from the condemnation of law (due to sin) is seen as an expression of love can it inspire the response of love which is "the fulfilling [and not the abrogation] of the [intent of the] law," as Paul put it. Indeed, grace is God’s love saving us from the condition of sin. Only in this sphere of God’s saving grace can our responsive love be truly voluntary, and only so is it truly love.

The compulsive character of life under the law cannot produce love. For love to be authentic, it must be removed from the system of law. There must be a "does not have to" character to love. Only in this state of grace, of being accepted and welcomed by God "in spite of" not being an inherently loving and self-giving person, in spite of being a sinner, can one love voluntarily from the heart as an expression of the new being created precisely by this grace. Indeed, as should be clear, "voluntary love" is as redundant as "self-serving love" is contradictory.

Love must be shown to be "attractive" if one is to express it oneself free from extrinsic reward, voluntarily from the heart. This is exactly what the grace of God in Christ does as it removes one from the system of law: it reveals the natural attractiveness of love through the experience of being unconditionally loved (i.e. apart from successful compliance with the law). As St. John put it in one of the most concise summaries of the gospel in scripture, "We love because he [God in Christ] first loved us." The love by which we love God and neighbor is the effect of the love of God for us (accepted by faith).

This portrait of "new being" (Tillich) in grace comes to life in Jesus Christ and to a significantly lesser, but still real, extent in those born of the Spirit of Christ. Those who most truly resemble this portrait have been called "saints." In various ways, these Christians reveal the character of Christ, of human life as God intended it to be from the beginning, of "human being fully alive."]

So, the "law of sin and death" is the single Mosaic Law situated within a different existential-spiritual gestalt than that constituted by Christ in the Spirit. It is Mosaic Law within a system that is structured according to the interwoven principles of "flesh/sin/death."

Paul’s fundamental position is that the Law of sin and death is the Mosaic Law as it evokes and identifies, but cannot overcome, sin. Instead of rectifying sin, this Law is overcome and enslaved by sin. Sin uses the Law to serve its purposes of producing death. Sin uses "the good" of the Law to produce its evil.

The "spirit of sin," let’s call it, uses the commandment of God as an opportunity to reproduce itself within those who are given the commandment. The "spirit of sin" is: "that which is against God." So, when the commandment of God is given, it becomes the focal point of sin’s activity; the commandment of God is the place where "that which is against God" can become explicit and express itself within the creatures for whom the commandment applies. The commandment gives the spirit of sin a target.

The stark contrast of the commandment’s righteous intent and its character co-opted by sin reveals the "exceeding sinfulness of sin." Of course, sin’s use of a good thing to produce its evil, the dynamic identified by Paul with respect to the Mosaic Law, is not limited to this instance, but is a recurring pattern within religious life.

In other words, and returning to the main point, the genitive is possessive. The Law of the Spirit is the Spirit’s Law, the Mosaic Law as determined by the sphere of meaning (and being) that is the Spirit. The Law of sin and death is the same Mosaic Law, but now belonging to sin and death, ‘obeyed’ "according to the flesh" rather than "according to the Spirit."

Conversion to Christ entails the reconfiguration of all things—including the Law—according to meaning of Jesus as the Christ. This is a life process, of course, but it is begun in the moment that one recognizes the significance of Jesus for oneself, the moment of faith created by the Spirit working through the Word of the gospel. It is a process of being "transformed by the renewal of the mind" wherein all things are seen anew in the gestalt, the light, of Christ.

While the transformation of the Law through faith in Christ is the focus of much of Paul’s writings, he speaks in a similar manner about other aspects of life, as well. For example, when he refers to the destruction of "the body of sin," he means primarily the human body as it belongs to and is directed by sin, sin’s body. This same body, once baptized, is called to serve Christ in the Spirit, for it now belongs to Christ instead of to sin. Baptism is the spiritual act of the "transfer of title," so to speak, from sin to Christ. This one body that previously belonged to sin has been identified with Christ in the Spirit through baptism. This body does not belong to sin anymore but to the Lord.

Finally, while it will be argued below that Paul’s conversion was a gestalt shift with respect to all the elements in his world according to the meaning of Jesus as the Christ, this is not to suggest that Christ is merely meaning. Salvation in Christ is more than a psychological reframe. Creation is not saved by redefinition alone; although it is not saved without it, either. Insofar as creation is redefined, given new meaning by the Word of God, it becomes that; it is that; for, as will be further discussed, the Word of God is meaning and being. The divine Word of new meaning entails new being.

Nevertheless, this discussion of Paul so far has focused on new meaning in order to prepare for the following presentation of "conversion" as a change of perspective. Paul’s conversion through his encounter with (the meaning and being) of Christ on the Damascus Road changed how he perceived and valued everything.

The point for now is this. Jesus as the Christ represents a new ordering principle of the elements of creation; he is a new light in which all things are to be seen. He is the criterion of meaning for each element.

Furthermore, not only is each individual element seen anew in Christ, each element in turn shines its new light on every other to which it is related. Each element’s meaning is changed both with respect to the new organizing principle that is Christ, and accordingly, with respect to one another. The elements of creation form new syntheses with one another that variously express "the mind of Christ." Moreover, they do so in terms of their true character and purpose as established in the beginning by God. Salvation in Christ rescues creation from sin and for its fulfillment in the harmony of God.

"Allow me to introduce myself. I am Jesus whom you are persecuting."

Conversion of Saint Paul, January25 (Book of Common Prayer, p. 238-239)

"O God, by the preaching of your apostle Paul you have cause the light of the Gospel to shine throughout the world: Grant we pray, that we, having his wonderful conversion in remembrance, may show ourselves thankful to you by following his holy teaching;

through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever." Amen.

"Meanwhile Saul [Paul was Saul’s Roman name] was still breathing murderous threats against the disciples of the Lord. He went to the High Priest and applied for letters to the synagogues at Damascus authorizing him to arrest anyone he found, men and women, who followed the new way, and bring them to Jerusalem. While he was still on the road and nearing Damascus, suddenly a light flashed from the sky all around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’ ‘Tell me, Lord,’ he said, ‘who are you.’ The voice answered, ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.’" (Acts 9:1-5)

The above passage from Acts of the Apostles is one of its three accounts of Paul’s encounter with the risen and glorified Jesus. Acts was written by the Luke who also wrote The Gospel according to Luke. In a later chapter, we will compare Luke’s gospel account of the resurrection appearance of Jesus to two disciples on the road to Emmaus with his account in Acts of Jesus’ appearance to Paul on the road to Damascus. For now, I will use the Lucan narratives in Acts as context for analyzing one of the more difficult chapters in the Pauline writings: Romans 7.

This chapter contains the oft-repeated complaint, "The good that I would, I do not; the evil that I would not, that I do." This conflict between good and evil has been analyzed to death throughout the Christian tradition, so I will get right to the point.

The answer to the following question is the interpretive key to this section of Romans: What is the good that Paul wants to do, and what is the evil he wants to avoid? For (an anachronistic) example, does Paul want to quit smoking? Let’s say it is. Paul wants to give up cigarettes; this is the "good he would." But the habit is too strong; and he cannot do it himself. So, the evil that he would not—smoke—he continues to do. He is too weak to give up cigarettes. He needs God’s help.

The reason that this kind of explanation of Paul’s complaint is often given is that it surely describes common experience, in one way or another, Christian or otherwise. We all have habits that are harmful to us and/or other people that we know we should quit; but they are too strong for us to change on our own. We need God’s help. Christians confess that God gives us this help through the Spirit working in us and our circumstances.

As true and valuable as this understanding may be in general, it misses the particular point Paul is making here. This is not the dynamic Paul has in mind. Or at least, this is not his fundamental point.

This mistaken view begins with the assumption that Paul is not able to perform the particular act he chooses to perform. But there is another way to begin that gives us a better sense of Paul’s meaning. The problem Paul laments is not that he cannot perform the act he wants to perform. The problem is that the particular act that he performs does not bring the result that Paul had desired and expected. Paul wants to produce a particular good; he performs the act that should produce this good, but it doesn’t. So, it is not the case that he does not perform the act that he intended; it is, rather, that this act that he performs is misguided; it does not produce the consequence he had assumed that it would. It is in this sense that he doesn’t understand his own actions and that he doesn’t do (produce) what he wants, but rather does (produces) what he does not want.

Paul wants two things: he wants the (1) life that comes from (2) the righteousness of obedience to God’s will. He believes that his way of doing the Law is the way of obedience to God’s will, and so is the path to life. But Paul’s way of doing the Law does not produce the life he wants because his way of doing the Law is not God’s way, and so is not God’s will. His way of doing the Law is the way of the "flesh," "according to the flesh" and not the way of the Spirit, not "according to the Spirit." Consequently, the former is the "Law of sin and death" while the later is the "Law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus."

Paul does not realize that this is the case, however, until he meets Christ raised into the glory of God. Only then does he see that what he thought he was doing—producing righteousness and life by obeying God’s will—is precisely what he is not doing. He is doing the exact opposite of his stated intentions: he is producing unrighteousness and death by disobeying God’s will. Paul thought that his way of doing the Law was the way of obedience and life (God’s way, God’s Law), but in the light of Christ he learns that it is the way of disobedience, sin and death (the Law of sin and death).

Specifically, Paul wants to persecute the Christians. His problem is not, for example, that he is too lazy to actually get out there and do it. Rather he does it, and it does not accomplish what he wants it to accomplish: it does not accomplish God’s will and does not bring him life. Paul does not realize that his efforts are not producing the desired results, however, until Christ appears to him and identifies himself and God’s will with the Christians whom Paul is persecuting.

[This is to say, sometimes it takes a significant life-event before we can see the distortions in the judgments we make and begin to adjust the instrument by which we make these judgments, namely, ourselves. Indeed, regardless of its intensity, such an event is by definition "ecstatic." It pulls us beyond the current construction and resources of ourselves—by which we reflectively evaluate ourselves and our actions—to begin anew. So it was for Paul: his internal structures of thinking, feeling and valuing were re-formed when he met Jesus on the road. It was a spiritual transformation through the renewal of his mind (Romans 12:2). He was "born again" (John 3: 24). Only now could he see clearly what he was doing, and not doing. He saw that his "obedience" to the Law had led him to disobey God, thereby producing death, not life.]

Did the Law’s involvement in the production of sin and death mean that the Law itself was contrary to the divine will? No (although Paul had to repeatedly defend his preaching from this accusation). It meant that sin had co-opted the Law through the "weakness of the flesh" to serve its purposes.

While we need to avoid bogging down in Pauline terminology, the "flesh" needs a further explanation than has been given so far. Flesh can be neutral or negative. As neutral, it refers simply to human nature and its various expressions: our evolutionary, biological inheritance, the social structures of family and culture, and so on. As a negative, it refers to this neutral designation but with the connotation of "against God." Living "according to the flesh" is living in accord with the directives of human nature as it is organized and oriented toward itself apart from, and in antagonism to, God. Human nature on its own is particularly "weak" with respect to the things of God, those things that are of the Spirit, one of which is the Law.

Apart from reconciliation with God through faith in Christ and life in the Spirit, human beings necessarily live according to the flesh. But God’s Law is "of the Spirit" (Romans 7:14), not the flesh. So, the Law cannot be properly understood, much less obeyed, by anyone living according to the flesh, which is everyone who is not born of the Spirit.

This is the basis of the desperation in Paul’s lament at the end of Romans 7: "Who will deliver me from this body of death?" Because he is flesh he can only "obey" the Law according to the flesh. But being of the Spirit, the Law can only be truly obeyed according to the Spirit. So, Paul cannot avoid disobeying the Law, and thereby sinning, since he is of the flesh and the Law is of the Spirit.

As may be clear, even when he "obeys" the Law, he disobeys it precisely because he obeys it according to the flesh, which is of course the only way he can "obey" it (this claim elaborates somewhat on the discussion of the "Be spontaneous paradox" above). This conundrum is implicit is his cryptic remark, "We know that the Law is of the Spirit, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin" (Romans 7: 14). Because the Law is of the Spirit and Paul is of the flesh, he cannot not sin even when he is doing the Law, and so he is truly a slave to sin, truly "sold under sin."

Furthermore and finally, even though Paul necessarily sins by doing the Law according to the flesh—which, to repeat, insofar as he is not of the Spirit, is the only way he can do the Law—nevertheless, Paul cannot escape sin by avoiding the Law altogether! He cannot find an existential space where there is no Law so that he can avoid disobeying it. The Law’s scope is universal; it represents God’s will for all people, not just the Jews. The spiritual and moral criteria by which God judges the world is made explicit in the Jewish Law.

So, whether Paul complies with the Law according to the flesh or tries to ignore it, he sins. He is "damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t." Sin shapes all he does; there is no escape from it or the condemnation it effects under the requirements of the Law. "Who will deliver me from this body doomed to death?" Indeed.

How did Paul get himself into this fix? To put it simply and in his terms, he descended from Adam and Eve, like the rest of us (here we go again!). A brief explication of this claim will uncover the more introspective aspects of Romans 7 and the depth in which Paul, as a child of Adam, is entangled in sin.

Adam indwells Paul; and Paul, Adam. When Paul identifies "covetousness" as the sin revealed/stimulated by the law and commandment (Romans 7:7ff), he is alluding to the sin of Adam in the garden. Because covetousness is both explicitly named in the Ten Commandments and implicit in the commandment to Adam not to eat the forbidden fruit, it is the point where Paul the Jew and Adam the generic and original human being meet and become one.

In the Adam scenario, the commandment not to eat the fruit awakened the desire to eat it (opening an existential space for sin’s appearance in the guise of the cunning serpent). As Soren Kierkegaard put it, the prohibition brought the awareness of "being able." The prohibition taught Adam that he could do what was prohibited (else why prohibit it?). Through the commandment, he realized that disobeying God was a real possibility for him. This is how sin, latent in the creation, "sprang to life." It was through the commandment that Paul/Adam became acquainted with sin (as possibility) and tempted by it.

Paul/Adam was tempted and deceived by sin to the extent that he came to distrust and then disobey God. Contrary to God’s warning that if he ate from the forbidden tree he would die, he came to believe that eating it, and thereby choosing disobedience, was the way of and to life. Moreover, by disobeying God, he believed that he could become an "equal" with God. (Implicit here is the—at times perverse—belief that we become equal to and free from the ones we disobey precisely by disobeying them; while we remain servants of the ones we obey, and so not free.) Herein lay the covetousness, the sin and its deception, of Paul/Adam. His covetousness led him to try to become like and equal to God, free from God, by disobeying God. In this way, the primal and intended relation of trusting obedience between the human creatures and the Creator is ruptured.

As was discussed above, time marches on and the pattern of Adam’s sin is woven into the fabric of human life and culture. God abandons Adam and his descendants to the, consequently fateful, choice of sin. Every human being is raised in a spiritual environment that is shaped according to this original sin and its ruptured, distrustful and alienated relation to God. Even religion suffers from its distorting influence. Such was Paul’s experience: the distrustful, covetousness disobedience of the race of Adam expressed itself in Paul’s doing of his religion. Covetous disobedience characterized his way of doing the Law of God. It was this covetous disobedience that led him into the situation of doing evil in the performance of God’s good Law.

Paul repeats the Adamic pattern in his relation with God. Adam’s story is implicit in Paul’s self-analysis of covetous disobedience in Romans 7. There is a twist to it, however. Rather than overtly disobeying the will of God, as did Adam, Paul covertly disobeys it. Paul does the Law, but the underlying motivation of his "obedience" is the very sin that motivated Adam to disobey by eating the forbidden fruit. Paul’s overt obedience to the Law is motivated by the same covetousness that motivated Adam’s overt disobedience to the commandment. Paul’s "zeal for the Law" is an expression of his covetousness. In other words, "it is the same song; just a different verse;" as far as God is concerned, neither better nor worse.

Furthermore, this covetousness extends beyond individual desires to include similar desires for his people. As a Jew, he "boasts in having the Law" and being a member of the chosen, covenant people. He desires to preserve this privileged status before God for himself and his own, and not share it with others, namely the Gentiles. He covetously refuses to be a "light to the nations [Gentiles]." But the Law was given to the people of Israel to share with the world. It was through Israel that God was reaching out with salvation for all people, not just the physical descendents of Abraham. This vocation of Israel was finally fulfilled in the descendant of Abraham, Jesus, who became indeed a "light to the nations."

Apart from this vision of Israel’s vocation for the world, apart from the fulfillment of the Law in Christ, and through faith in him, "having the Law" only "awakens all kinds of covetousness" (Romans 7: 8). According to Paul’s experience and analysis, sin uses the Law to separate Israel from God and distort the meaning of the Law. Only Christ could break through this tangle of self-deceit, sin and death.

The irony for Paul becomes particularly thick here. For it was precisely to the Gentiles that the converted Paul was sent by the Risen Christ to preach their inclusion in the people of God. He was sent to announce their salvation in Christ; and in announcing it, offer it to them.

*

The hope of being delivered from the futility of fallen nature apart from grace is the raison d’etre of most religions. This is true even when, ironically and as worldly institutions, religions fall victim to the very conditions they claim to rectify, as was the case with Paul. The hope of recovering, redeeming, restoring, actualizing, and sustaining human nature is at the heart of most religions. This hope of salvation—however it is envisioned—is a persistent and common human theme.

It seems counter-intuitive at first that a different religion than one’s own could teach one about one’s own. But if most religions are concerned about the same thing, namely salvation (however conceived), then it follows that there might be enriching overlaps among them.

People who write books about the relations among the religions sometimes divide the options up this way: the "exclusivists" are at one end, the "pluralists" are at the other, and the "inclusivists" are in the middle. Exclusivists say, "My religion is right and yours is wrong." Pluralists say, "Our religions are different; not right and wrong." The inclusivists say, "My religion is the fulfillment of yours." This is an oversimplification, of course—as is saying that I am an "inclusivist"—but it is true enough to get the ball rolling.

Since I am, more or less, an inclusivist, I want to clarify something about us (speaking only for myself, of course). The religions that "my" religion fulfills enrich my religion. They are not just fulfilled by it as if they were no more than spiritual placeholders waiting for the truth of my religion came along. Just because their religion has some blanks and forms without much substance does not mean that it is totally wrong and should be completely rejected and replaced. My religion has blanks and empty forms, too (as currently constituted, for sure), and I do not take that to mean that it is totally wrong and should be completely replaced. Some of my religion fills in some of their blanks and enlivens their forms; and some of their religion does the same for mine.

The difference, an inclusivist like me might argue, is that the blanks my religion fills in theirs fulfills their religion, while the blanks their religion fills in mine enriches my religion. That is, it is a question of context: to enrich a religion is to be contextualized by it; to fulfill a religion is to become the defining context of it. "My" religion remains the context of the content borrowed from "their" religion.

Is this a distinction without a difference? What difference really resides in the words "enrich" and "fulfill?" The difference is that the enriched religion can stand on its own—albeit impoverished—the fulfilled one cannot.

Having said this, I must add a final qualification. It comes from Karl Barth, among others, and is implicit in the disparaging remarks about religion that I made above. The Christian religion is no different from other religions, except for Christ (!) As a religious phenomenon, the Christian religion is composed of identical elements as are other religions. The difference is the living presence of Christ himself within these elements. Apart from him, all religions, including the Christian one, are "human works," that is to say, self-serving attempts to secure God’s favor. Far from reconciling us to God, such religion keeps us estranged from him. This dynamic plays itself out in dramatic style for Christian faith: according to the gospel narratives, it was the religious who instigated the crucifixion of Jesus as a work for God.

While these various qualifications will not silence the pluralist charge that the inclusivist position remains arrogantly triumphalistic, at least they allow the spiritual traffic to flow both ways: the fulfilled tradition is not simply fulfilled; it contributes to the tradition that fulfills it. Still, some might see this explanation as rationalizing robbery, not unlike the "white lie" that the Europeans took the land from the Indians because the Indians were not making full and proper use of it

Nevertheless, inclusivism is a strong current in the Christian tradition. For example, the early church Fathers claimed that the wisdom so highly prized in Greek philosophy was fulfilled in Christ. They said that Christ was the incarnation of the eternal Logos, the wisdom of God spread throughout creation and its manifold cultures. These early Christian writers used this Greek understanding of the Logos to explain and enrich their understanding of Christ. Indeed, some of these Fathers practically baptized Plato (as those of the middle ages did Aristotle), and for good reason: he had a lot to teach them about their religion even as, and precisely because, they claimed Christianity to be the fulfillment and correction of Plato’s vision. Christianity could include and be enriched by the insights of Plato even as it fulfilled/corrected them.

Of course, Plato, Aristotle and the Lakota have the right to argue that the roles should be reversed. Nevertheless, the point holds: we learn some of that which is possible in our religion from the truths that we are able to incorporate from other religions; in other words, we learn about our religion from theirs. Learning new things is hard, granted; but what else is there to learn? Learning new religious things is especially hard, and perhaps dangerous. After all, a "soul," whatever that is, is at stake.

*

Consider the church’s proclamation as a parable. A parable is a story that rightly orients a person to the subject of the story. Even though a parable may not be literally, historically true, it is true in the fundamental sense that it portrays us in one or more aspects of our relation to God. The subject of Jesus' parables is God and the character of God's relation to us. Whether the parable of the Prodigal Son, for instance, narrates an historical family drama or not is beside the point. The point is to portray the character of God's relation to sinners, in particular God's welcoming love. To relate oneself to God through the matrix of this story by faith is to be rightly related to God.

A parable is like a compass: it directs us toward God and a true relation with God. Note that it directs us to a relation, not to a place. Or rather, the place to which a parable directs us is a relation, one in which God’s love in Christ rules in our lives. This is the "kingdom of God."

As one’s entry into this relationship via the parable suggests, it occurs to some degree through the imagination. This is not to say that it is imaginary, but that imagination is the mode through which the new reality of God’s rule in grace and truth makes itself known to us and enters our lives. The parables, for example, stimulate our imagination as they portray this new reality. They aim our imagination in the right direction. Through the parables we can imagine God being like the "waiting and loving father."

Imagination may lead to faith. Faith is the conviction that the picture portrayed to the imagination through the parable, for example, is true, not merely possible. Imagination is the faculty of the possible; faith is the faculty of the real; imagination is "maybe;" faith is "yes!" With respect to God and the gospel, faith is the means through which the merely possible reveals its reality and is embraced as true. Of course, all gospel preaching functions as the parables do: preaching is the portrayal in words of the reality of God’s rule in Christ. These words inspire faith by way of imagination.

Even though it proceeds along natural processes of hearing, imagining and believing, faith is a miracle, an act of the Spirit. All faith is inspired. The step of "faith" is either a miracle or a delusion. It cannot be grounded simply in rational proof. It is beyond currently constituted reason—that is why it must enter the mind as possibility through imagination. Of course, if it is authentic, faith will reconstitute reason on higher ground. From the point of view prior to faith, however, faith involves the risk that the imaginative insight—that has led one to the outskirts of faith—may be imaginary. But, of course, the only way to know for sure if the ground in front of you will support the weight of commitment is to step.

Anyway, the comparison of the parables with the gospel narrative is not to suggest that the latter does not entail historical characters and actions. It is to say that the gospel story, like the parables, is an interpretation. Like the parables, the gospel narrative orients us rightly, in this case with respect to the true meaning of the historical event of Jesus Christ.

For example, the gospel story includes the claim that Jesus died for our sins. This is an interpretation of the historical event of his crucifixion. It orients us rightly with respect to the meaning of that event. And—this is an important and perhaps controversial point that will be touched again immediately below—as we are rightly related to its meaning, so we truly encounter its being. The point for now is that the various explanations of the crucifixion, how it can be thought to be "Jesus dying for our sins," for example, are analogies taken from various human activities, religious and otherwise. For example, "Jesus dying for our sins" is like buying the freedom of a slave, "redemption." The death of Jesus somehow functions like payment for a slave’s freedom. (The early church fathers speculated to whom the payment was made, arguing that it was made to the devil. Some may think this is taking the analogy too far). In any case, buying the freedom of a slave is a parabolic expression of the spiritual meaning of the historical event of the cross. It interprets that event so that one who orients himself or herself toward this event in this way rightly orients himself or herself to the meaning of that event, and through its meaning to its being.

Short interlude

And again as the German theologians put it, this salvation by grace is always already and not yet. It is always already here and still to come. This is their way of saying what Paul meant when he said that the salvation we experience now is a "down payment" or the "first fruits" (the first fruits to ripen) of what is still to come.

Those Germans! Germans, I learned, seem to be uniquely fascinated by American Indians. Wonder why? I suspect that it’s the same reason that I married a German Catholic girl from a large family: I’m a Presbyterian boy from a small family of Scots-Irish, Welsh, and probably some English ancestry. Opposites attract. For example, the Germans are punctual, some neurotically so. Whatever the Lakota are, they ain’t punctual.

Indians prefer "Indian time." That means, "when we get ‘round to it.’" Quoting from their Greek New Testaments, the Germans might call it "kairos time." Kairos is not clock time, not "chronos," but the right time, the opportune moment, like catching a wave at the beach.

Kairos time is connected, natural time. It is not arbitrary; it is not clock time, not mangled-to-fit-our-plans time. Kairos is not imposed on nature by humanity’s self-serving twist to the divine charge in Genesis to "have dominion over" creation. It is time according to something besides me and my plans. It is time in time to the rhythms of nature that the geese follow.

Kairos time is connected to the environment. But its connection is not just to the environment of trees and bees and seeds. Because kairos time has become human time, it is connected to the whole environment, as we are. It is connected to the movements of the Spirit as well as of nature. True kairos it the restoration of nature-and-grace.

Because Indian time is closer to nature, it is more graceful than "white time." White time ignores nature and grace because it ignores the grace of God in nature. White time expresses the covetousness of original sin, the desire to absolutely determine life for our own purposes, to decide when things should happen.

"Indian time" reflects Indian history, too. Culturally, it symbolizes resistance to someone else’s time being imposed upon them. It’s a moment when contemporary Indians may hear the echo of the ancestors.

I am not sure if many of them can comprehend what the ancestors’ are saying, though. This is not just my opinion; several Indians said as much in my hearing. Recovering the authenticity of the traditions is the mission of many Indian people. To an outsider like me, however, it seems that they have their work cut out for them, for I heard almost as many conflicting reports of the ancestors’ teachings as there are discordant voices of Christian denominations.

I must add a qualification here. It may be that both Indian and Christian teachings were as discordant in the golden age of the past as they are now. It seems to be a human habit to idealize the traditions of the past. One way we do this is to imagine that these traditions were more uniform both in word and deed than they are today. We often portray ourselves as falling away from the communal unity that existed back then. Of course, we also idealize our progress beyond what may in fact be the case.

Be that as it may, recovering Indian traditions includes recovering the Indian language, as well as Indian time. Language is always a focal issue when cultures mix. I learned to ignore the seeming slight when Indians would "speak Indian" in my presence, even though they knew that I did not understand. This regularly happened in big meetings. If the person sitting next to me thought it important for me to know what was said, he or she would usually translate the gist of it for me.

The elders regularly complained in my presence, and in English, about the young people who do not speak the language. The schools on the reservation are trying to rectify this by making the language, as well as other Indian traditions, a requirement. Ben, to whom these reflections are dedicated, tried to teach me some Indian words. I remember "good" and "God" and "cold" ("Good God, [it’s] cold!" for example).

"Speaking English" is also an Indian expression for cussing. Ben and I regularly "spoke English" when we repaired the church’s riding lawn mower. This was one of the languages that we both understood.

4.

Archetypes as Word: Dream Language

After I graduated from seminary, I had a dream. I am writing this on December 31, 2006, the First Sunday after Christmas Day. I graduated from seminary in 1983, and I still think about that dream. In fact, it is a psychic compass that I use occasionally to orient myself toward God and what God might be saying in my soul. It is a so-called "big dream," one that has a lot to say that is important to hear.

As I suggested above, I’m not sure what a soul is. I think it is as much a verb as a noun. I think of it simply as: us-hearing-God-speak-to-us. We don’t hear God speak to us like we hear a bird, of course—although God may speak to us through a bird—rather, we resonate to God like a tuning fork to its note. Our soul is "our name" that God uses when God calls us, a name that comes into existence precisely at the point where we hear that call. We may have heard the words of it before, but until they resonate in us, bringing our inchoate, potential self into being, we do not hear the words as a call; and so, they are just words; and so, we do not hear them with our soul. Our soul is: us-hearing-God-call-our-name.

"Soul" reminds me of when I was a kid playing down the street. I recognized my mother’s voice calling me before anyone else even noticed that somebody was calling. Life had sensitized me to it. I knew the voice and knew that it knew me. Indeed, hearing it, I remembered who I was.

Using science-speak, soul is an emergent property. It is something that emerges from the physical-mental complexities of human life, but which has its own characteristics. The lower levels from which it emerges are the source of its potential; its actual emergence depends upon God’s call. Or in the poetic words of Genesis, before the "dust" from which human beings evolve can become a "living soul," God must "breathe" into it.

Anyway, the dream…I am a child in the dream. I enter "my house," but it isn’t a house I have ever seen before. The first room past the door is large, more or less octagonal, and made of dark wood. It has no furniture in it except a small wooden table exactly across the room from me, with a mirror hung on the wall above it. There may have been a vase of flowers on it.

A flight of stairs runs up the right side of the room. Near the bottom step of these stairs is a door. As soon as I see the door, I am instinctively drawn to it. I move toward it, and as I do, I remember someone (I don’t remember who) had warned me not to open that door. In part of my mind, I am saying to myself that I am just walking over to the door; in another part of my mind, a quieter and more private part, I know that I will open the door when I get to it. I do.

It is dark. Stairs run along the wall on my left side and lead down to the basement (a mirror-image of the set of stairs that lead up). At the bottom is more darkness. I remember now that I have my teddy bear in my arm. The stairs are made of wood; the wall is old brick. I run my hand along it as I make my way down the stairs. They curve a bit to my right so that as I step onto the floor, I am facing the middle, apparently, of the room. The floor is stone; it is worn smooth and is cool to my bare feet. Then I see it.

It is a statue. It is in the center of the room, illuminated by light that seems to be both coming from the statue itself and, at the same time, shining on it. The statue is of a Hindu god, sitting in the lotus position with its many spindly arms bent slightly at the elbows and reaching up beyond my sight, beyond where the ceiling would be. I notice that there is not a ceiling and that the arms extend out of my sight into a fuzzy dark-gray mist that is the top border of the dream images. Indeed, this "transcending" edge is part of the dream itself. Anyway, I am not sure how to describe the "arms." They resemble roots or limbs of a tree, but also they are thin enough to be ribbons or strings. Furthermore, I can’t tell if they are pushing or are being pulled. Finally, even though it is set in white light, the figure itself is a different color, blue or maybe a light purple. And it has three heads: one looking right, one left and one forward; none seem to be looking at me.

That’s the dream. I have since discovered a striking parallel between it and a cave on Elephantine Island in Southeast Asia that seems to have been used in a ritual of some kind (I have not been to Elephantine Island, of course, but I have since read about it in one of Joseph Campbell’s books, and he refers to it during one of the well-known PBS interviews with Bill Moyers). At the end of this dark cave on Elephantine Island there is a giant three-faced head, lighted somehow (by holes in the cave?) like the one in the dream. It doesn’t have all the arms running up out of sight, though, as did the dream image. The statue is identified as Shiva. Shiva is the Hindu god representing the ever-recurring cycle of creation, preservation and destruction of the universe(s).

[Sometimes Shiva is said to be the "destroyer" while Brahma is the "creator" and Vishnu is the "preserver." However, according to Swami Sivasiva Palani of Hinduism Today, "Siva is the unmanifest; he is the creator, preserver, destroyer, personal Lord, friend, primal Soul…all pervasive energy; the more or less impersonal love and light that flows through all things" (quoted in Living Religions, p. 107, Mary Pat Fisher). Ms Fisher adds: "Siva is often depicted dancing above the body of the demon he has killed, reconciling darkness and light, good and evil, creation and destruction, rest and activity in the eternal dance of life."]

We will now take a dip into the waters of interpretation, beginning with the "arms." I will call them arms because on the few similarly shaped Hindu figures that I have seen, they are arms. A seemingly crucial feature of these arms is that I could not decide if they were pushing or pulling, or whether they were extending up from the figure or down to it. In other words, their origin and the direction of their influence were un-decidable. Their general purpose was clear, however: connection and influence. But again, from where the connection originated and the direction of the influence was a mystery. Insofar as the dream was about the divine, about God in some sense, this mystery of the connection, where it came from and where it was going, is precisely to the point.

We cannot tell where God comes from or where God goes. Indeed, if we could, it would not be God. God is omnipresent, but who can nevertheless be said to "arrive" by making his presence known. As Jesus said in John’s gospel, the Spirit of God is like the wind: "You can hear the sound of it, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it goes" (John 3:8). The origin and direction of God’s influence is an event of the Spirit, and "Spirit" in scripture always connotes the mystery of God acting within creation. The arms represent spiritual connection and influence, the spiritual connection and influence of the Spirit of God, the mystery of God’s presence.

The arms are symbols for the various transcendent and eternal workings of God immanent within creation, always already there, but hidden (beneath and above) from the perspective that sees only the surface, the physical, empirical, one-dimensional, linearly causal aspects of life. Having no physical, local beginning or end, this transcendent causality is like a circle. It is already always there as a whole even though there is movement within it. The movement and causality is reciprocally a-temporal. This, of course, suggests the life of the Holy Trinity (see below). (OK, it also suggests the proverbial "chicken and egg:" when we first meet them, both are always already there causing one another according to a pattern that is currently a-temporal. This is the case even with the Trinity in which the Second Person is said to be begotten of the First Person—the Son by the Father—the Son is "eternally begotten" of the Father.)

The figure suggests that the divine transcendence is of height and depth. Not only does the un-decidability of the direction of influence represented by the arms (from above or below or both) suggest this, but also further, the "god" figure was underground. Moreover, this transcendence of depth suggests the hidden creativity of the divine from which new life and growth proceed (as from the hidden-ness of the seed planted beneath the soil and within the womb). In addition and from a more literal sense of things, the emergence and growth of the plant from its seed that is buried beneath the ground requires the influence from above, namely, of the sun and rain, which are both images of the divine; and for precisely this reason.

If there is both a transcendence of above, of height, and of below, of depth, then one could imagine that they would meet, so to speak, on the "surface," that is, where we are. Where humans live is the point at which transcendence of height and depth meets and acquires meaning for us. The transcendence of the divine, whether of height or depth, becomes immanent in its meaning for us. Otherwise, "beyond" is nothing.

Of course, literally speaking, the influences of the elements above ground do reach below ground (the water sinks into the ground, for example), but that influence is hidden from us on the surface. In other words (and this anticipates somewhat) insofar as the image is of Christ—the immanence of the transcendent—his incarnation in the womb of Mary is hidden from view, as is the actual moment of his resurrection, both of which are imaged by the seed planted and springing forth as new life.

Moreover, the ascending and descending arms suggest the "spiritual ladder" to/from heaven that symbolizes the spiritual journey to God, a journey that presupposes God’s journey to earth. In particular, this journey to God is made possible for humanity by the path clearing, ladder building, spiritual descent and ascent of the Word, the incarnation and the resurrection/ascension of the Word of God in Jesus.

The primary New Testament text for this image is John 1:51. Here Jesus promises Nathaniel—a "true Israelite, in whom there is nothing false"—that he "shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man" (emphasis added).

Following this line of thought, Shiva would then represent Jesus, the Son of Man. Not coincidently, the Son of Man in the gospels is an allusion to Daniel’s heavenly Son of Man, the divine/human agent of God in the judgment and salvation of the world. As Jesus, this heavenly Son of Man has come down to earth to initiate God’s judgment and salvation, and then returns to heaven through his death, burial and resurrection/ascension.

The descending/ascending movement that marks the incarnate career of the Word of God, the Logos, is particularly pronounced in John’s gospel. Christ as the heavenly Son of Man, the Logos, "Word of God that was with God, that was God," descended to earth "becoming flesh"; and through the passion, death, burial, resurrection and ascension returns to heaven, from which he will appear to complete the divine judgment and salvation of the world. Through death and burial, Jesus ascends "back" to heaven, taking a freed and newborn human nature with him. This seed of new life that is the incarnate Word of God descends from heaven; God sends "down" the Word. Being incarnate in Jesus, the Word descends further into the earth by death and burial, is planted in death (it is worth noting that in the catholic tradition, Jesus is said to descend even farther, into "hell" itself to offer salvation to those who came before his advent). The incarnate Word then arises (is "pulled up"), through the power of the one who sent him, into the new reality of the emergent plant of his resurrected life (see Paul’s 1 Corinthians’ image below). As Jesus puts it in John 12, "Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies it remains a single grain; but if it dies it produces much fruit."

Thus, the underground Shiva is the buried Christ, sent and raised by the streams of the light and life of God, the connecting "arms" of the Spirit, to new transcendent life above. The arms that raise him first sent him and then reach down where he is, in the depths of the earth—not only where he was buried, but also from which he "further descends" to "harrow hell"—to raise him back to heaven in his resurrection and with him those bound in the depths of death and hell.

The dream is now primarily about death and resurrection—and so, the Shiva figure. Shiva is the symbol of creation, destruction, and preservation; that is, of transformation; that is, of resurrection. But, of course, to say that the dream is about resurrection of Christ is to say that it is about the incarnation, the death and burial of the Christ, for his life is a whole. Even if one can argue that the resurrection is the telos of the "Christ event," it is that because of the previous moments that are fulfilled in it. The death and resurrection have the meaning they do because of the entire incarnate career of the Word.

Shiva is the symbol of divine creation, destruction and preservation. And so, Shiva is the symbol of resurrection: the new creation that preserves and destroys the old. Resurrection is a transformation as when a seed becomes a plant. Shiva is the symbol for the dynamic of resurrection, a dynamic that presupposes, in the Christian idiom, the cross, the death and burial. More about this below.

But Shiva also represents the Trinity, the three faces in one head, the three personae (eternal "presentations," Persons) of the one Being. This Trinitarian association fits the faith claim that in Christ’s saving work through his incarnation, death and resurrection, the Trinity is present and active, not just the Second Person. The Father sends the Son whose acts of salvation are communicated and made efficacious with respect to creation by the Spirit. There is one God, three Persons; one grace of salvation from the Father in the Son through the Spirit.

Furthermore, the arms could also indicate, in the manner of speaking suggested above, the movement of the divine life among the Persons of the Trinity. As the "font" of divine life, the Father is the "whence" of the divinity of the Son and the Spirit, but not in terms of created, and hence temporal, causality; rather, in terms of eternal relations. Coming from the Father, divine life moves in full reciprocity and eternal co-inherence with the Son and Spirit so that directionality serves only to manifest the unity of divinity and the nature of the reciprocity of divine love and being among the diversity of persons. Indeed, the persons are the terms of the movement of divine love.

The divine love can only be discerned by the recognition of the Persons themselves in their relations to one another. The persons are relational; they are defined by their relations: the "Father" and the "Son" and their relation as "Father and Son" (and so, their being as Father and Son), the Spirit, the eternal conjunction, the relation of love between the Father and the Son (Augustine). As many recent theologians claim, God the Trinity is relational, not only in the Persons, but in the Being which is of course inseparable from—because identical with—the Persons. The Persons are not something other than, separate from, the Being; the Being is relational, as the "names" of the Persons show. The Being cannot be isolated and known in itself apart from the (relations of) the Persons (which is itself redundant because the Persons are the relations of the Being, which in turn would not be what it is without the Persons).

The being is "love," as defined by love of the "other," by the gift of self to the other. Thus the Being of God must be relational. The Persons are "as much" the Being of God as is the Being itself (which is only a manner of speaking since there is no "Being itself" apart from the "Persons themselves."). Maybe one could say that the Being and the Persons are one, and are distinguished as are different perspectives in the created order. But these divine perspectives are ontological; that is, they are not merely perspectives; these perspectives are something. The Persons are God from another angle, so to speak, and each Person creates this angle; each is an eternal ontological angle of being God. The Father is God from the perspective of the relation of Parent; the Son is God from the perspective of Child of the Parent; the Spirit is God from the perspective of the character of the relationship between the Father and the Son: pure love.

The eternally un-begotten Father eternally begets the eternal Son and from whom the eternal Spirit eternally proceeds. This is "movement" without the ingredient of time required for movement of cause and effect; it is the "movement" of the eternal and divine relations of the Holy Trinity. Father becomes Father as Son becomes Son, and Spirit is the movement of this eternal relation.

The well-worn analogy of energy and matter may help. It does elsewhere (see the "resurrection body" below, assuming I get that far with this). Didn’t Einstein "prove" that matter is a form of energy, and vice versa, insofar as they are convertible (E=MC2)? Couldn’t we say that particles are energy focused in a unique configuration in a unique time and space? Similarly, Persons are like matter/particles and Being is like energy: one Being, one energy, manifest in three Persons, three particles, with the added stipulation that this particular energy is not apart from these particular particles (and further, that the relation between the Father and the Son, the Spirit, is like a graviton, for example, a particle that is precisely the energy of relation).

*

Finally, the Shiva figure also represents the Self—to be distinguished in Jungian fashion from the ego. Shiva symbolizes: 1) the incarnation, death, burial and resurrection of the Christ; 2) God the Holy Trinity in this saving action and "in itself:" the "economic and immanent Trinity," as the theologians call this distinction; 3) and the one saved in and by 1) and 2): the self. Following Carl Jung here, whatever else such dream images signify, they represent aspects of the self. We can speculate, then—for Jungian as well as orthodox theological reasons—that the Shiva figure represents: the Holy Trinity focused in Jesus the Christ (event); and the self remade and united to God through Jesus the Christ (event) by the Spirit.

We should first note in this regard that, in Jung’s view, the archetypal symbols for the self and God are interchangeable. That is, the same symbol can function as a symbol for God and the self. The common ground seems to be: wholeness, perfection as completeness, which is typically suggested by circular or spherical symbols—the octagonal room in the dream, for example.

But, as will be discussed below, the self is created by its relation to God. The self is called into being by the Word (in this I am using "self" is a synonym for "soul," as mentioned above). This Word (the Son) that calls the self into being is effectual through the Spirit who, in accord with the Spirit's nature, is the relation of this Word to its hearer, as the Spirit is the relation of this Word to its speaker, God the Father.

But/and if the self/soul does not exist except as called into being by the Word, how can it "be there" to hear the call? Perhaps, as Kierkegaard said of original sin, "it presupposes itself." It is a "timeless creation (!)" called into being outside the temporal order. This is not to say that it is eternal, of course; it is to say that its creation lies outside the casual sequences of linear time; it is clearly an "act of God."

This is to say that the self/soul is the product of the (creative) light of God shining on the human organism as it evolves, is born, created. As the arms of the dream image suggest, one cannot tell "Where it [this light] comes from or where it goes" (again, John 3 describing the Spirit). Further this self is complete as this light of God shines transparently within it. In this way, the reality of God and the self may co-inhere in the same archetypal symbol—as was said, often a circular image. The circle is a symbol for the self and God (again, consider the octagonal shape of the house): as the circle of the self unites the various components of the human organism in wholeness, so God unites the various components of creation in the wholeness of salvation that is union in him. Here the mediation of the Christ becomes apparent as illustrated in the hymn of Ephesians (1:10) and Colossians (1:15-20): he unites all things in heaven and earth in himself. Christ is the wholeness of creation "transparently grounded" in the wholeness of the Creator.

"Transparently grounded" is taken from Kierkegaard’s famous definition of the self, the similarities of which to Jung’s understanding of the self is worthy of more serious reflection than it has received (to my knowledge, of course). Kierkegaard’s definition is quoted in full below.

Christ is the author and pattern of salvation and the "saved" self. Salvation is the movement of the self from sin-and-death, the ruling principle of the old creation, to life in the new creation where God’s grace, love and righteousness rule. Through the death and resurrection of Jesus, life with God through death and resurrection becomes the pattern and movement of the Christian self. Thus, the Shiva figure doubles as a symbol for the Christian self and for Christ himself: the self as being transformed in the Christian according to the principle incarnate in Christ, as "finished/perfected/complete" in Christ.

Secondly, in Jung’s opinion, the self is the union of opposites: darkness and light, height and depth, male and female, etc. This is represented in the three faces insofar as the union of the two "opposing faces" is a third face, namely, their relation. However, while we can surely accept oppositions of darkness and light, goodness and badness, righteousness and sin, etc. in the composition of the human self, we cannot accept them as constitutive of God. Scripture says specifically and for instance, "God is light; and in him is no darkness at all (I John 1:5).

We need to remember, however, that Shiva represents primarily Christ, the Word incarnate in the human being Jesus, and secondarily God in Christ. In this regard, we should note that scripture says of Christ, "Though he knew no sin, he was made sin for our sakes" (I Corinthians 6:21). That is, Christ is the union of opposites. He is the union of God and creation, nature and "grace" in the incarnation; and he is the union of God and fallen creation/nature (sin and death) in his crucifixion (and resurrection). This, the doctrine of the atonement, includes the union of darkness and light—the sin of the world and the righteousness of God—on the cross. The cross is the union of humiliation and glorification, of death and life.

Furthermore, Jesus constitutes a union of opposites that produces wholeness. Christ unites darkness and light in such a way that manifests, not gray, but a transcendent light, a transcending goodness that assimilates and overcomes evil.

The divine goodness in Christ assimilates the evil of the world to itself such that this evil is not simply defeated. Rather the evil is incorporated and transformed by this. Once transformed, the darkness contributes to wholeness (and with respect to irredeemable evil, in spite of itself). As Paul put it, "we are more than conquerors through him who loved us").

In Jesus, the glory of God is revealed in the humiliation not only of God the Word becoming incarnate and constrained within the limitations of human being, but further, of this human becoming the "sacrifice for sin," dying on the cross on behalf of the very human beings who rejected him and hung him there (Philippians 2). To unite us with God, Christ must unite himself with us not merely in our humanity, but also in our sin, our darkness and our death. And so, there is nowhere in all creation that we might not find him "for us," for us because "for God," for the God who is for us. "If God is for us, who can be [stand] against us" (Romans 8:24)

In Christ, God united with sin-and-death in nature precisely to overcome it by the power of his life. By his union with it in the human nature of Jesus, God exhausts it in himself. By the invincible power of God’s divine being "death is swallowed up in life" (I Corinthians 15). His union with death produces life through, and beyond, death.

Thus, Shiva represents the self in the Christian drama of redemption. Shiva is the self as the union of opposites in Christ: salvation from sin-and-death and reconciliation of the creation with the Creator, nature with grace, through the movement of transformation: preservation through destruction and creation.

These (perhaps tedious) reflections are what Jung might call "amplification" of the dream. It is the widening spiral of interpretation that includes all the elements of the dream image that are relevant to the dreamer and the meanings that connect them in this particular relevancy (a relevancy that Jung would argue is universal, "collective," as well as particular). This relevancy is the message of the dream; this relevancy is the dreamer! The dreamer is the web of connections of relevancy inherent in the dream images. The self is this relationship.

The dream shows and promises the self. This is why dreams are often prophetic: they show things that are, but are not recognized, and so that will be, in a manner of speaking, as soon as they are recognized and accepted, that is, recognized as the truth of oneself. They are actual in one dimension and potential in another; the dream unites these dimensions. As a Word of God, a dream is the word of one’s potential being, a being that always already is in the word of it. The dream is like the Word that in the beginning said, "Let there be light." This Word remains "potential" in the perhaps empirically immeasurable time represented by the "and" in "And there was light."

That is why dreams are often thought to be from God: they fit the pattern of divine creation and redemption, of new being, the transformation that is the preservation that endures through destruction and creation. The implicit imperative of the dream includes the indicative: "Become what you are." Indeed, this is often described by theologians (German and otherwise) to be the process of the Christian life: become what you are (have been recreated as) by God in Christ. In this case, become what the dream shows you to be, what you are said to be in the word of the dream. If this word is of God, it is there, and will endure long enough for you to enter it, to be united to it, to become it. It is the form of the self. But it is not yet the self. Let me explain.

The dream images convey the meaning of the self. They portray this meaning of the self, but they are not the self; they picture it. However, the self is not other than the meaning portrayed in the dream; the self is the being of this meaning.

Meaning is the form of being. Archetypes, myths, etc. are narrative forms of being, the meaning of being. However, the being indicated by the form, as communicated by its meaning, is not necessarily present in its form or meaning. It is not the case that being automatically inheres a given instance of its form, in this case its narrative, symbolic meaning. Forms exist, meanings exist without the corresponding presence of the being of which they are the forms/meaning; there are empty forms and imaginary meanings.

The emergence of being in its form/meaning is a step beyond that of the emergence of the form/meaning itself. And the presentation of the form/meaning of being is (or at least, may be) the dawning of the being itself. Its presentation of its form, the proclamation of its meaning, is the medium, of the emergence of the being. Being fills the form of its meaning with itself by means of itself. Meaning is the womb in which being is born for us, or not. The sacraments illustrate this for Christian faith.

In the Christian sacrament of Eucharist (Communion, Lord’s Supper, etc.), the meaning of the bread/wine is changed by the so-called "words of institution," "This is my body/blood." In this instance and due to the action of God the Spirit, this word of new meaning brings the corresponding new being with it, so to speak. This inseparable union of meaning and being is present because this word is the Word of God in which meaning and being are united. This is one instance of that which theologians call "God’s simplicity": there is no possibility of separating meaning and being in God, as there is for us; God is not a composite.

There is a "natural" gap between the expression of meaning and the presence of (its) being when we as humans speak the words of institution, express the new meaning of this bread and wine in the Christian sacrament. Our saying that it is so does not make it so. God makes it so. The epiclesis makes this clear.

The epiclesis is the prayer that God the Spirit will "descend upon us and upon these gifts of bread and wine [as the Word has redefined, re-signified, given new meaning to them, thereby making and] showing them to be the bread of life and the cup of salvation, the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ" (BCP. emphasis added). Were it not for this supplication of and dependence upon the Spirit, we would be approaching "magic," as for example, in the ancient belief that the knowledge of the divine name gave one power over the being of the divine so named. In this realm, the realm of magic, we are no longer operating within the sphere of God’s grace and mercy, but within the sphere of "human work" and the attempted manipulation of the divine. In other words, human expressions of purportedly divine meaning do not make the being of the divine present.

Thus, we can distinguish between the Word of God and the word of man even when the meaning may be nominally identical. As in the Old Testament test for true prophesy, if it is the Word of the Lord that the prophet speaks, it will come to pass; so if the Word is of God, whether in a dream or otherwise, the being will (come to) occupy its meaning.

Philosopher Martin Heiddegar claimed, "Language is the house of being." Assuming that language is meaning, it may be apparent that the house may be built but unoccupied. For meaning to actually house being, a further step is required than simple construction of the house, the mere expression of meaning: being still has to move in. In other words, we might say that meaning is necessary but not sufficient for the emergence of being, at least for creatures that can recognize meaning.

This distinction makes lying possible: we can utter meaning apart from its being. This is not possible, however, when the language is of God, when it is the Word of God. So Kierkegaard could say, "In the realm of the Spirit, there can be no lying."

Returning to the point at hand—which was the dream—before we find ourselves ensconced in the separate study that this topic deserves, insofar as the dream is the Word of God, a message from God, the being of it will be in its meaning, but this is not to say that, in terms of the dreamer, having the dream is to have the being indicated in the dream. That is, the dream images are the meaning of the being of which they are the precursor. They are the first rays of the sunrise of being. However and consequently, the actual being will not be other than this precursor except as its completion; the being will complete the announcement, the promise, of the meaning announced in the word of the dream image. It will fill the description of life with the life described.

The being will come as the enlivening of the meaning presented in the dream images. But/and, it will come of itself, so to speak. We can, of course, interfere with its coming by ignoring its precursor, for example; but we cannot make it come. The being will fill the form, the meaning, in which it has presented itself in the same way that it has presented itself in this form, this meaning: at its own initiative.

So, there is the meaning of the self, its description in the word of the dream image, and there is the becoming of this self, "becoming what you (always already) are" as announced in the dream image. Further, it is not just that you become the image presented in the dream. In becoming it, you are united to the one who is the Word that speaks it. In becoming the self revealed in the dream you unite with the transcendent/immanent Word that is its origin, and by the power inherent in this Word itself, its being.

That is the point of the dream: to show you yourself so that you might become yourself; in this case, for me, through the movement of "Shiva"—preservation though destruction and creation—through union with Christ and in the power of his death and resurrection present in the Spirit. The dream calls me to die to what I am/was in order to become what I am/will be, what I am called to be in the Word of God proclaimed in the dream image (insofar, of course, as the dream is of God). My Shiva dream is a dream of the new creation in Christ.

In knowing Christ in and as this movement represented in the dream image of Shiva I am called to know myself transformed in him. Jesus the Christ is the archetype/prototype of this movement; he makes it himself, he the first, and he is in us as this archetype; and as such, remakes us in it, in him, remakes us in him from the inside out.

That God, Christ and Self can be represented by the same symbols of the collective unconscious in Jung’s interpretative scheme helps us understand this. While Jung’s insights can lead into a serious misreading of the signs of truth, into a misleading Gnosticism in particular, it can also lead into the truth of God and ourselves in relation to God, into Christ. To not follow this path when one is called to it because Jung made some theological errors is faithlessness.

This is one example of how another’s religion—in this case the Hindu image of Shiva—can teach you about yours, that is, me about mine.

*

If all this God-Christ-self unity business sounds too "new-agey" for you, then consider the very non-new-ager Jean Calvin (the "father" of the Presbyterian and Reformed Churches and the Calvin of "Calvinism"). At the beginning of his famous Institutes of the Christian Religion, he writes:

Given this fundamental orientation, it is little wonder that Calvin talks so much of Christian faith as being principally a life of union with Christ. Since Christ is the union of humanity and God, then the self-knowledge housed in the knowledge of God, and vise versa, is the knowledge of Christ, whether recognized as such or not. Calvin was, of course, keen on this recognition and the confession of faith in this Christ. Who can blame him? Moreover, to be precise and fair to Calvin, knowledge of Christ is the knowledge of ourselves as redeemed by God, which is brotherly commentary on the Lutheran, Philip Melancthon’s, famous dictum: "To know Christ is to know his benefits."

Moreover, if Christ is the union of humanity and God, then he is the union of fallen humanity and God—for there is no other humanity than that—and no other name for its union with God in Christ than "redemption." And so, the shadow of the cross falls across the crèche, and Mary’s ponderings of heart will too soon feel the sword pierce that heart of flesh, the giving of the gift of the new covenant in his blood. Indeed, to come alive with Christ is to die with him. The Indians sun dance.

*

Once someone asked Melanie Klein, the great psychoanalytic theorist of the previous century, what she thought about a topic. I do not remember which topic. She replied, "Do you want to know what I think or what I really think?" In that spirit, here is what I really think. I think that dreams like the one above, Jungian archetypes and mythologies and so on are structures of spiritual meaning. This meaning is fundamental and universal. For this reason the various myths of humanity have similar themes and symbols: it is about the meaning of human being. As such, it includes the transcendent in relation to which our ultimate meaning is found.

I think, I really think, that authentic meaning can be present in these mythic narratives without the corresponding being. That is, the word may be true but empty. The human archetypal frames of meaning are simply that: frames. There is no substance to fill the frames. I believe that the word fully is only in Christ. Christ is the substance the meaning of which is variously prefigured in humanity’s myths. In Christ, the word of meaning has being; indeed, this being is the origin of the meaning, a meaning that echoes throughout the world of human spiritual aspirations. To paraphrase the Prologue of the Gospel of John, "The word, the meaning of being in relation to God, has being only in the Logos, and this Logos became flesh in Jesus of Nazareth."

5.

The Word of Resurrection

The "Shiva dream" is a resurrection dream above all—if there can be an "above all" in the system of life that is the gospel. The dream interprets St. Paul’s resurrection metaphor of the natural process by which a seed becomes a plant (I Corinthians 15).

In I Corinthians 15, the only section of the New Testament that comes close to a theological discussion of the nature of the resurrection, Paul compares the resurrection body with (his understanding of) the process by which a seed becomes a plant. The seed is planted in (under) the ground. It "dies." After it dies as a seed, it comes to life as a plant. (To be noted in passing with respect to the "arms" of the dream image is that the death of the seed produces the roots of the tree, for example, that descend and the limbs of the tree that ascend).

The plant both is and is not the seed. The seed is preserved in the plant; but it is preserved through destruction (as seed) and creation (as plant). It is transformed. This is the pattern of resurrection according to Paul’s analogy in I Corinthians 15. It is also the dynamic symbolized by Shiva in the dream: preservation through destruction and creation. The "it" that is preserved in this destruction and creation is the life of the seed/plant, and not the form of the seed.

Paul seems to have believed that this natural transformation was nevertheless an act of God, for he notes in his discussion that God gives to each element of creation the form or body it takes. Paul apparently viewed each transformation of seed to plant as an act of God (as well as, we may assume, an act of nature). In any case, he uses the common experience of seed-to-plant transformation to represent God’s act of new creation in the resurrection, beginning with Jesus.

Paul highlights God’s role in the transformation of seed to plant to indicate that resurrection is a divine act of new creation, rather than an unfolding of the powers inherent in the "old creation." Apart from God’s intervention, in other words, there would be no plant, no new creation, and no life after death.

The new creation is both like and unlike the original creation. Both are a creation from nothing, but the new creation of resurrection includes the being of the old creation that had passed into nothing in death. The creation out of the nothing of death—resurrection—is a transformation of the being that was and no longer is, rather than a calling into being of that which never has been. There is continuity within discontinuity in the new creation of resurrection that is not the case with the initial creation out of nothing.

Like the seed, the physical human body dies. It is "planted" in the ground and decomposes. It is destroyed; it no longer exists. The Spiritual body, the resurrected body given and animated by the Spirit of God and composed of "spirit" rather than of "flesh and blood," comes to be by the creative act of God. Like the plant is a body, so this Spiritual body is a body; and as the plant is not the body of the seed but is a different body, so the Spiritual body is not the body that was buried and decomposes. It is a different body.

"Spiritual body" is oxymoronic insofar as we take "body" to mean the opposite of "spirit." This contradiction is eased if we think, as Paul probably thought, of "body" as the mode of being of a person. The "body" is the vehicle of the person, and it may take various forms, as assigned by God. "Body" need not necessarily refer to a physical reality subject to physical laws. With this in mind, the physical body can be reasonably thought to be preserved in the new creation of the Spiritual body: the person who came to be in the mode of being that is the physical body is preserved in the new mode of being that is the Spiritual body. There is continuity of person amid the discontinuity of this person’s mode of being, his or her "body."

In the resurrection, the physical body is not preserved physically. The physical body is preserved in the idiom of the Spiritual body—again, just as the seed is preserved in the idiom of the plant. Further, the physical body is preserved in the preservation of the person that came to be, in part, through the particular history of this physical body. This person, constituted by the history of his or her physical body, is preserved in the transformed reality of the Spiritual body. This is how the physical body is resurrected: it is raised into the being of the meaning of his or her history as judged by God in Christ; this is manifested in the transparency that is the Spiritual body. The risen body is a body of meaning; it is the being of the meaning of the person as judged by God through the grace and truth of Christ. This claim will be developed below in the discussion of the nature or the Risen Christ.

The physical body is not simply negated in this view of resurrection. Indeed, on the contrary, one’s physical career constructs, in part, the body one will inherit in the resurrection (a point of contact for dialogue, perhaps, with reincarnation). This is the case primarily because the physical body is the mode and means of becoming the person who is preserved in the transformation that is resurrection. It is the "resurrection of the body" in the person of this physical body, in the one who came to be in and through this physical body. Apart from this body, this person would not have been. This physical body continues in the continuing existence of this person even when it—this person’s physical body—is destroyed, as the seed is destroyed in becoming the plant.

As the plant is the plant of a particular seed, so the resurrection body is that of the particular person of the physical body. As the seed is destroyed, so is the physical body; and as the seed is preserved in the creation of the plant, so the physical body is preserved in the creation of the Spiritual body. Again, it is a transformation: preservation through destruction and creation. That which is preserved is the person of the physical body, as that person came to be throughout his or her physical existence. This becomes the Spiritual body.

When the seed is planted, it ceases to exist as a seed precisely as it begins to exist as a plant. So it is with the buried and resurrected bodies of human beings. The question is: what is it that continues throughout this change? It is the person, or in traditional language, the soul.

In earthly life, the person is housed in the physical body, and is identical with it and yet variously separable from, transcending it. In heavenly life, the person is housed in the Spiritual body, and is identical with it but not separable from it. The person is transparent within and through it. Among the differences between the two bodies is that the meaning of the person, the person in his or her essence ("soul"), that may have been obscured in the physical body for numerous reasons is fully manifest in the Spiritual body. Indeed, this meaning of this person created in this physical body is the Spiritual body; as was said, it is the being of this meaning. The Spiritual body is the ontology of this meaning.

It is in this sense that Paul can speak of this Spiritual body as a "glorified body." As the word, "glory" suggests, this body manifests the meaning (honor, significance) of the person, in this case, as given him or her by God in Christ. That is, it manifests not only the history of this individual, but also the history of Jesus imputed to this individual by God’s act of grace. This grace is the basis of this person’s salvation and glorification. In the resurrected life, this meaning, honor, significance, this glory is substantial; it is body.

To be precise, this meaning is the radiance of this body, but the body is no other than this meaning. In order to distinguish between meaning and being while not separating them, we could say that the being is the meaning focused, as for example, the sun itself (being) is its radiance (meaning) focused.

To follow this admittedly odd line of thought, one has to make the imaginative leap beyond the equation: substantial = physical. One must entertain the notion that Spirit can be substantial, rather than merely ethereal, as it is typically thought to be. To insist that something substantial must be physical is anthropocentric when one realizes that "God is Sprit" (John 4). Does one want to claim that God is insubstantial because God is Spirit? On the contrary, God is the measure of the substantiality of being.

In conclusion, in the life of the resurrection, life animated and constituted by the Spirit, life in God, a historical life’s meaning has being. The meaning created in the physical life of an individual constitutes the Spiritual body. This is the mode of being of this person in the life of the resurrection.

A qualification, already noted but which must be emphasized, is that a person's meaning can only be truly judged by God. Further, here the value of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, his meaning, becomes crucial. God clothes us in the meaning of Christ in our resurrection. This is our salvation. Apart from this gift, the meaning of even the best of fallen human existence would perish in the light of God’s glory, as would the planet Earth as it neared the sun.

*

Damascus and Emmaus Roads

As the resurrection accounts of Jesus can be read to suggest, resurrection life shares the reality of God in whom being and meaning are inseparable. This dynamic unity of being and meaning is implicit in the Emmaus Road resurrection narrative (Luke 24:13-35).

In this Lucan resurrection account, the disciples cannot recognize the Risen Christ who walks beside them until they can grasp the meaning of the historical Jesus as the Christ, a meaning that had been thrown into radical question by his crucifixion. Jesus’ resurrected being cannot be recognized apart from his meaning as the Christ because in the resurrection, as life in God, meaning and being are inseparable. As was just said, the resurrected body is the being of meaning.

This section considers the theological implications of the Emmaus story for an understanding of the nature of the Risen Christ. It does so through an interpretative dialectic with Paul’s claim that the resurrected body is a "Spiritual body" (I Corinthians 15) and St. Luke’s narrative of Paul’s encounter of the Risen Christ in Acts.

As has been suggested, the Pauline phrase, "Spiritual body," is at first thought oxymoronic. Surely no more so, however, than a "crucified Christ" was for the Emmaus disciples. These disciples, who had apparently witnessed the crucifixion, could not fit this rejected and crucified Christ into their pre-understanding of the Christ. This pre-understanding—the interpretive assumptions that they brought with them—was based on the traditional reading of the Christological scriptures according to which the Christ is victorious not defeated. Consequently, after his crucifixion, the disciples could no longer believe that Jesus was the Christ.

In order for the disciples to reasonably imagine that Jesus could still be the Christ after his crucifixion, their understanding of the Christ must change. This meant that first their interpretation of the scriptures from which that understanding arose must change. This is the first scene in the Emmaus drama.

The disciples’ anonymous traveling companion reinterprets scripture for them to read, "The Christ must suffer to enter into his glory." This reading inspires them to imagine that Jesus may still be the Christ after all. This possibility, grounded in the stranger’s novel interpretation of the scripture concerning the Christ, was a necessary prerequisite for the recognition that the stranger was the Risen Christ; but it was not sufficient.

As was mentioned earlier, while imaginative constructions of thought prepare the way for faith, faith itself is a further step, a step through and then beyond the imagination. Imagination is the mind in the mode of possibility; faith is the mind in the mode of conviction…of that which the imagination presents as possibility.

The new gestalt of imaginative thought may be real or imaginary. That it is the former rather than the latter is the risk that faith takes. The Emmaus disciples’ imagination was kindled by the stranger’s exegesis of scripture, but this imaginative reconfiguration was not yet faith. Imagination had revealed the path; faith must now step into it.

If faith is the step inclusive of but going beyond imagination, "spiritual sight" is the step inclusive of but going beyond faith. Spiritual sight is "seeing" the object of faith. Since the object of faith is not a physical reality, however, it cannot be seen physically. The object of Christian faith is not just Jesus of Nazareth; it is the meaning of this Jesus as the Christ. Imagination envisions the possibility that the historical (and now crucified) Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ; faith is the conviction that this possibility is true. Spiritual sight is seeing (the being of) this meaning that is believed to be true. It is seeing the risen Christ.

This seeing of the being of the meaning of the crucified Jesus is a resurrection appearance. Jesus is raised into the being of his meaning—as judged by God—and this meaning is inseparable from the event of the crucifixion. The crucifixion is the focal point of the meaning of Jesus as the Christ of God. Without a grasp of the true meaning of the crucifixion, the disciples could not grasp the meaning of Jesus and so could not recognize him in his resurrected body—which, again, is the being of this meaning. This is the stumbling block that Jesus' interpretation of scripture is intended to remove from the disciples' minds so that they can see him.

To be clear, "seeing meaning" is not a mere metaphor for understanding. Spiritual sight is literally, but not physically, seeing meaning. It is seeing the Spiritual being of this meaning.

This claim sounds odd, no doubt. For, among other reasons, "to see" is typically meant only to describe either literal, physical vision or as a metaphor for "to understand." The claim here, however, is that there is a range of sight beyond either of these about which it can be said that meaning is seen literally, but not physically. This is the spiritual seeing of spiritual being, a seeing that necessarily includes and depends upon mental seeing, understanding, but is not reducible to it.

To appreciate this notion in relation to the Emmaus story, consider the situation of not recognizing a physical reality that you are "looking at" until it is described to you (a common example is the various kinds of snow that remain "unseen" by the novice until named). The object may register on the retina, but it is not "seen" because it is not also registering in the brain. It is not registering in the brain because the mind has no or inappropriate concepts for it.

The same dynamic operates in spiritual sight with the notable difference that there is nothing registering on the retina prior to its recognition by the brain/mind because there is nothing physical there to register. There is instead an invisible, Spiritual presence (Tillich, Loder). This does not mean, however, that it is not real or substantial; this does not mean that it is nothing but psychological projection; this does not mean that it is in any way less real than a physical reality; it only means that it is not physical. On the contrary, and to repeat, insofar as it is the manifestation of the Spirit of God, it is incomparably more real and substantial than is any temporary convergence of matter and energy that we call physical reality. Similarly, however, just as a physical reality may not be recognized prior to a verbal description of it even though it is "there," so this Spiritual presence may be "there" but not recognized apart from the communication of concepts appropriate to it, which explain it and point it out. Its being can only be recognized through what it means, which is communicated by concepts appropriate to it.

This is the reason that the Emmaus disciples did not recognize the Spiritual presence of the Risen Christ: their concepts of the Christ were inappropriate for the reality of the Christ, that is, inappropriate for this Spiritual presence. Their failure to recognize his being presupposes their failure to recognize his meaning, that is, the meaning of the crucifixion. For this presence to be recognized and seen, the disciples’ concepts of the Christ (as not subject to suffering and defeat as on the cross) must be corrected. The crucified Jesus as the Christ must be explained and preached in order to be recognized and seen as the Risen Christ, even when he is immediately present, even when he himself—in the personna of the Spirit—is the preacher.

Indeed, it is the Spiritual influence of the Risen Christ himself that informs the minds of the disciples so that they can recognize/see him. This occurs in and as a reinterpretation of scripture. Thus, the first movement of the Emmaus journey is the Risen Christ explaining the true nature of the Christ so that he can be recognized, "known again" by the mind and through faith, and seen though spiritual sight.

To clarify, one may ask, could not the resurrected Jesus still be recognized as Jesus, that is, by means of his physical characteristics, even if he were not also recognized in his meaning as the Christ, that is, apart from faith and this so-called spiritual sight? After all, the disciples had previously identified a particular set of physical characteristics as Jesus. Couldn’t they do that again? Surely the recognition of his meaning as the Christ was not required to recognize this person as Jesus prior to his resurrection. Knowing him as Jesus the son of Mary and Joseph and knowing him as the Christ were two different things; the former could, and did, happen without the other. Apparently, from the logic of the Emmaus narrative, however, this is no longer possible.

In the resurrection Jesus is no longer present in a way that would allow him to be recognized as Jesus without at the same time being recognized in his meaning as the Christ. Jesus is raised into a body such that he is unrecognizable apart from his meaning as the Christ. This, of course, means that he was not present in nothing-but-the-same-body by which the disciples had previously known him, the body that was laid in the tomb.

That buried body had been raised into the substantiality of meaning in the Spirit, the being of meaning that is the Spiritual body, and so Jesus could not be recognized apart from his meaning as the Christ. In an intriguing analogy, C.F.D. Moule suggests that in the transformation that is the resurrection, the physical body of Jesus became the fuel that burned into the fire of the Spiritual body. Or to repeat the Pauline analogy one more time, the seed of this physical body died and disappeared by becoming the emerging plant of his Spiritual body. The seed becomes the plant; there is no longer a seed because it has become the plant. This imaginative scenario would account for the empty tomb without requiring that the resurrection body be precisely the physical body that was placed there. The physical body of the crucified Jesus emerges into the Spiritual body of the Risen Jesus; there no longer is a physical body because it has become the Spiritual body.

Indeed, this is not so different from what happens in natural human development. The body I had as a three-year old child is gone. Where did it go? It became this body that I have now as an adult. The former has disappeared into the latter. If one looked for me as the three-year old I once was, one would never find me.

*

In the Spiritual body, the body of the Spirit of God, the unity of meaning and being is constitutive. Through his resurrection, the being of Jesus became ontologically inseparable and epistemologically indistinguishable from his meaning as the Christ. The mode of the Risen Christ’s "real" presence and recognition is the being of his divine meaning. He has being, so to speak (although to be more precise, he is being; being is not "accidental" to him, as if he could have essence without existence. This manner of speaking of the nature of the Risen Christ intentionally echoes the traditional descriptions of God, whose essence/meaning is to be, to exist, being). The Risen Christ is not a mere concept; but his being is not apart from his meaning, a meaning historically epitomized in the cross.

Through the eyes of faith that see, that mentally perceive, the meaning of the cross, one encounters the true being of the Risen Christ in the Spirit. He is there in and through that mental recognition and act of faith through the Spirit. This is not precisely an apostolic resurrection appearance, however. An apostolic resurrection appearance is the next step mentioned above: spiritually seeing the Risen Christ who is always already present and experienced (though not always seen) through faith inspired by the illuminating presence of the Spirit

If true, this claim raises the important question regarding what it is that is experienced of this invisible, Spiritual presence prior to its recognition? How does the Risen Christ begin to make himself known? While the manner of presentation of Spiritual presence prior to its recognition is mysterious, it has been variously discussed throughout the Christian tradition. Perhaps the most recent and currently well-known description is that of Rudolf Otto’s "mysterium tremendum et fascinens," the sense of awe and fascination inspired by the ineffable presence of the Holy. Using the Emmaus story as a guide, however, it appears that the presentation of the Spiritual reality of the Risen Christ occurs in thought, specifically the imaginative reinterpretation of scripture that "the Christ must suffer to enter into his glory." As the narrative indicates, this thought is inspired by the Risen Christ who is invisibly but substantially present in the Spirit. This thought is his word.

The phenomenon of the Risen Christ making himself known in thought—via discussions among the disciples—is ably argued in Schillebeeckx’s book, Jesus: An Experiment in Christology. The disciples, who had previously abandoned Jesus at the cross, afterward experience among themselves the forgiveness that had, as they recalled, characterized his person and ministry prior to the crucifixion. In their collective recollections of him and his character, they encounter him again. They recognize him as alive and present among them as the Risen Christ precisely within the dynamic of their discussions; and further, as they realize retrospectively, he is the origin and guides the direction of these discussions.

In broad strokes, Schillebeeckx’s reconstruction of the apostolic resurrection appearances fits the Emmaus pattern, and supports the hypothesis that the Risen Christ is encountered as a Spiritual presence who leads the thought of the disciples, through discussions among themselves about him, to the awareness of his risen presence already there. However, Schillebeeckx does not develop the notion that I am stressing here, namely spiritual seeing in contrast to, and inclusive of, the faith that experiences the real presence of Christ, but does not see him. In Schillebeeckx’s view, the disciples’ conversion and renewal of faith amid the awareness of Spiritual presence of the Risen Christ does not lead to spiritually seeing him. Nevertheless, Schillebeeckx seems to have phenomenologically portrayed the nature of the experience.

Schillebeeckx’s image of the disciples gathered and "discussing among themselves" the things pertaining to Jesus, and by which Jesus appears to them, is not far from saying that the Risen Christ presents himself through the Word. Indeed, this image captures the dialectic of the emergence of the Word itself in the discussions of the disciples, as well as that of the personal presence of Jesus in that dialectic as both an element in it and as its foundation, as the immanent and transcendent Word. Jesus is both the transcendent source of the disciples’ immanent train of thought and its destination.

Developing Schillebeeckx’s phenomenological point of view with respect to the Emmaus story, one could say that the disciples’ spiritual journey takes a decisive turn when they recognize that the thoughts that arise in their minds and hearts as they discuss the crucifixion of Jesus are not merely their thoughts, nor in fact, are they merely thoughts. These thoughts are the words of another. They realize that the reconfiguration of meaning (e.g., the divine ordination of the Messiah’s suffering) that begins to arise in their minds and hearts as they walk and talk is a word spoken to them.

Led by the Spirit that inspires these thoughts in them, they "trace" this Word (both logically and phenomenologically) to its origin in the person extra nos, standing outside of them: (the Spiritual presence of) the Risen Christ. This tracing movement is not unlike the way one would follow the physical sound of someone’s voice to the person speaking, or in a different sensory mode, the sunlight to the being of the sun. The difference is that instead of physical sound leading to the physical presence of a person, it is the Word of the Spirit "heard" as thought in mind and heart leading—in an almost physical way, that is, in a Spiritually substantial way—to the source of the Word in the Spiritually substantial presence of the Risen Christ, in whom the identity of the speaker/Word/thought is recognized. The Spirit who voices the Word in the hearts and minds of the disciples "leaps," so to speak, beyond heart and mind—and carrying mind and heart with it—to the Spiritually substantial and immediately present origin of that Word, the Risen Christ. The immanence of the Word—within the disciples’ hearts and minds—"extrapolates" itself from the heart and mind to reveal itself in its independence and transcendence. That which was hidden within the dynamic of the disciples’ discussions becomes salient and then identified as not them, but a third surprisingly but unobtrusively already there. This independently and transcendently existing reality is the Risen Christ in the power of the Spirit and is the source and goal of the disciples’ train of thought. The fullness of the recognition does not occur, however, until the "breaking of the bead," and then retrospectively in the Word that had identified the crucified Jesus as the Christ through a reinterpretation of scripture.

*

These claims make a number of assumptions, of course. The fundamental theological assumption has already been mentioned: God’s "simplicity" includes the unity of meaning and being. As raised into God, Jesus’ being is inseparable and indistinguishable from his meaning. This unity is the Spiritual body of the Risen Christ. Through his crucifixion, Jesus has become "transparent" (Tillich) to his meaning as the Word of God. In the resurrection, this transparency is revealed: the referent of the meaning of this Word is precisely the being of this Word, the person Jesus.

The meaning of the crucified Jesus as the Christ is declared in God’s resurrection of him to glory: "the Christ must suffer to enter into his glory." This kerygmatic claim suggests a resurrection theology of exaltation; that is, Jesus reveals himself on the Road to Emmaus from the status of his glory in God. The connotations of glory—meaning and light—support the thesis that in the Risen Christ meaning is inseparable from being, and that meaning can be seen, literally, but not physically. In glory, meaning is the being of light.

This thesis can be illustrated by comparing the resurrection with the Transfiguration. In the Transfiguration, the glory of Jesus is seen; that is to say, his meaning as Son of God is revealed, and there is a radiance of heavenly light within and around him. His revealed meaning and this (spiritually) visible radiance of light are one and the same reality, namely his glory.

Transfiguration is not a mere metaphor for insight into his meaning, nor is it a mere "light show." It is a "third thing." The disciples literally, but not physically, see light as they come to recognize Jesus’ significance as the Son of God. They see light as the substantiality of meaning perceived by the mind in faith. The transfiguration is a moment of God’s presence in which the inherent union of meaning and being in God is experienced by the disciples in the person of Jesus, the Son of God.

This "third thing"—neither mere insight, nor light show—is mentioned in the writings of St. Gregory of Palamas. Vladimir Lossky summarizes Palamas’ thought regarding the Transfiguration this way: "The Hagioritic Tome distinguishes: 1) sensible light, (2) the light of intelligence, (3) the uncreated light which surpasses both the others equally." It is the latter that, according to Palamas, the disciples encountered on the Mount of Transfiguration. Palamas himself writes:

That which Palamas describes as "above all sense and intellect" is spiritual sight. It includes in its own manner both physical sight and mental insight, transforming them to accommodate its own nature. It is the mode of the Transfiguration and of the apostolic resurrection appearances, the mode in and by which the Risen Christ is seen.

There is a difference, however, between the Transfiguration and resurrection appearances. In the Transfiguration both the physical body of Jesus and his spiritual glory were "seen." Indeed, one could imagine someone peering over a rock and seeing the physical Jesus but not seeing the glory that was granted to the disciples to see. Such would not be the case in the resurrection. In the resurrection, Jesus’ physical body is "converted" to glory such that he cannot be seen at all apart from his meaning as the Christ in the Spiritual radiance of God’s presence.

Before discussing Paul’s experience of this light and meaning of the Risen Christ, a quick summary and final elaboration may be helpful. The main points are these: 1) the Risen Christ is present in the body of the Spirit, which includes his physical, historical reality in the idiom of meaning (recognized by thought, imagination and belief; see #3); 2) this body includes both meaning and being in a divine unity; 3) through ("preached") meaning, this being of Christ is recognized, his substantial Spiritual presence is identified and experienced in faith; 4) there is a further step beyond this recognition of the invisible presence (being) of the Risen Christ through his meaning in the Word through faith, and that is seeing via spiritual sight the Spiritual substantiality of the Risen Christ. This final step is, strictly speaking, that of an apostolic appearance of the Risen Christ.

It needs to be made clear that in this view all that Jesus was before the resurrection, he still is after it. He has not become a ghost; he has not become an insubstantial "shade" (Robinson, Riley; a concern that may have motivated the narrative strategy of the later accounts in which the physicality of the Risen Christ is unmistakably portrayed). On the contrary, in the resurrection, Jesus is not less than he was; he is more; or perhaps, rather, the more he always was is eternally revealed. The substantiality of the physical is taken up and converted into the substantiality of the Spirit, where meaning is ontologically inseparable and epistemologically indistinguishable from being. The meaning, as declared by God, established in the history of Jesus, and so in his physical body, is reconstituted in the body of the Spirit. This body, which is the reality of Jesus in the flesh is "encoded," "converted," "sublated" in the meaning established in that flesh as judged by God; this is how his flesh is raised a Spiritual body.

As was said, the empty tomb represents this transformation. The physical is gone; the body of Jesus is not physical anymore. As the angels said to the first disciples to arrive at the tomb, "He is not here." The physical that can be "held" (John) within time and space has been taken up into the transcendent reality of God and is ubiquitously present in the Spirit.

Finally, and likewise, since the substantiality of Christ’s Spiritual body is more substantial than is a physical body, it is understandable, indeed it is more appropriate, to say that it can be touched rather than that it cannot. It is more appropriate in general to ascribe physical qualities to it than not, even though such descriptions must be taken analogically, rather than literally.

In this, one could follow Aquinas’ claim that the characteristics of God are not to be ascribed univocally to both God and humanity, nor in a merely equivocal way, but in an analogical way. That is, it is more appropriate to say that God is just, for example, than unjust; but God’s justice is not simply identical with human notions and experiences of justice. God is "just" neither univocally nor equivocally, but analogically. So with the Risen Christ: it is more appropriate to say that he is physically present than not, but he is physically present in an analogical manner in the substantiality of the glorified body consisting of and given by virtue of ontological union with God who is Spirit.

[In this, one can glimpse the connections between the resurrection appearances of the apostolic era that revealed the union of God and Jesus the Risen Christ and the Christological dogma of the post apostolic church, in particular the commuinicato idiomatum in which the attributes of God can be attributed to the incarnation, which is itself the historical life of Jesus seen through the lens of the resurrection.]

*

Now to Paul. The problem with interpreting Paul’s experience of the Risen Christ is that Paul himself is so reticent in describing it. A relatively detailed account occurs in Acts (the Damascus Road appearance), but at issue in this account is Luke’s theological bias. Luke seems reluctant to consider Paul a full equal with the apostles, and so Luke’s presentation of the appearance to Paul is ambivalent, suggesting that it was not a true apostolic appearance. Thus, while one can make reasonable claims regarding Paul’s experience, by the nature of the evidence they must be hypothetical. With that qualification, I will simply present a reasonable account that fits what has been said so far.

Following Reginald Fuller, it can be posited that within Luke’s redaction in Acts, something of the actual resurrection appearance to Paul is retained.

Perhaps one can see here the theological similarities between Fuller’s characterization of Luke’s account of Paul’s Damascus Road encounter with the Risen Christ and that of the Lucan narrative of the two disciples on the Emmaus Road. While there is no denying the differences in these accounts, the implicit theological patterns that structure each of them suggests that they stem from the same foundational tradition. Although reworked in significantly different directions according to Luke’s apologetic purposes, the underlying theological motif of both seems to be: the being of the Risen Christ is inseparable from the meaning of the crucified Jesus as the Christ.

Of particular note here is that in Luke’s accounts of Paul’s Damascus Road experience, the blinding light is identified as Jesus whom Paul is persecuting. While it cannot be argued here, it is fair to say that the offense that Paul the Pharisee found in the church’s proclamation of Jesus as the Christ, and so the reason that he was persecuting the church (and so, Jesus), is precisely that Jesus was crucified. Like the Emmaus disciples, Paul found the cross of the Messiah a "stumbling block." Similarly for Paul, recognition of the Risen Christ entailed overcoming this stumbling block and recognizing that this crucified Jesus is the Christ. In other words, the light that Paul encountered is both the being of the Risen Christ, and the revelation of the crucified Jesus as the Christ, the meaning of Jesus and of the Christ that is revealed—whether recognized then or not—in the cross. It is to this point to remember that Paul the Apostle characterized his preaching, and those of the other apostles, this way: "…we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God" (I Corinthians 1:23-24).

In sum, each of these Lucan narratives of the resurrection appearances (to Paul in Acts and the anonymous disciples on the Road to Emmaus in his gospel) portrays in its own, and very different, way the ineffable reality that is the union of meaning and being in the Christ, the crucified and risen Jesus, who was raised into and by the glory of God.

If Fuller’s characterization is true, then it may be that Paul would agree in general with Luke’s narration of his Damascus Road experience in Acts, but disagree with Luke’s apparent assessment of it that it was not an apostolic resurrection appearance (As Fuller notes, Luke thought of apostolic resurrection appearances differently than is entailed in his description of the appearance to Paul.). Certainly in Paul’s estimation, the "heavenly vision," as Luke refers to it, of Christ in glory that apprehended him on the road was an apostolic resurrection appearance.

[Furthermore, if this is true, then Paul’s account of "revelations and visions of the Lord" in 2 Corinthians 12 might not be as phenomenongically unlike his apostolic encounter on the Road to Damascus as is often assumed (which, again, may be precisely the point Luke is making in his description of the Damascus encounter, although with the purpose of implying that it was not, therefore, a resurrection appearance like that of the original apostles; again, a distinction of which Paul seems unaware; see especially I Corinthians 15: 1-11). Consequently, the nature of the resurrection appearance becomes equally as ambiguous as the visions and revelations of the Lord, about which Paul repeatedly protests that he couldn’t even say of a particular event "whether [it occurred] in the body or out of the body." That is to say, Paul’s experience of the Risen Christ was ecstatic and ineffable.]

Perhaps the most that can be said of Paul’s experience is that of Fuller’s characterization: it was a "vision of light," and a "communication of meaning." The being of light, the Risen Christ, was a manifestation of the meaning of Jesus who was crucified and raised into his glory in God. This being and meaning of/that was this light was the being and meaning of/that was the Lord’s Spiritual body.

In an excellent discussion of Paul’s encounter with the Risen Christ, James Dunn makes several cogent comments that seem to agree in substance with this conclusion. First, agreeing with Willie Marxsen, he says that … "Paul’s conversion can [not] be reduced to mental perception [and yet] we must not deny that subjective mental perception was also integral to that experience" (emphasis added, p.106). He goes on to say, "It seems impossible … to deny the subjectivity of the resurrection appearance to Paul. His seeing of Jesus on the road to Damascus cannot be described as physical perception." In other words, Paul’s experience was neither purely mental nor purely physical; it was, perhaps, as designated above (and in accord with Palamas’ description of the Transfiguration), a "third thing."

After his illuminating discussion of the nature of this "third thing," Dunn concludes:

Paul’s experience of the Risen Christ cannot be adequately described as either objective or subjective. It was a participatory and transformational event that transcended and united subjective and objective dimensions of reality. The revelation occurred both in him and to him: "… God was pleased to reveal his Son to/in me" (Galatians 1:16). To claim that it was one or the other—to or in, objective or subjective—misses the point. It was a "revelatory encounter" in which the Risen Christ was revealed to Paul by means of the psychic and spiritual content of Paul’s personality, in Paul.

The person of Paul was, in part, the medium of the appearance; indeed, if meaning is an integral aspect of the revelatory appearance, how could it be otherwise? This revelatory event was not simply a psychological phenomenon, however; it was not confined within the borders or motivations of Paul’s psyche; but neither was it an event that bypassed Paul’s unique personality for its occurrence. On the contrary, it included for its very character the participation, indeed the contribution, of Paul at the personal center of his being. It was an event in which the Risen Christ enlisted Paul in the revelation of himself to Paul. The revelation of Christ to Paul was a calling of Paul; it called to Paul in the depths of his person, calling him out of himself (ecstatically) into union with the Risen Christ—but still as Paul. It was by means of the medium of Paul (subjectively in thought, imagination and belief) that the Risen Christ revealed himself to Paul (in the substantiality of his objective Spiritual presence); and then through this Paul, now an apostle of Christ, to the Gentiles.

In conclusion, and returning to the well-known and repeatedly mentioned Pauline analogy, in the eschatological reality of the resurrection, the physical body has disappeared, like a seed planted in the ground, and has become a Spiritual body, like the plant of the seed. It ("body") was physical, now it ("body") is Spiritual. It is not that the physical is now also spiritual, that it has been joined to the Spiritual. It is not an addition; it is a metamorphosis: the physical has become Spiritual. In other words, to say that the physical body has now become Spiritual body does not mean that the physicality of the former continues as before only now united to the Spirit (which is how Paul is sometimes understood in the I Corinthians 15 passage). There is no longer a physical body; it (that which is the body of the person) is changed, converted from physical to Spiritual. It is now a body of the Spirit, a body given by and being of the Spirit. It is not the continuance of the physical body now animated by the Spirit (even though it is the continuation of the full being of the person). Animation of the mortal, physical body by the Spirit is the current experience of Christians on earth. The Spirit enlivens the mortal body now, in this life. Indeed, that is what being Christian, belonging to Christ, entails (Romans 8). Both in contrast to and in continuance with this condition, the resurrection body is enlivened by nothing but the Spirit.

This present experience of the Spirit is brought to completion in actual death and resurrection. This process of transformation, this renewal of the "inner man" is complete in the resurrection body. Likewise, the concomitant process of the "wasting away" of the "outer man," the physical body, is complete in death (Moule). In the eschaton, we are given bodies like Christ’s body of the Spirit, his "body of glory." That which is "sown in dishonor is raised in glory." This body is the substantiality and radiance of meaning that is our share in the body of Christ. This body is the truth of who we are in God through Christ; this is our meaning and being in Christ.

*

Contrary to some of what has just been said about the resurrection body, the Church Fathers insisted that the very flesh that is buried is constitutive of the resurrected body. Many Christians today would question their claims. Obviously, I am one of them. However, these post-apostolic teachers were concerned, among other things, to counter the inordinate influences of the Platonism of the day on Christian teaching. The sharp dichotomy Platonism makes between body and soul led some Christians to believe that what one does in the body does not matter for the future life since it is the soul, rather than the body, that continues beyond death. This was sometimes reinforced by a one-sided understanding of the Pauline distinction between law and grace: since the Christian is under grace, not law, ethical behavior is irrelevant.

Understood to mean the reconstitution of the very flesh of this earthly body, the "resurrection of the body" addressed both concerns. What one does in this body matters because it is this body that is raised into infinity. One does not simply start over. While one does start over in the resurrection, it is a transformation, not a beginning from scratch. Resurrection of the body symbolized this aspect of continuity between this life and the next. Certainly the fathers had other concerns, but just as certainly these were among them. However, one can honor these legitimate concerns without insisting on the "resurrection of the body" being the reconstitution of this earthly body of "flesh and blood."

The fathers were perhaps faithful to the main thrust of Paul’s teaching, but at the same time they misunderstood his meaning of the resurrection body as expressed in I Corinthians 15. Paul’s concern for the resurrection of the body includes the belief that what one does in this body on earth matters for the future life, for in this future life, one will "receive what was done in the body, good or bad," as Paul puts it (here, given his system of thought, Paul can be seen to clearly agree with James that "Faith without deeds is dead"). However, this concern does not lead necessarily to the claim of identity of physical body in the resurrection. It can fit the notion of the Spiritual body. The Spiritual body is the transparent body composed of the meaning of that which one has done in the earthly, physical body, as judged by God in Christ.

However, this resurrection body is not just the deeds done in the earthly body transformed into transparent meaning; indeed, this would be nothing more than salvation through law and works, not grace and faith. Rather, the deeds of the earthly body are seen in the light of the Risen Christ, that is, in the light of his meaning revealed in his resurrection body. In other words, the being and meaning of this person, this body, is transformed according to the grace of God given in Christ. As united to Christ, this body is transparent to the meaning of Christ, and judged accordingly.

6.

Back on the reservation and personal stuff

I grew up as a Presbyterian. I come from a small family: a sister and a mother. My father died from high blood pressure when I was seven. He was driven, dedicated person, as I remember him. That’s what I loved about him, and what I hated about him. I think I am kind of the same way.

I can still see him in the back bedroom just before he died. I was not supposed to bother him, but I sneaked back there one day, anyway, cracked the door open and peeked in. I remember the i.v. running down into his arm. Or was it running up from his arm? I couldn’t tell which from where I was standing, and I was afraid to go any closer. As far as I knew, or could tell, they could have ripped a vein out of his arm and stuck it in the bottle that was hanging upside down from that fancy silver coat hanger beside the bed.

He was dying, but I didn’t know it. That was back in the day when these things were kept from the children, to protect them. Surely, this is part of the personal history that collaborated with the collective unconscious to compose the Shiva dream.

I know that after he died, I started to go crazy. I did not know that I was going crazy, but that did not stop me. I held it together until the ninth grade. Puberty, I guess. I had my first panic attack in Mrs. Robbins Algebra class. Maybe it was the algebra that did it! I did not understand algebra, and I did not understand myself. The combination was too much, I suppose.

I sometimes imagined—but not in so many words—that my father turned into a vampire when he died. Back then, young kids watched movies that kids these days don’t, unless the parents who want to see the movie can’t find a baby sitter. It is sad to see young children recording images in their impressionistic brains that will haunt them later. Anyway, I watched vampire movies on the late show. After my father died, I slept with a cross by my bed and a knife under my pillow. I am not sure how much good either would have done me against a real vampire, but at least I could get to sleep.

The thing that really scared the hell out of me was the idea of how powerful death and the vampires must be to overpower my dad. He was a doctor, had been decorated in WWII, started a hospital in our little town, and had died. There was nothing he or anyone else—including his partner who worked tirelessly, I am told, to cure him—could do. If death could take him, what chance did I have?

I had not learned the word, "vulnerability" by then, but I knew what it meant. I ran from my anxieties, but they caught up with me in Mrs. Robbins ninth grade Algebra class. Sometimes they would camp outside my psychic fortifications—that is to say, my superstitious, obsessive habits—other times they invaded and overran them. Actually though, I am better. Actually I am much better, thank God… and Prozac.

I remember an incident shortly before he died. He was sitting in a chair in the living room watching us neighborhood kids play football in the front yard. He was in his pajamas and robe. I ran into the house and past him toward the bathroom. As I neared the hall, he called my name like he wanted to tell me something. I stopped and waited, breathing heavily, obviously in a hurry to do my business and get back out to the game. He continued to stare out the window until he finally said, "Never mind."

To this day, I wish that he had said it, whatever it was that he intended to say to me when he called my name. That silence still haunts and saddens me a little.

With this in mind, it perhaps makes sense that in high school I majored in football and minored in fighting. Then I joined the navy.

When I joined the navy, I didn’t see the world (only Chicago and Maryland), but I did see that Yankees could fight; and mostly better than I could. No wonder our confederate money is no good. Holding on to it is like the Lakota waiting for the buffalo to come back.

I can only remember three of my Navy fights; I was too drunk to remember the others that people told me about. Apparently I was too drunk to put up much of a fight in the ones I do remember; I lost them all. Well, I didn’t go down with a bang or out with a whimpered "no mas" (Roberto Duran against Sugar Ray Leonard), but I am confident that my opponent would have won on points. When you’re fighting drunk, you want to land a power punch, so you tense up to swing hard, and that means you’re not quick. That means, unless he’s drunk too, you’re going to get peppered. I got peppered. But, like I said, I didn’t give up; we just quit and walked away. Once, we walked away as friends, sort of.

Oh wait, that was in high school, not the Navy.

"The Hell’s Angels are coming this way; they’re camping out on the sand bar down by the river" (that would be the Arkansas River where it bends around Little Rock, Petite Rouge, as the French called it), someone said one night at the dairy queen, all excited as if something special was happening or should happen because of it. It seemed like an opportunity for some of us to make a name for ourselves, win our spurs, and prove ourselves men. (Not exactly a "vision quest," but Confirmation in the Presbyterian or Episcopal Church is a bit tame, not to say lame, let’s face it. I understand that the bishop used to slap the devil out of the confirmand; he or she would probably get sued if she or he did that now.) I don’t remember who suggested fighting them, but we were just drunk, fool and ambitious enough to think that was a good idea.

"You fought the Hell’s Angels," somebody would say wide-eyed as the story would begin unwind around the campfire. Astonished admiration would escape from their words like rats from a sinking ship… and with as much hope of surviving. There was not much to admire about us that night. We got beat up alright, but not by the Hell’s Angels. We got beat up by another group of fools who had heard the same as-it-turned-out-to-be false rumor at their dairy queen—which was a Little Rock honky-tonk—and had chased the same mirage to the river that we had. Since there were no Hell’s Angels to be had that night, they took us as a consolation prize.

The first scene of our fiasco is burned into my brain. As we drove onto the sandbar, their beat-up pickup truck pulled in front of us from out of nowhere. Their bright red brake lights blinked hard, and the driver got out. He was a wiry, tough-as-a-nut Arkansas hick, with his button up short sleeve shirt unbuttoned, a scar running diagonally across his chest and stomach, a quart of Schlitz in one hand and a tire tool in the other. Why didn’t we back up and get out of there? I don’t know either. Maybe it would have been cowardly. Instead, we were stupid; we got out.

After they beat us up, they made friends with us. I think those river rats actually felt sorry for us. They offered to buy us beers at the dive they had come from on the other side of the river. Having taken one dive for the night—we didn’t fight back very hard, assuming that such a strategy would save us from a severe beating (weren’t we smart!), which I suppose it did (but how does you know for sure about such things?)—we declined their gracious invitation. Actually, it wasn’t their invitation; it was the leader’s. We didn’t have one, a leader that is.

*

The Lakota think of themselves as warriors, and historically it seems that they were. They were brutal (by some standards) and fierce fighters. Courage is an important Lakota virtue. Maybe that is why their defeats by the Europeans are so hard for many of them to accept even now. A young Lakota man told me that they were, as a matter of fact, never actually defeated militarily; only cheated politically. Like all history telling—including my own—I suspect that, too, is semi-fictional.

Part of the historical truth seems to be that the Lakota (and Dakota and Nakota) rarely had a leader; instead, they usually had several of them at the same time. If they could have agreed among themselves and their native neighbors to follow a leader, they could have at least held out against the European onslaught a little longer—Little Big Horn being a case in point—and maybe have gotten a better deal from the white man. When they were broken up into smaller, more or less, family units and bands (as they naturally were) they were defeated—Wounded Knee being a case in point. Divide and conquer was made easy by the always already units of their social structures.

*

The Lakota are interesting people, a study in contrasts in many ways. They are gentle and rough, fun loving and quickly depressed, respectful and rude, welcoming and alienating. They are human.

The Pine Ridge Reservation is an interesting place. After living there for even a short time, one can begin to appreciate some of the reasons the Indians value the land so. After a while, the land does not seem so much a commodity as a companion. My sister told me once that if you are quiet to hear the land speak. This is not new age gibberish; there is something to it.

Pine Ridge Village is not interesting, however. I didn’t like it much. The Tribal Council Offices are there and the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) offices, and so on. It’s not much different from Little Rock down by the river, without the river and the river rats of course, and before Bubba parked his double-wide mobile home there and called it a presidential library. That section of Little Rock is now cleaned up for the out of state tourists, even though, I am told, alcoholics still walk it by day and sleep it by night.

The Indians don’t usually get cleaned up for visitors; they didn’t for me. They haven’t had much luck entertaining strangers; rarely were their strangers "angels unawares." I suspect they did get dressed up when Clinton came to visit during his second term, though. Indians are not stupid, far from it. You can’t be stupid and survive what they have. Yeah, they do shoot themselves in the foot sometimes, but guess where they got the guns (and the liquor so they couldn’t shoot straight)! Anyway, I know they got some good from cleaning up for Clinton; I don’t remember what they got, though: school buildings or something like that.

That you might get something from it is a good reason for dressing up, of course. Only a fool or a fox would wear his work clothes to meet his benefactors. And that is the point and one of the problems, isn’t it? We—us white folks—are still the Indians’ benefactors, in a way. Not like it used to be, for sure; but it’s still there, that history.

Like stratified land, different histories are preserved under the surface of contemporary culture. Sometimes the surface erodes and you can see what lies beneath. Occasionally I glimpsed the Indian history before the white man came; the time when the white man had the Bible and the Indian had the land. The same young man who claimed that the Lakota had never been militarily defeated by the white-led army (there were some soldiers of African descent, I am told, "Buffalo soldiers": the hair) spoke simply and eloquently about it one night.

My second summer there, I recruited him to speak about Lakota ways to the church groups that come to work on the reservation during the summer. This man was a good speaker—actually, most Lakota are; one reason that Indian meetings tend to last for a long time; maybe that’s partly why they’re in no hurry to arrive "on time" (Indian time, remember): they know the meeting will last long enough to accommodate all the speakers. He described the Lakota history in naively mythological terms at first. He began with story of the Indians migrating to the surface of the Earth from beneath the Black Hills, not from Asia over a "land bridge." As I mentioned, the traditional Lakota "trickster," Uktomi, led them astray from their paradisiacal home beneath the earth. (Think Garden of Eden and the serpent, although the Judeo-Christian serpent seems more sinister than Uktomi.)

He then recounted his peoples’ history in such romantic terms that it would have made any "new age-er" proud, if not blush. After some of that, he rehearsed the historical victimization of the Sioux by the whites. And then he said it: "And now we’re doing it to ourselves." "It" was victimization. He meant that the Indians are now victimizing themselves as whites previously victimized them. And then he said another it: "But it’s still there."

This it was not victimization. He called this it "pride." I wouldn’t call it that ("pride" still sounds sinful to me); I would call it nobility of spirit. I think we mean the same thing. Maybe grace of spirit, as long as grace includes strength as well as gracefulness. This is still there, he said, in the Indian people. He was right; even a white newcomer could see it. It is still there, beneath and within the suffering and corruption and victimizations of the Lakota: that free, brave, generous and honest heart of the people, the culture, and the ancestors. Under the crud that has been piled on them, and that they piled on one another, that spirit is still there… perhaps barely, but still there.

Of course, they drink now. In various places in Pine Ridge Village, drunks are hanging out, waiting for a handout, selling "trinkets" to anybody who looks fool enough to buy them; that is, all the whites and some of the Indians. And some are on meth. You can’t tell if they are on meth by looking at their teeth, however. Most Lakota have missing or false teeth. And quite a few have what I think of, perhaps inaccurately and unfairly, as alcohol noses: the bulbous, cabbage looking things. But even so, it is still there.

The young man, our "historian," had his teeth and a regular looking nose. Actually, he was a son of Russell Means, the Indian I mentioned at the beginning who lived near me, whose book was entitled, Where White Men Fear to Tread.

None of us whites challenged him on his historical/mythological concoction. Surely some of the church groups would have challenged their priest if he or she had taught the Adam and Eve story as history like this young man taught the Lakota mythology. But we were afraid to challenge him about his interpretation. I guess we were doing penance for our ancestors’ sins, or maybe too embarrassed for him to point out the inconsistencies. Nor did we have the courage to suggest, as one Omaha Indian is reported to have said, "If the whites owe the Sioux an apology [for killing them and taking their land], the Sioux owe the Omaha the same apology." That part of the Lakota story isn’t told when the Indians tell the white church groups about themselves. Like I said, they’re not stupid; and they are in survival mode.

Or maybe we had reached the climax of the evening when he said, "But it’s still there." There was no reason to continue. It was both too late and too soon to challenge the blur between myth and history that connected his narrative.

*

I taught literature classes at the Oglala Lakota College. Teachers learn by teaching, they say. This was certainly true for me.

Once we talked about the differences between myth and history. When we reached the point in our discussion about white/Indian history where "we" chased them off "their" land, I asked one of them, "Yeah, but isn’t that like what you all did to the Crow?" She answered me, "The Crow are our traditional enemies. We are working on that." She meant that the conversation had gone as far as it was about to go with a white man.

Another time, I pressed them to explain their insistence that they had not in fact come from Asia. It came up because one of the students mentioned the birthmark that some Indians have. It is a bruise-like discoloration of the skin near the hip that eventually goes away, I am told. She mentioned that Indians are sometimes accused of child abuse by white physicians who see the mark and don’t know better. It told her where I first heard that identical story: from Korean friends in graduate school.

Finally, I asked them why the Indians insist that they "just growed here" rather than migrated here, whether from Asia or somewhere else. However the answer is phrased, it’s always about the land. Many things on the reservation that don’t make sense at first do when you realize that it’s about the land. To paraphrase one of Bubba’s campaign slogans, "It’s the land, stupid." Like I said before, if the Indians admit that they are no more than immigrants themselves, that they too came from another place, like we did, then they would lose most of the moral high ground for their claims to the land.

This is true even if the "land bridge" theory is wrong. After all, like I said, the Lakota migrated from the east into the Dakotas, regardless of how any Indians first reached the western hemisphere.

If they are immigrants, and if they took by force the land that they claim to be theirs by divine right, then they are no different from the white immigrants. One supposedly got the land by way of the "Great Spirit" and military victories and the other got it by way of their "Manifest Destiny" and military victories. Like I said, they ain’t stupid, and they’re in a survival mode. They can play the victim card when it suits them. Who can blame them? But, as I said at the beginning, challenging mythical revisions of history becomes critical when truth is at stake.

Having made that point, I have to get out my mirror and say to myself and the rest of those "tribes" that immigrated here long after the various Indian tribes had been here for generations, "Look who’s talking." Denial and the recasting of history in mythic terms have become American virtues. With a long angled lens, European claims such as discovering America appear breathtakingly absurd, and a white man like me suggesting that the Indians learn to be truthful about their history is equally breathtaking in its hypocrisy. No wonder the woman in literature class chose not to continue the conversation with me.

Having had their natural self-esteem taken captive and almost exterminated by occupying armies, the Indians are understandably reluctant to let the scars show in public, especially a white public. However, it is one thing to present an unambiguously noble history in the face of a historical oppressor; it is another to deny the truth to oneself. Being a racial member of the oppressors, I perhaps can never know what they say to and among themselves in private.

There were exceptions. There were times when I thought I saw something of what was under the surface. We read a short story in one of the literature classes about two black kids in the south during the Jim Crow era. They had won a fight with some white kids who had been picking on them. They expected their mother to be sympathetic and proud of them for sticking up for themselves. To their profound dismay, she wasn’t. She gave them a whipping instead. The Indians in the class—it was all Indians besides me—didn’t need to be told why. When I asked them if they could understand why the black mother whipped her kids for beating up the white kids, they all nodded, but no one volunteered an answer. I did not ask for one.

Finally, the worst of it for me came in another class during a discussion of Hamlet. We were talking about images of the "after-life." A young woman mentioned that the Indians’ image of heaven is "the time before the white man came." I felt like Bruce Lee had just side-kicked me in the stomach. I remember actually trying to catch my breath. That a people’s vision of heaven is before your kind arrived is a hard lesson to learn.

The student who taught me this lesson realized immediately that she had hurt me, and she apologized. She apologized to me! We took an early coffee break. I skipped the coffee and went straight for the fresh air.

*

Newsflash! Suicide is not uncommon on the reservation. Well, so what? It is not uncommon in many places. Yeah, but I wasn’t in many places; I was there. I was there where the adolescent girl hung herself from the basketball goal in the park, apparently for all to see. I guess the question is, as someone from another time and place put it, "Not why do some kill themselves, but why do some not kill themselves?" Maybe like the young man said, "It’s still there." And sometimes it is there to strengthen, not just accuse.

The Indians frequently encourage one another to "Be strong." I used this phrase in several funeral sermons, suggesting that we often need help to be strong. To be specific, we need the help of Christ. Whether they bought the claim that their help comes from Christ or not, I suspect that they know that they need help to be strong. Many of them look to their traditional ceremonies and beliefs to be strong, not to the church. How are we, the church, to respond to this?

Are we to say, "No, you shouldn’t look to your traditional ways to be strong; you must do it our way"? How can they ever hear this as anything but the echo of the beginning the horrors, of the hypocrisy and bullets that took their land, heritage and dignity, the wave from the new world that took as much as it could of the nobility of spirit that had made them strong for generations? How dare we tell them how to be! How dare we steal the moral high ground for ourselves after we have stolen the actual ground from under their feet, the land that had been their life! How dare we preach to them after we have mixed the blood of Christ with whiskey and made them drink!

The writer, Simon Wiel, once said, "If you deny the truth for the sake of ‘Christ,’ you will have neither; if you deny ‘Christ’ for the sake of truth, you will have both." The church needs to ponder this saying until it knows what and how it means to be "Christ’s Body" on the reservation. It needs to pray over this saying until it can see the relation of Christ’s body and that of the young woman hanging from the basketball goal. We need to meditate on it long enough so that we will not hesitate to challenge what the church is doing in the name of Christ.

Sun Dance

You only get one beginning. You can do something again in a different way, but you can only do something for the first time once. None of us ever start from scratch. It has always already begun. It has already begun before any of us even have a thought about beginning. So, the church can’t start over with the Indians; we can only start with the history we inherit. It is the same for them, of course.

Sun dancing is in their history and more and more, it seems, in the present where history comes from. The Ghost Dance is in their past, not so much in their present, and few of them talk about it. The Ghost Dance played a crucial role in the so-called Wounded Knee Massacre. More about that soon.

The Sundance is more traditional to the Lakota (and other Plains Indians) than the Ghost Dance was. The U.S. government once banned the Sundance and other Indian ceremonies. They no longer are.

I only attended one Sundance, and that was only on the first day. A Sundance lasts at least three days and nights, and the famous "piercing" does not happen until the last day(s).

I had been serving the Pine Ridge churches for six months and had plans to return home to California to visit my family when I was invited to attend a Sundance. Several members from one of "my" churches were dancing. I wanted to stay for the whole thing, but I missed my family more. And I longed to see the ocean again, even though the rolling hills and deep ridges of the Pine Ridge plains are not as far from the ocean as one might think.

I had been turned away "at the gate" from an earlier Sundance. I had not been invited to that one, and I did not know any of the dancers. I would have been a gawker; they do not like gawkers at a Sundance. I was angry and embarrassed to have to turn my car around with the people watching, most of whom were getting in. Another racist Indian snub, I thought.

However, as I got back on the paved road and calmed down some, I began to admire them for not letting me in. After all, the Sundance is not a show; it’s not a Pow-Wow. It is a religious event. If you are invited and come to support the dancers, to pray for them, to encourage them, fine. If not, then you are coming for the wrong reason. At least, that is how the Indians see it, I think.

Not all Sundances are as strict as this one was, however. Indeed, some Indians openly complain that Sundances are not run as they should be. Some claim that the Sundance is corrupted when women and whites are permitted to dance (whites and other non-Indians often pay the leader an "honorarium"). Some of the younger male Indian dancers afterward wear shirts that reveal their piercing scars; they dance to show off, in other words, to prove that they are men. But as some complaining elders explained to me, the intent of the dance is to pray; it is a sacrificial prayer on behalf of others. "A sacrificial prayer on behalf of others" should ring a bell in Christian ears.

Sacrificial prayer on behalf of others is a mythic structure of the human psyche. Christians believe it is epitomized and fulfilled in Christ, the one who offered himself as sacrificial prayer to God on behalf of all the people.

Likewise, the sun is the nearly universal symbol for God. To offer oneself to the sun in the dance is to symbolically offer oneself to God. The Indians with whom I discussed this no more think that the sun is actually God than I do.

In regard to its symbolic effect, however, I must say that, having never before lived where you could see the horizon in every direction as you can on the South Dakota plains, I had never realized the psychic impact the sun has when you can. It is clear then that you live on a planet that is totally open and exposed to the sun and that all you are and have depends on this contingent relation to that ball of fire. Without it being there, and for no apparent reason, you and all that is dear to you would cease to be. Everything depends on it suspending itself above you. Furthermore, as a circle, the sun represents wholeness, perfection, and completeness. It is a small leap from the sun to God.

The Sundance is an act of sacrificial love at the center of a circle, a prayer to the Great Spirit symbolized by, among other things, the sun. This is the ceremony of identity and healing for many Plains Indians.

So, what are Christians to think of this? Is the Sundance an imitation of the crucifixion? The similarities are obvious. If we call it an imitation, is it an imitation in the sense of a substitution (instead of) or in the sense of cultural conformation to a mythic/historical pattern? Does an answer depend on whom you ask? Or is it a question that can be answered for all for all time? Is its objectivity subjective?

As is nearly always the case, how you frame the question will limit the answers that you can get. For example, is the Sundance like the New Testament issue of eating meat bought in the meat market that had previously been offered in a pagan sacrifice to idols? If I understand Paul’s answer, this is a question of individual conscience. It doesn’t matter unless you think it does; it’s okay unless you believe it isn’t. There is the added proviso that even if your conscience allows you to eat, but by doing so you would harm another believer whose conscience is "weak," then you should not eat, for the sake or the "weak" brother or sister, for the sake of love.

Or is the Sundance more like actually offering sacrifices to a pagan idol, in which case it does not matter what you believe or think you are doing. You are turning your back on the true God whether you know it or not. You are worshipping "demons," as Paul puts it, regardless of what you think or say you are doing.

Another way to put the issue is this. At what point, does "preparation for the gospel" become a substitute for the gospel, and so, a hindrance to it? This is similar to the "Law" question for Paul and the early church. According to the typical Christian view, the Law (the history of Israel, in general) was preparation for the coming of Christ (along with being something in itself, of course). Once Christ came, the Law was fulfilled; it had served its purpose. At least, it had served its primary purpose of being the preparation for the gospel of Christ.

The Law could still function for Jewish Christians, however, as a cultural/religious focal point and "identity marker." In addition, the Law could serve as a continuing context for understanding the meaning of Christ, and as a way that Jewish Christians expressed their life in Christ. So, it was okay for Jewish Christians to observe the Law as long as they did not insist that it was necessary for salvation (for themselves or the Gentiles), that is, as long as they did not equate it with, and substitute it for, Christ.

Is it the same for the Sundance? If it is parallel to the Law for Jewish Christians, then the Lakota Christians can observe it in the context of, but not as a substitute for, salvation in Christ. It can serve as their ladder to and from the Christ. It is one way for a Plains Indian to express solidarity with Christ and his cross, a way that is natural to their culture and spiritual heritage. It is how they may "make the cross of Christ their own," as the German New Testament theologian, Rudolf Bultmann, put it in the significantly (or is that somewhat?) different setting of post-war Europe.

This is one way to frame the issue. There are others, of course.

It may be that the Indians want the church to simply stay out of Sundance discussions. They may understandably believe that we cannot enter such discussions without assuming that we should have the last, best and decisive word about it, even if it is something that we know very little about, and much of that is hearsay. Granting this point, nevertheless, for authentic Christian ministry to happen on the reservation, the relation of Christianity to traditional Lakota ceremonies and beliefs, as focused for example in the Sundance, needs to be prayerfully revisited.

*

Now, a brief white man’s description of my limited knowledge of the sun dance itself. There is the inner circle, constructed of cut saplings buried in the ground, reaching about nine feet high. I don’t know the diameter of the circle; I would guess about 20-30 feet, but I am not good at estimating distance. A second, concentric, circle of saplings is put in the ground about four feet out from this inner circle and limbs are laid over-head. Pine needles are laid across this structure to make a shade for those not dancing: the singers and supporters, those praying for the dancers. The Lakota I know sun dance in July and August, and South Dakota summers are as hot as the winters are cold.

In the center of the circle, a much taller tree, stripped of its limbs, is put in the ground. One end of several long cords is tied to the top of this tree and nail-like bones are tied to the other end. These bones are pinned through the skin of the dancers’ chests (or backs). They dance around the tree in the center of the circle facing the sun and pulling against these cords until the bones in their chests rip free.

*

At a funeral, I once heard some Indians refer to God as the Great Mystery. I had first heard about this reference from a conservative, evangelical Indian preacher whose first words to me were an aggressive "Do you study the Bible everyday?" I didn’t know he was a preacher at the time, and thought he was looking for a fight. Good thing I was wrong; I usually lose, remember. He told me that such a reference to God was sufficient evidence that the Indian beliefs were all wrong. That is to say, I assume, that to refer to God in terms other than the ones of scripture indicates culpable ignorance. While sometimes true, no doubt, it may be wiser to leave such judgments to God.

I think many Indians think that we Christians think we have all the answers. And unfortunately, they often have had good reason for thinking that. From the earliest contacts to today many Christians have told the Indians that they are wrong and that our, the Christian way—which, it is crucial to note, is historically indistinguishable from the "white man’s" way—of understanding God is right. We explain God to them. Some believed us, and are now returning the favor: they are explaining the God we explained to them to us, my conservative conversation partner being a case in point.

But, then again and after all, that is what preachers do. We believe the gospel is truly good news and that we are charged, by the very nature of it and our common humanity revealed in it, to share it. This gospel is about what we believe God has done and so what God is like. But while we need to be as clear about this gospel as we can be, we should not try to be clearer than that. There has always been a "faithful agnosticism," as someone put it, in the Christian tradition. While we rightly claim that what we know about God from the gospel is true, we should not claim, therefore, that we know all of God that there is to know. One who claims otherwise might reconsider the meaning of idolatry.

Even when revealed, God is a mystery; even when immanent, God remains transcendent; even when known as the love ultimately revealed in the incarnation and sacrifice of Christ for us, God is still more than we can ever comprehend. Eternity in God is coming to know God and being changed by that knowledge; and on the basis of that change coming to know God and being changed by that knowledge…. ad infinitum, literally. Granted, what we will learn of God is consistent with the truth of God we know now ( indeed, if God is One, how could it be otherwise?); but there is nevertheless more truth (and love) in God than any one or community of us know now. Again granted, this truth (and love) of God is fully manifest in Christ, but that still does not mean that we Christians at any given moment in our history (individually or corporately) have learned it all. Only God knows it all. It is our calling to be faithful to what he shows and tells us, a showing and telling that includes the fact that we have not seen nor been told, much less faithfully assimilated, all there is of the one whose love for us in Christ means eternal life.

We cannot know all there is to know about God. But we can know Christ enough to follow him in faithful obedience. This is the crucial point, the only thing that really matters, the only thing that will matter in the end. For, I must add, I believe that whatever more we will learn of God, it will be consistent with what we know of him in Christ; indeed, it will be a further unfolding of the truth of God that is in Christ.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with an Indian woman who was a Sun dancer and a member of one of "my" churches. First, she complained (Indians seem to complain a lot, both seriously and jokingly) about Episcopalians reading prayers—in contrast to spontaneous prayers, prayers with feeling and meaning. She informed me that unlike us, Indians pray from the heart. Second, Indians recognize the mystery of God, whereas whites, or maybe it was Christians, seem to have it all organized into concepts, doctrines, and so on. She suggested that we have tried to manage, tame and domesticate the mystery of God; but the Great Spirit, like the wind, is free and uncontrollable. St. John could not have said it better (Jn. 3).

Although I might have added that the free wind of the Spirit brings the life of the Word, my only response to her was that there is more in the Christian tradition than she had been taught. I didn’t try to articulate the breadth of this tradition because, frankly, I did not feel competent to faithfully summarize it (and I don’t think she would have listened for long if I had). I did insist that what she had learned of Christianity was most likely only a small slice of it. I told her that there is a continuing stream of mysticism, aestecism, and so-called negative theology stretching from the Christian beginnings until now that she did not know about and that she might find more congenial to her native spirituality than recitation from the Book of Common Prayer.

In fact, one of my projects—that never got off the ground (not enough wind, I suppose)—was to create a Native-Christian institute where the two traditions could engage in study and dialogue. There are such places in the country, I am sure; but there are none on the Pine Ridge Reservation that I know about. The closest would be at the Red Cloud (Catholic) School, west of Pine Ridge. They have a museum, art gallery, book store, etc. full of Indian artifacts, art and literature. In fact, one of the priests who once served at Red Cloud, William Stolzman, attempted a similar project (while he was at Rosebud Reservation, I think; which is about a hundred miles east of Pine Ridge), but it was more of a series of meetings between Christian ministers and traditional Indian spiritual leaders than a permanent institute. His efforts resulted in the book, The Pipe and Christ.

*

At the beginning of my ministry on the Pine Ridge, I offered adult classes at all the churches I visited. I visited at least two churches each Sunday (the two most distant from me were 100 miles from each other). The classes were, partly, an attempt to recruit Lay Readers. Without Lay Readers, most congregations only had church when I was there: once a month for most of them.

At these classes I gave a short presentation of Christian history and doctrine and concluded with a word about "post-modernism." I had audited a class in post-modern theology before I moved to Pine Ridge from Claremont, California. While I didn’t understand most of what I read and heard in this class, what I thought I understood, I taught. The Indians readily understood it.

Post-modernism contains two pieces that are congenial to Indian thinking. The first is the Great Mystery idea. Post-modern theology insists that God is always transcendent, always going beyond our understanding, never fully captured in our concepts. This is not new, of course. As I said, the Christian tradition is full of this kind of thing. It is getting a new hearing today, however, as it gets presented in a new way to new ears. This often happens in theology.

The second piece of post-modernism that Indians naturally take to is like unto the first: postmodernism blows the top of the European hegemony of thought. Postmodern ways of thinking are not so controlled by European logic as was true in the past when the European armies doubled as thought police.

Take time, again. "On time" is variously measured. Stereotypically speaking, the chronos way of telling time fits European logic. There are, however, other logics and so other times. "Does anybody really know what time it is?" (Chicago) This is a postmodern question that Indians can appreciate, as long as they get a chance to answer it in their own way. Postmodernism gives them a chance.

On the other hand, does postmodernism mean that it can be any time that anybody chooses for it to be? Does postmodern theology mean that any theological idea is as good as any other? Does it mean total relativism? These are questions that may be running through the reader’s mind; they are mine.

How do we allow the truth to speak for itself in ways that we can hear it without insisting that it speak the same way to everyone else? But unless it speaks the same way to everyone else, how will we recognize it as truth? Well, there you go; that is the question(s), isn’t it?

These are not academic questions, either. They are practical, existential ones. When these kinds of questions are answered in print by a tenured academic nestled in his or her cozy office somewhere, it is a joke, an arrogant presumption, and an insult to those in the field, whether that field be the plains of North America or the jungles of South America. Practical theology is the fruit of the living dialogue between "theory" and "practice." Without ongoing practice, it is only theory; where then is the practical theology?

Academics answering questions like these from their office reminds me of a Kierkegaard-ism. I paraphrase and elaborate:

A good laugh now and then is surly salvific, don’t you think? The Indians like to laugh; they joke a lot and appreciate irony. They would appreciate Kierkegaard. As Sitting Bull is alleged to have said, a quote I alluded to earlier: "When the white man came, we had the land and he had the Bible. Now we have the Bible and he has the land." Many Indians are ready, I suspect, to trade back; but some of them would like to keep their Bibles. That is where the church comes in. Can we let them have "our" Bibles and allow them to read them in Lakota? Did God allow his Word to become flesh? Do we?

*

Indians think a lot of nature. They are superstitious, too, maybe. To see an eagle is a good sign, auspicious, as the Chinese say. A few of us saw an eagle one day as we waited for an important mission-wide church meeting to start. I guess the meeting went well; nothing spectacular happened that I noticed.

Once, a hawk circled overhead during a funeral I participated in. I overheard a woman note "the eagle."

Not long before I left, a respected elder and medicine man died. His funeral itself (not to mention the wake) was a huge affair that began early in the morning and lasted late into the night. I didn’t go. I should have. Anyway, around dusk that day, I was standing outside watching the sun go down over the ridges around my house. A hawk caught my eye, gliding on the breeze like hawks do. It flew around for some time, swooping and climbing effortlessly. Then suddenly it was gone. I must have lost sight of it among the pine-covered hills, I thought. In any event, I never saw it again.

The next day, an Indian acquaintance stopped by and talked about the previous day’s funeral for the medicine man. He said an "eagle" appeared at the burial. It circled around the gravesite, climbing higher and higher until it suddenly disappeared from sight. He said it was taking the old man’s soul to heaven, or that it was the old man’s soul going to heaven. I don’t remember precisely which, nor does it matter, nor, as should be apparent, was I in any position to challenge him about his theology.

I am in Arkansas now. Yesterday, I heard a goose honking outside. I went out, but did not see it. Of course, I didn’t need to; I knew it was there.

Epilogue

Hearing the Ancestors

I thought I heard them once—the ancestors—or was it that I thought I saw them? Maybe neither because both, but in an unusual way. Without meaning to compare myself to Black Elk (I am not quite that insanely arrogant), his description, "seeing in a sacred manner," comes to mind; which is not to say that this was that; just that it comes to mind.

The vision (although I hesitate to use that word to describe it, but I don’t know what else to call it) came during one of the many burials services that I performed on the reservation. I cannot speak for the other denominations on the reservation, of course, but I know that burials are most of what the Episcopal priests do there. At least once a week, and sometimes several times in a week, one of us priests officiated at a funeral.

Most funerals on the reservation include traditional Indian ceremonies with drum and singers. The family, rather than the priest or medicine man, makes the decisions about who does what and when, except if the funeral is in the church house. I had maybe three of at least fifty funerals in two years in a church house, and two of them were of white bodies. Most are done at a "neutral site," like a school gym or a CAP building. Typically, I would do the Episcopal ceremony first and then a medicine man would do the Lakota one. The ceremonies were clearly separate, and just as clearly, each was a part of the same service.

This relationship deserves mention. It is another instance of the dynamic I spoke of above with respect to one of the church’s Senior Warden: the bi-religious spirituality of reservation life. It was natural to have the different ceremonies—Christian and traditional—one after the other in the same space and at essentially the same time. It is somewhat a matter of semantics whether the Christian and traditional were a "single ceremony." I was clear in my own mind that they were not. It might be more appropriate to describe what happens when Indian and Christian ceremonies occur together as a single rite of passage marked in different spiritual ways.

I do not think this characterization is splitting hairs. Indeed, it would be a misrepresentation to call such services a Christian-Lakota ceremony, for each retained its own integrity. Typically, when I finished the Episcopal Burial Office, I disrobed and sat with the people as the Lakota ceremony was conducted.

If there could be said to be a moment when there is a single ceremony, it is during the procession out of the building to the vehicle (often a horse-drawn wagon) that carries the body to the cemetery. All of us process out more or less together following the "master of ceremonies" and to the accompaniment of a traditional drum group.

It is neither theory nor structure that unites the two traditions at a funeral, but spirit expressed in prayer. It is the Spirit who reveals a single humanity and unites us in it as we walk together with this person who has completed his or her human journey on earth, as we remember that we all "are dust and to dust we shall return," as the mystical beat of the drum releases the spirits of the singers and of those who hear with their spirits. This fellowship of prayer and communion with God who is Spirit "lies too deep for words."

The relationship between Christian and traditional ways is personal and practical. It is a relation that comes to be in the people as they do it. The relation occurs within the lives of people before it can ever occur in print. It is not worked out in theory and then put into practice. The theory, if there can be one, is the description of what takes place in the lives of faithful people. However, I am not sure if fully faithful practice has occurred yet. Maybe that waits in the future.

In any case, the relation may be likened to that of the incarnation. According to orthodox Christianity, the incarnation is the union of nature (humanity) and grace (God) in Jesus. Most theoretical descriptions of this union lead to paradoxes, at best, for humanity and divinity are thought to be, in many respects, contradictory. Its reality is not discovered in theory, however, but in the person who actually lives it, in the person who in "practice" unites humanity and God in himself.

The way of this union is characterized by orthodox Christianity as: "two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction…being in no way annulled by the union…" (Council of Chalcedon, 451 A.D., Act V). It may be that for awhile at least, the relation between Christian and traditional ways will only be asserted by practice, a practice the truth of which may be experienced long before it can be faithfully articulated.

Be that as it may, at a typical graveside at a typical funeral I would finish my few prayers and then the medicine man would sing his prayers and perform his ceremony. Then the drum group would begin again as the grave is filled in with shovels by the pallbearers and others. The last movement of the burial is that of women and children placing flowers and other items on the mound of dirt. These ceremonies always had a profound affect on me, and I suppose on the others who stayed to the end, and most did, even when the snow was blowing.

The particular funeral I have in mind was in spring or fall. It was cool, I remember, but not cold. The cemetery was on the slope of a hill. You could see far into the distance across the rolling plains and abrupt ridges that are spotted and lined with (mostly) pine trees (hence the name, "Pine Ridge"). The wind was blowing across the plains as it usually does. The medicine man had finished, and the singers were singing as the hole was being filled. Like I said, the songs are spirit. Even if the words are meaningless (which they were to me), the spirit of them is not.

As I was listening and watching, I felt-in-my-spirit-as-translated-into-mental-images-by-my-imagination Indian ancestors approach. They were on horseback. They stopped just beyond the edge of the people gathered around the grave. It was as if the singing had called them, and they had come to see what was going on. But they hadn’t just come to look at what there was to see; they were looking for something. They had been waiting for something and had come to see if what they were waiting for was happening. Apparently it wasn’t because I sensed them going back. I called in my spirit, "Wait. What is it? Wait." But they didn’t wait, and I didn’t learn what they were looking for.

This description must sound psychotic to some readers. It doesn’t to me, and I suspect it wouldn’t sound that way to many Indians, either. They may balk at it being a white man’s experience, however. I was surprised myself.

Knowing what the ancestors are looking and waiting for is crucial for the relationship between Indians and the church on the reservation. If the church knew and respected what this is, and could faithfully incorporate it, or part of it, into its narrative of God in Christ, the church might discover a direction and meaning for being on the reservation. Without understanding and appreciating what the ancestors need, what they need to have us know and do, I don’t believe we can fulfill our calling there. Maybe Black Elk knew but couldn’t say.

*

I moved to Arkansas from Porcupine, South Dakota. Porcupine is roughly in the middle of the Pine Ridge Reservation, about ten miles from the community of Wounded Knee, the sight of the infamous "Wounded Knee Massacre." That tragedy began with the Ghost Dance, but as we know by now, it began before that.

Just before the 20th century began, during the "moon of the popping tress"—when it is so cold the tress make popping sounds (see, Moon of the Popping Trees by Rex Allen Smith), around Christmas time, most of a band of Dakota Indians lead by aging Chief Big Foot were killed by U.S. Army soldiers. The full truth of what happened there is frozen in the Indian bodies left exposed for three days during the brutal cold snap that followed the massacre. After it warmed up, they were later buried in a mass grave on the hill where the Hoskins Rifles that killed most of them were mounted. Probably as many soldiers were killed by the "friendly fire" from these weapons as by the Indians.

The massacre began several years before with a vision implanted in the brain of a (perhaps) psychotic Paute Indian named Wovoda while he was on peyote. He was from Utah. Wovada’s supposedly inspired message was that if the Indians would dance this new dance, the Ghost Dance, then Jesus would return and destroy the white man’s society for its failure to live according to his will, and the Indian would inherit the land again, now as Christ’s chosen people. The plains would then be filled with Buffalo and happy Indians once more.

As is common with the spread of a tradition among different peoples, changes were introduced. A comic-tragic change that was added by the time the dance reached the Sioux was the addition of the Ghost Shirt. This shirt was said to be powerful enough when worn to withstand the white man’s bullets. That someone would be desperate enough to believe this claim is tragedy enough. To discover that the claim is false only when the bullets pierce the skin is a crying shame. The army’s command that the Indians give up their weapons before they were escorted to the Pine Ridge post was the spark that ignited the holocaust, as some call it, that proved Ghost Shirts to be no match for bullets.

The event seems to be a classic example of a "tragedy." A tragedy occurs when no one person or single event is responsible for something bad happening. Somehow the ball gets rolling; it roles innocuously until it reaches the point where it can’t stop or be stopped; it has to run its course to the bottom. At the moment before the shooting started at Wounded Knee, there was, within the historical contours of the event, no way to stop it. And at that point, there was no one to blame for not stopping it.

Once the army caught up with Big Foot and his band, the dye was essentially cast. The army understandably would not allow the Indians to come into Pine Ridge with their weapons. Just as understandably, the Indians would not allow the army to take their weapons. The army was afraid of and did not trust the Indians; the Indians were afraid of and did not trust the army. It was a standoff. The first casualty in war is truth, someone said. Perhaps the second is like unto it: trust.

I read that an Indian girl at Wounded Knee was heard screaming, "These shirts don’t work!" as she was taken bleeding to the "hospital" at Pine Ridge. The agonizing image of this wounded and betrayed young woman haunts Wounded Knee as much as does that of the soldiers receiving Congressional Medals of Honor for their part in the tragedy.

I don’t remember how many were killed that day. I know that the wounded were taken to Holy Cross Episcopal Church in Pine Ridge to be treated there by the (Indian) medical doctor and a (white) nurse, among others. Some survived. A famous photograph of the church-turned-hospital shows bodies lying on the floor that was covered with straw to absorb the blood, and the Christmas decorations still up. That building has since been relocated north of Pine Ridge, outside Oglala, S.D.

Because it has been moved, and repaired in spots by white church groups, it is ineligible for the South Dakota historical registry. My predecessor as missioner on the Pine Ridge, the Rev. Ben Tyon, told me that when the sun shines on the floor at the right angle, however, the bloodstains are still visible.

I had a baptism there one evening. While we were waiting for the baptismal party to arrive (Indian time, remember) I asked the packed church if anyone knew the historic significance of their church house. One old woman raised her hand.

End