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Creation as the Body of God

Fr. Richard Rohr [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/fr-richard-rohr ]
Founding Director, Center for Action and Contemplation
Posted: March 4, 2011 09:00 PM

"Creation is the primary and most perfect revelation of the Divine." -- Thomas Aquinas

"God remains in immediate sustaining attentiveness to everything that exists, precisely in its 'thisness.'" -- John Duns Scotus

The Incarnation of God did not happen in Bethlehem 2000 years ago. That is just when we started taking it seriously. The incarnation actually happened 14.5 billion years ago with a moment that we now call "The Big Bang." That is when God actually decided to materialize and to self expose.

Two thousand years ago was the human incarnation of God in Jesus, but before that there was the first and original incarnation through light, water, land, sun, moon, stars, plants, trees, fruit, birds, serpents, cattle, fish, and "every kind of wild beast" according to our own creation story (Genesis 1:3-25). This was the "Cosmic Christ" through which God has "let us know the mystery of his purpose, the hidden plan he so kindly made from the beginning in Christ" (Ephesians 1:9). Christ is not Jesus' last name, but the title for his life's purpose. Jesus is the very concrete truth revealing and standing in for the universal truth. As Colossians puts it, "He is the image of the invisible God, the first born of all creation" (1:15), he is the one glorious part that names and reveals the even more glorious whole. "The fullness is founded in him ... everything in heaven and everything on earth" (Colossians1:19-20). Christ, for John Duns Scotus (1265/66-1308) was the very first idea in the mind of God, and God has never stopped thinking, dreaming, and creating the Christ. "The immense diversity and pluriformity of this creation more perfectly represents God than any one creature alone or by itself," adds Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) in his Summa Theologica (47:1).

For most of us, this is a significant shaking of our foundational image of the universe and of our religion. Yet if any group should have come to this quite simply and naturally, it should have been the three groups of believers that call themselves "monotheists". Jews, Christians, and Muslims all believe that the world was created by one God. It would seem to follow therefore that everything, everything without exception, would bear the clear imprint and likeness of the one Creator. Doesn't that seem to follow? How could we miss that? After all, we believed that One God created everything out of nothing.

We must realize what a muddle we have got ourselves into by not taking incarnation and the body of God seriously. It is our only Christian trump card, and we have yet to actually play it! As Sally McFague states so powerfully, "salvation is the direction of all of creation, and creation is the very place of salvation." (The Body of God, p. 287) All is God's place, which is our place, which is the only place and every place.

In the 4th century St. Augustine said that "the church consists in the state of communion of the whole world" (Ecclesiam in totius orbis communione consistere). Wherever we are connected, in right relationship, you might say "in love," there is the Christ, the Body of God, and there is the church. But we whittled that Great Mystery down into something small, exclusive, and manageable too. The church became a Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant private club, and not necessarily with people who were "in communion" with anything else, usually not with the natural world, animals, with non-Christians, or even with other Christians outside their own denomination. It became a very tiny salvation, hardly worthy of the name. God was not very victorious at all.

Our very suffering now, our condensed presence on this common nest that we have fouled, will soon be the one thing that we finally share in common. It might well be the one thing that will bring us together. The earth and its life systems on which we all entirely depend (just like God!) might soon become the very thing that will convert us to a simple Gospel lifestyle, to necessary community, and to an inherent and universal sense of the holy.

I know it is no longer words, doctrines, and mental belief systems that can or will reveal the fullness of this Cosmic Christ. This earth indeed is the very Body of God, and it is from this body that we are born, live, suffer, and resurrect to eternal life. Either all is God's Great Project, or we may rightly wonder whether anything is God's Great Project. One wonders if we humans will be the last to accept this.

"From the beginning until now, the entire creation has been groaning in one great act of giving birth, and not only creation, but all of us who possess the first fruits of the Spirit, we also groan inwardly, as we wait for our bodies to be set free" (Romans 8:22-23). It seems that St. Paul is saying here that we human ones might be the last ones to jump aboard God's great plan. There is the groaning of growing in all of creation, and the groaning of resisting and "waiting" in us humans.

All of creation, it seems, has been obedient to its destiny, "each mortal thing does one thing and the same ... myself it speaks and spells, crying 'What I do is me, for that I came'" (Gerard Manley Hopkins, When Kingfishers Catch Fire). Wouldn't it be our last and greatest humiliation, surely the "first being last," (Matt. 20:16) if we one day realized that all other creatures have obeyed their destiny unblinkingly and with trustful surrender. Watch the plants and animals!

It is only humans who have resisted "the one great act of giving birth," and in fact have frequently chosen death for themselves and for so many others.

Radical Grace, April-May-June, Volume 23, Number 2, 2010. Used with permission.

Copyright © 2011 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. (emphasis in original)

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Would You Pay To See John The Baptist's Tooth?



By Daniel Burke
Religion News Service
First Posted: 03/ 3/11 11:31 PM Updated: 03/ 3/11 11:31 PM

BALTIMORE (RNS) Martina Bagnoli admits that the exhibit she helps curate here at The Walters Art Museum may gross some people out.

After all, the display includes 2,000-year-old teeth, shards of bone and splinters from a first-century execution device. But these are not just any teeth, bones and splinters.

Tradition holds that they belong to John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene, St. Luke, and the cross on which Jesus was crucified.

Once upon a time, pilgrims would trudge halfway around the world just to glimpse one of these objects. Seen as conduits to God, holy relics were carried into battle as talismans, used to cement alliances between heads of state, sold for small fortunes, and coveted by Christians everywhere; some even believed relics could heal the sick.

Now that a bevy of these once-prized objects are on display in downtown Baltimore, the question is: Are holy relics still relevant? Or are they, well, a thing of the past?

"A lot of that depends on what kind of Christian you are," said Bagnoli, the Walters' associate curator of medieval art. "For a lot of people this is still very much relevant."

For instance, a group of Orthodox Christian monks drove down from Boston to see the exhibit in February. And two Catholic nuns dropped by to check out the bones of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, who founded their order, Bagnoli said.

The exhibit, called "Treasures of Heaven," runs through May 15.

Among Christians, the veneration of relics has traditionally been strongest among the Orthodox and Catholics, who, beginning in the second century, created ever more ornate reliquaries to display the sacred objects. Both also mandated that church altars be built on the remains of martyrs and saints to emphasize the continuity of the faith.

But excesses, including the selling of spurious relics -- the infant head of John the Baptist, anyone? -- led Protestant Reformers to ridicule and reject the practice as an unscriptural superstition. The Walters exhibit displays a scorching sermon by Martin Luther, who called relics "completely unnecessary and useless."

Peter Manseau, author of Rag and Bone, a relic-based travelogue of sorts, said sacred remains often provided holy hubs for new religious movements. "As faith traditions spread rapidly over vast geographies, they needed to have little centers of the sacred -- a little Jerusalem wherever they went."

Other religions, such as Buddhism and some Muslim sects also revere the bodily remnants of holy figures such as the Buddha and Prophet Muhammad, Manseau notes.

Relics still occupy a privileged place among Orthodox Christians, said Peter Bouteneff, a theology professor at St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary in Crestwood, N.Y. For example, priests are given a cloth sheet with a relic sewn into it, a tangible token of the bishops' blessing, which is placed on the altar during Communion.

"You celebrate the Eucharist incorporating this very physical memory, and a continuity with the saints who have gone before us," said Bouteneff.

For Catholics, the veneration of relics, like many traditional practices, waned after the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, when devotions were de-emphasized in favor of wider engagement with the world, according to scholars.

"After Vatican II, relics kind of got put on the shelf," said Thomas Serafin, president of the Apostolate for Holy Relics, a Connecticut-based group dedicated to bringing the remains of Christian heroes back into the limelight.

Michele Dillon, an expert on American Catholicism from the University of New Hampshire, said venerating relics may be making a comeback in the U.S., particularly with the immigration of young Latino Catholics from cultures in which the practice is more widespread.

"It depends on where you look," Dillon said. "You're not going to see veneration of relics as a core part of everyday worship within a lot of Catholic churches. But it remains an important part of private religiosity."

The Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and author of My Life with the Saints, noted that thousands of Catholics crowded St. Patrick's Cathedral in 1999 to be near the relics of St. Therese of Lisieux, a French nun who died more than a century ago.

Martin himself keeps a small relic of St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, in his room. It's just "a tiny little speck of something," the priest said, but it imparts a profound message.

"Relics remind us that saints are real people -- not mythological figures, but real flesh-and-blood human beings," Martin said.

The Walters museum provides a book where visitors can write their reflections on the exhibit. Thoughts range from reverent to wacky. "Google is my relic," wrote one visitor.

"Relics still freak most people out," Martin said, "but if you check on eBay" -- where sellers proffer Michael Jackson's shirt and locks of Elvis Presley's hair -- "the idea of wanting to connect physically with someone you admire is not so strange."

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Related:

Relishing Relics: Will John Paul Go to Pieces?
As the appetite among the faithful surges for papal relics, will the Vatican truly keep a lid on John Paul's body?
February 25, 2011
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-briggs/relishing-relics-will-joh_b_827276.html

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Copyright © 2011 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

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