Sarx

Clicking through the internet, the phrase “Christ Mystery” in a Catholic context sounded at once rather engaging and surprising. Canon Edward West told me once *never* to refer to it as “the Christ Event” because it was dated (this was in 1985, and even then, the theological lingo of the late 60 and early 70s was dated). So I did a google & found a link to a essay by Fr Bruno Barnhart that addresses it. It is part of a larger discussion on the website of The Bede Griffiths Trust, on the topic of Wisdom Christinity.

I found this passage, from the Introduction, to the section, to be inviting:

Today Christianity finds itself confronted not only by the wisdom of the East—Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism—but by other wisdoms as well. Jungian and transpersonal psychology, modern art and poetry, tribal shamanism, hermeneutics, ecology and feminism, literary theory and the history of thought—on every side, the sharp edges of western consciousness are rounded and silvered by an invisible river of psyche and spirit.

At this critical threshold, the container of Western and of Christian consciousness is opening to a fresh encounter with reality on every side. At this moment, wisdom signifies an epistemological quantum leap from our culturally contracted mind, an awakening to this larger, multidimensional reality. Christian wisdom, at this moment, is the rediscovery of the Christ-Event in the context of this larger, dynamic and interrelated world of reality.

Our ‘Wisdom Christianity’ page will move around this point: the re-emergence of the Christ-Event at the center of the larger world in which we find ourselves today, whether on the level of spirit, of mind and psyche or of the body.

I draw from there a difference in the Eastern and Western churches: the eastern church having never really lost touch with these sorts of “other” wisdoms – indeed with her own Sophia, at least until the modern age when she seems overcome by legalism and dogmatism. THe West came into contact with other sources of wisdom – Celtic and Germanic, tribal sources. Her church encloses in spirals and knotworks the same Wisdom that the East chose to portray in silence and vast golden spaces. It seems rather like the difference between free verse and iambic pentameter. Both are poetry, intensely beautiful, rich. But they are different.

When the Western Church – shrugging off her late fixation on legalistic minutae – contacted “mystery”, it seemed a revelation, “a fresh encounter with reality on every side”. It will be the same for the Eastern Christians, too, when they finally escape their modern world view and discover the gold spaces in their icons.

Wisdom as we are using the word is intended to signify not only depth, but fullness and vitality. We are dealing, finally, not with a specialization but with a breaking out from the confinement of our over-specialized consciousness—whether secular or religious. It is a question of recovering the fullness of the Beginning—in the energy of the Spirit which impels us toward the end. Today the word ‘wisdom’ connotes the critical breakthrough into a greater consciousness, which has been long beginning in the modern West.

Be sure to read the 27 Assertions of The Christ Mystery.