Breakthrough

Likely the greatest gift that contemplative prayer offers to people is the chance to genuinely humanize us. It is in the opportunity to regain our freedom to genuinely experience the imminent loving grace of God that our characters become enable to come to their senses in spite of our personalities.

Christianity was launched into its official acceptance with a world view that had crude and simple and naive enculturated undertones. The late first century church understood itself as: living in the last stages of salvation history, in a world beset by radical evil, doomed from the start, bedraggled by the devil, corporately and personally ransomed by the substitution of Christ on the cross for us, and now simply marking time until everyone has a chance to sign on to this scheme. After all of this will come the end. This is neither the world in which we live today, nor does it reflect the world of the Hebrew scriptures. When we realize that the words and actions of Jesus are a far cry from their adaptation by imperial Rome, the political aims of Constantine and Augustine and Charlemagne in the west and Byzantium in the east, then we can start to responsibly deconstruct the impacts that this has had on the genuine investments that God has chanced and that people have usurped to their personal advantages.

It is precisely this attitude that we cannot be left to our own freedoms or even to an unbridled form of God's grace that is at stake. That we have to have our freedoms taken away because this is our greatest persil. That we have to be told step-by-step what to do and how to live because without doing so our corrupt natures will always be displeasing to others and to God. That in spite of our human limitations it is the authority of the church - manned as it may be by other corrupt humans - holds the key to abolish this chaos and disorder and must under all circumstances be submitted to. And thus we have a stable, albeit a rigid order in which our values are fixed and immutable and need to be preserved and protected and defended at all costs. And so even war becomes a sacred duty. And so the world became frozen in every respect as an object of choice, identified with the sinful, the perilous, the unpredictable and the church became a train onto which pilgrims clamoured. And to not do so was a choice against God and salvation...a black spot on one's character. It is why at Mass people still pray for 'many priests, deacons, and religious brothers and sister who will love You with their whole hearts and will gladly spend their entire lives to make you known and loved by all,' because quite obviously God is veiled from everyone else, who in the end simply cannot do this without some sort of radical withdrawal from the corruptness of this evil time in which we are stuck and are awaiting dissolution.

This attitude is simply, mentally a grave illness that is supported by largely all Christianity today.

The breakthrough comes when one stands in the lineage of the narratives found in Hebrew scriptures - and which by the way was even afforded to the first apostles and disciples - that is, the simple openness, and conscientiousness, and sociability, and agreeableness, and embracing of positive emotions that can happen through one's simple, direct turning to God, that happens when you set your self on hold and accept your place in the world, which can happen anywhere, and which is the essence of Christian contemplation. This is why those who are psychologically frozen into unexamined and enculturated forms of Christianity are so threatened by it.