By Mark Kutolowski
Every human being is made in the image and likeness of God. Each of us comes into this world bearing the infinite, and we all have unlimited potential to manifest this divine presence in the world as vessels of divine light, life and love. Yet, without conscious practice and discipline, our human experience of God is fleeting at best, and one of the great agonies of modern life is a pervasive sense of God’s absence. Even those who have momentary breakthroughs and encounters with God find that, without a discipline, these experiences remain rare, transitory, and elusive. So, to unlock our human potential as bearers of the divine image, we need a ‘way’ that can guide us to outwardly become who we truly are in the depths of our being.
In the first few years after Jesus’ resurrection, his disciples were simply known as followers of ‘The Way’, that is, ‘The Way of Christ’. Only later did outsiders name the community of ‘way followers’ as ‘Christians’. The early centuries of Christianity began to understand ‘The Way’ as a path of ‘divinization’. Early writers—such as St. Irenaeus of Lyons (130-200) and St. Athanasius (296-373)—articulated that ‘The Way of Christ’ was a path by which a fallen humanity could regain access to its divine nature. Through prayer, discipline, and devotion, a human being could be ‘yoked’ to the divine-human one, Jesus Christ, and through Christ be elevated into union and intimacy with God. As St. Athanasius succinctly put it, ‘God became human so that humans might become God.’[1] In the past two thousand years, in every generation and in cultures across the globe, there have been women and men who have taken up this ‘Way of Christ’, and through great personal sacrifice and devotion have become Christ-bearers and radiant reflections of divine love and mercy in the world. They are known, in the older Christian churches at least, as saints.
To become united with God, to be restored to our original divine image, and to bear Christ in the world from the depths of our being—these are the goals of any authentic Christian spiritual practice. To put it more simply, our goal is to become saints. If we make the mistake of equating sainthood with personal accomplishment, this can sound absurdly prideful or arrogant. Yet sainthood, in the Christian understanding, is largely a matter of how God transforms us. God is the actor—we simply show up and consent to the process of divine transformation. This is simple. Not easy, but simple. We must never forget, also, that in being ‘divinized’ God is not making us into something other than what we are. God is merely healing us and stripping away the layers of illusion and hurt that have kept us from access to our original nature. Sanctification is always a matter of restoration, which is why Jesus’ favorite model for those who enter the Kingdom of God was little children.
For us, spirituality and religion have a very practical aim – our restoration into our whole, holy human selves in union with God. In our work at Metanoia of Vermont, we’ve come to understand the Way of Christ as including three central spiritual movements, each of which has its own supporting disciplines and practices:
Metanoia – The biblical Greek conjugate ‘meta’ (to change, expand, or go beyond) and ‘nous’ (the inner being, or mind/heart)
Metanoiais the transformation of the heart, or the spiritual practice of opening to God’s presence in the inmost depths of our being—deeper than words, thoughts, emotions, or sensation. Metanoia is the opening word that Jesus spoke in his ministry in Mark’s and Matthew’s gospels, often (mis)translated as ‘repent’.
Kenosis – A biblical Greek word that means ‘self-emptying’
If metanoia is opening to divinity, kenosis is the humble acknowledgement of our human limits and failings, and the gradual dis-entanglement of our identities from the self-centered patterns at their source. It is the emptying out of our personal agenda, egoic desires, and conditioned habits of thinking and reacting that are far too small to hold the infinite reality of God.
Incarnation – From Latin, meaning ‘into flesh’
In Christian theology, incarnation typically refers to God taking on a human body in the person of Jesus. As a spiritual practice, incarnation means manifesting or bringing forth into form that which dwells within. It is the necessary step of moving from inner experience to an embodied way of life and action in the world. The work of incarnation is seen in the particulars of how we live, what we consume, what we create, how we act upon the land, and how our physical lives affect the lives of other humans, animals, plants and the community of all life.
In future posts on ‘Cult’, we’ll explore specific spiritual disciplines and practices, and ways in which these practices can be lived out in our time. These practices can be quite diverse and take many forms throughout different cultures and ways of being human. But all of these practices, if they are truly useful, are but expressions of the central work of returning to intimacy with the divine source, God. This intimacy, rooted in the Way of Christ, provides the stable inner foundation for the works of renewing life-giving culture, restorative cultivation of the land, and fruitful conversation.
[1]Or ‘so that humans might become divine.’ The statement is about sharing in the divine nature, not about becoming ‘a god’. This passage is in Athanasius’ writings ‘On the Incarnation’ and ‘Against the Arians’. This is an indication of how widespread and central the concept of salvation as divinization was in the early centuries of Christianity.
Lisa's current iconography project: A Byzantine icon of Mary Theotokos and the Christ child
This post is part of the ongoing series:
- Cult, Culture, Cultivation and Conversation -
Imagining a vital human community
Peter Maurin, who started the Catholic Worker movement along with Dorothy Day, spoke of renewing society through the practice of ‘cult, culture and cultivation.’ Writing and speaking in the early 20th century, Maurin saw Western society in precipitous decline and envisioned a wholistic, spirit-centered restoration of vital human community. In our Metanoia reflections, we are adopting Maurin’s template, while adding a fourth ‘c’ of ‘conversation’.
- Cult -
Reflections on spiritual practice and growth, both communal (ritual, liturgy) and personal (spiritual discipline)
- Culture -
Exploration of human culture, renewed by spiritual insight and just relationships between people and with the land
- Cultivation -
The work of building fertility and abundance in land and discovering ways to live in healthy interdependence with the natural world
- Conversation -
Spiritual dialogue with pressing social and cultural issues and dialogue with other thinkers and perspectives beyond our vision at Metanoia.