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Why 99% of Christians don’t know the love of God
Posted March 20th, 2009 by camfree
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A few people have raised an important question in relation to one my previous blogs, titled Why 99% of Christians don’t know the love of God. It’s a provocative statement that deserves a response. The idea comes from a number of different sources (pastoral, theological, personal) but for an integral audience I would suggest you read this very good essay by Ken Wilber “A Spirituality that Transforms”.
In it he writes that religion itself has always performed two very important, but very different, functions “translation” and “transformation”. With translation, “the self is simply given a new “belief system” about reality...This function of religion does not usually or necessarily change the level of consciousness in a person; it does not deliver radical transformation. Rather, it consoles the self, fortifies the self, defends the self, promotes the self. As long as the separate self believes the myths, performs the rituals, mouths the prayers, or embraces the dogma, then the self, it is fervently believed, will be "saved"--either now in the glory of being God-saved or Goddess-favored, or in an after-life that insures eternal wonderment.
He goes on, “the Transformative function of religion does not fortify the separate self, but utterly shatters it--not consolation but devastation, not entrenchment but emptiness, not complacency but explosion, not comfort but revolution--in short, not a conventional bolstering of consciousness but a radical transmutation and transformation at the deepest seat of consciousness itself.”
Wilber then makes the point that when it comes to authentic transformative spirituality – only 0.0000001 of the total population are genuinely enlightened, awakened or realized.
Now, I am simply making the same point for Christianity rather than the Eastern traditions. For the vast majority of Church going Christians their religion performs the function of translation – it provides a belief system to console the separate-self... And for maybe 1% of Christians, their religion performs the function of transformation – where they directly realize the “not I, but Christ in me” of authentic Christian spirituality.
In fact, I am being far more generous than Ken, maybe a million times more generous going by the numbers. But I’m sure you get my point.
Cameron
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The heavy burden of self-justification
Posted March 20th, 2009 by camfreeNormal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4
Just to follow up and be more specific, the main reason that 99% of Christian don’t know the love of God is because we tend to burden ourselves with THE HEAVY YOKE OF SELF-JUSTIFICATION. That’s the curse of the Law that St. Paul consistently spoke about. We lay aside the free gift of God’s own self in Christ and struggle ceaselessly and unrelentingly to make ourselves more right, to lay hold of our future. We lay upon ourselves a heavy yoke of desperate seriousness about ourselves...
The Grace of Jesus Christ’s is so difficult because it’s so simple – the unbearable lightness of being – it’s always already offered but receiving it is hard. We are convinced that there must be something complicated for us to do. There must be some performance or work we have to accomplish. Jesus’ promise alone, 'come, follow me' is not enough. We long for, and we are in love with the heavy yoke of self justification.
So when Jesus says, "Our yoke is easy and my burden is light", what he says is: lay aside the obsession to possess the future and justify our existence, and receive the promise of his Kingdom. And that's why, as Jesus himself says in the gospel, that's why only some people really do hear the promise easily - only the tax collectors and the sinners.
99% of Christians don’t know the love of God in Christ because Jesus is going to be with those who feel the powerlessness of their position, ihe will be with in the company of those who feel lost; have lost; and who are just beginning to see that lost-ness is the beginning of wisdom. It's in that lost-ness that we begin to let go of the heavy burden of the Law and the compulsion to take hold of and script and control our future and find ourselves in the joyful 'unbearable lightness' of knowing ones self held by God
--"Become passers-by" (Jesus of Nazareth)