The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God (44 page)

That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not… But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God… Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

Please refer to our Diagram. Those little, headed, narrow-shouldered, short-armed, normal-way-up third persons were all born and will all die. This great, headless, broad-shouldered, wide-armed, other-way-up First Person was never born and will never die. He’s not in that class at all. To put it crudely, he’s the wrong size and the wrong shape for any midwife to handle or undertaker to undertake, and a case of breech presentation at that. He’s the Eternal Christ, ‘begotten of the Father before the world, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God’, yet forever reborn in all creatures as Christ crucified.

COUNSEL: Have you gone raving mad? Are you seriously saying that those miserable hands, clawing at the rail of the dock, are the Almighty’s? That those weedy limbs are the everlasting arms of the Everlasting One? May I remind you that this court has the power to turn them into
disjecta membra
and still them for ever?

MYSELF: They belong to the Incarnate God all right, but (as you say) are far from everlasting. I picture my Lord Christ as the Tree of Life. His foliage and limbs, exposed to the sharp frosts of time, are deciduous. They die off regularly in Calvary’s winter and are renewed in Bethlehem’s spring, but the Stem and the Root are perennial, ‘the same yesterday and today and forever’. These arms I’m extending to you now are indeed his very own - for the time being. How can I be so sure? Because of what they stick out of, and what they do. They stick out of No-thing. And, broken loose, they do amazing things such as drive the world. They are put forth by this immense clear-of-head Gap right here, by my true Self in Whom and as Whom alone I’m safe from all your threats.

Safe though all safety’s lost, safe when men fall

And if these poor limbs die, safest of all.

Rupert Brooke’s wartime lines make perfect sense. So do St Paul’s:

With all boldness, as always, so now also Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether it be by life, or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.

COUNSEL: St Paul, I keep telling you, was very special. You don’t get Christians nowadays talking like that. For them Jesus Christ is simply the Jesus Christ of the Synoptic Gospels, and there’s no confusing him with even the most saintly of his followers.

MYSELF: Crown Prosecutor, you really should not venture unprepared into the precipitous country of Christology. Here to confound you - among countless others - is Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Her Daily Prayer begins like this:

Dearest Lord, may I see you today and every day in the person of your sick, and while nursing them, minister unto you. Though you hide yourself behind the unattractive disguise of the irritable, the exacting, the unreasonable, may I still recognize you and say: ‘Jesus my patient, how sweet it is to serve you.’

Her words are based, of course, on those of her Lord who said: ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it [fed the hungry, clothed the naked, visited the sick] unto… the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.’

COUNSEL: So you are now going back on your view (frequently emphasized in your writings) that other great religions, though knowing nothing
(and needing to know nothing)
about Jesus Christ, are none the less revelations of God. And that they have their own genuine avatars, or special incarnations of God. One never knows where one is with John a-Nokes. He’s not only as shocking as an electric eel, but twice as slippery.

MYSELF: Most of the patients that Teresa saw as Jesus himself by grace were Hindus or Muslims by religion. That fact made no difference at all to her service. It seems never to have occurred to her to convert them to Christianity as a prelude to caring for them. Nor was it a ghost or a fragment of the living Jesus she found in each one, but her Lord who is indivisible and wholeness itself. Of course she was right. The Eternal Christ is the Light that lights everyone, and is crucified and resurrected in everyone - whatever the colour of his skin, whatever age he’s born into, whatever religion he professes, whatever language he speaks, whatever name he gives that One Light. And of course the experience of bodily transformation which I call Christing is by no means confined to Christianity. Other religions have their versions of an incarnate Deity with whom one may become identified. In Judaism he can take the form of Adam the primal man, in Islam the Prophet as the Logos, in Hinduism Krishna, in Buddhism the Buddha.

COUNSEL, throwing up his hands: While you are about it, why don’t you go the whole hog and declare the animals too (not excluding tapeworms and tsetse flies) are Christ travelling incognito.

MYSELF: Which I do, unreservedly. Specially so because - unlike fallen and blaspheming humankind - they all live without question from that One Light of Awareness, from their First Personhood, and never for a moment try to snuff it out with their third personhood. They build no self-image to obstruct their Space with, acquire no face to mask their original Face. Only humans are such blockheads as to stand in and block their own Light. God in Christ shines at the Centre of each animal’s world, His throne unusurped. T. E. (‘God wot’) Brown, having killed a toad, confessed:

I smote it cruelly,

Then all the place with subtle radiance glowed –

I looked, and it was He!

Humans ought, indeed, to reverence these junior members of the family, who are all living without effort or delusion from the Clarity that sages and seers consciously live from - after many a struggle and many a backsliding.

And, after all, what I’m saying is implicit in the Christian story, beginning with the Annunciation, nine months before the birth in Bethlehem. To take on human form, God the Son had first to take on the whole range of animal forms, from a single cell upwards, in Mary’s womb. What a telling witness to Nature’s essential Christliness! The alternative view is that Mary’s pregnancy was a phantom one, followed at the last moment - hey presto! - by the real thing! An unlikely and unlovely tale. By contrast, how convincing and poignant is the Incarnation which, occurring at one level, occurs at all levels - so that, in effect, the whole Creation (as Paul pictured it) is adopted and redeemed! Your tsetse flies and tapeworms, Sir Gerald, and all!

Counsel, clasping his wig in a gesture of despair, recalls the Witness to the box. He asks whether she has heard all that has passed since she left it, and how she feels about it.

WITNESS: I’ve followed every word, and am deeply saddened. It was our Lord Jesus Christ himself who said: ‘No man cometh unto the Father, but by me.’ Also ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life.’ There’s only one Jesus Christ, and he alone is our Saviour.

MYSELF: Believe it or not, once again I entirely agree. The plain fact is that the First Person is never plural. Never, never, will you find a pair of First Persons, much less a gaggle of them. A room full of headless inverted bodies would be Bluebeard’s cold-store. The ‘I’ and the ‘Me’ that Jesus uses in those two great texts are God’s own ‘I’ and ‘Me’, and no man’s. (As Eckhart tells us, only God can truly say ‘I’.) It’s as the unique and eternal First Person who is none other than God Himself that Jesus truly claims to be the Way and the Truth and the Life, and not as the third person who showed up in his mirror - the human being who was just one of many children in Nazareth, and just one of the many carpenters in Palestine. Quite the most mysterious and marvellous and saving thing about the Christ that lives in you, my sister, and me, and everyone here in court, is that he’s in each of us unique and whole and one and undivided and the same for ever and ever. ‘Christ,’ says that well-loved Jesuit father, Gerard W. Hughes, ‘is what we are called on to become.’ Christ, not Christs.

WITNESS: He alone suffered crucifixion for the sins of the world.

MYSELF: Certainly. And all of us are caught up in that same suffering and that same crucifixion and that same cure for sin. It’s the cosmic pattern of things, the very blueprint and architectonic of Creation. I just can’t narrow Christ down the way so many nominal Christians succeed in doing. I don’t believe that the stigmata of St Francis and St Pio were mere hysterical symptoms, and not evidence of their Christing. Or that the transubstantiation of the bread and wine into the flesh and the blood of Christ, before they are incorporated into the body of the communicant, is nothing but pious mumbo-jumbo. Or that the day of Crucifixion should be called Bad Friday, the Day of Defeat. Or that Paul lied about being crucified with Christ. Or that the Christ-picture you have before you in that booklet is some kind of accident or trick of mine, a trompe-l’oeil. Or that the Early Fathers of the Church were deluded when they saw Christ as the Archetypal Man, man as he is essentially. ‘By dwelling in one the Word dwelt in all,’ wrote St Cyril of Alexandria, ‘so that the one having been constituted the Son of God in power, the same dignity might pass to the whole human race.’

Let me add this: if to be a Christian is to see Christ everywhere, to feel his presence in every creature, and to be ravished by the joy and beauty of it all, then I’m a Christian all right.

Really the truth is so simple, so gloriously self evident, if only we will stop fighting it. Every creature takes two forms and has two aspects - what it is for others and what it is for itself- and in all respects they are diametric opposites. The latter - call it by what name you like - is cruciform. The built-in nature of the First Person is to vanish in favour of third persons, to give his life for the whole world, ranging from particles to island universes. To lead others he must turn his back on them, but to save them he must face them - on the cross. No, this is not a comfortable arrangement. It’s a terrible world. But thank God it’s His world, and the secret behind it is His own Crucifixion, Calvary for ever being re-enacted in and for each one of us. And the secret behind Calvary is the most incredible love. The love which is heaven and for ever.

COUNSEL: Are you
sure
that’s where you are going? The Witness has grave doubts.

MYSELF: Will I go to heaven when I die? For light on this subject, please turn to Diagram No. 33.

Diagram No. 33

Will I go to a real, bright, starry heaven and no dim dream-world? Yes! Provided I die now, on the inverted T-cross of St Anthony (a-b-c-dd). I can’t ascend (a) to the heights
(per ardua ad astra
just isn’t on), but I can and must descend (b) to the depths, to the baseline I never in fact left, to the crossroads (c) of my No-thingness and my death as a separate being. Here, taking both directions at once (d-d), I come to a heaven which, far from being a cloud-cuckoo-land, is as concrete and physical as it is spiritual. I come to it by the low road of self-abandonment, the high road of self-development being closed to traffic. (It never was a through road, except on maps.) The embracing arms of love gain the peak that the feet lose by climbing. At (d-d), in the heaven where the deepest is the widest, I come to ‘the love that moves the Sun and the other stars.’ Don’t believe this: spread your arms and test it. As a mother loves her child because she embraces her child, so you come to love your world because you embrace your world. Because, as First Person Singular, you are cruciform, built for the loving that is God’s loving. The loving that is death and resurrection – death
for
the world and resurrection as the world.

As Madame Guyon said, ‘God gives us the cross, and the cross gives us to God.’ And Thomas à Kempis:

The cross always stands ready, and everywhere awaits you. You cannot escape it, wherever you flee; for wherever you go, you bear yourself, and always find yourself. Look up or down, within you or without, and everywhere you will find the cross. And everywhere you must have patience, if you wish to attain inner peace, and win an eternal crown.

I don’t understand this. It’s beyond all comprehension. But with the utmost clarity I see it’s so, my pain and its relief confirm it, and my heart knows it always.