It was my birthday. I was sitting at my desk at home, staring at my iMac. While we were talking, an iMessage popped up on my desktop from my daughter in San Antonio. It contained an embedded video from my two little granddaughters. Our daughter and the girls were calling on FaceTime, so Kim brought the smartphone into my study and pointed it at the computer.
I clicked on the video and watched the girls singing Happy Birthday to me and blowing out candles that their mother had put on a tray of brownies. In communion, there is a deep transformation, as opposed to mere exchange of information.
Communion reaches a place that is far beyond words. In fact, it touches to that place where words unfold, it is the invisible space from which the symbolism of words and language derive. So it is natural that once communion has occurred and is over, the separation of self and other occurs again, that a whole slew of words will arise within ones consciousness.
But these words will be of a radically different quality than before because they are arising from the source of words, rather than generated from a previous surface level thought stream.
In order for these words to be able to touch the depth of what has occurred in the state of communion, it is important to have a natural language that can adequately express what has happened. This natural language is one of energetics. Because communion is a dissolving of boundaries, one enters into a realm of pure undifferentiated energy, it is a movement into the unmanifest, the mystery.
The standard language of the mind will not do, science cannot touch this place. This is where the application of the universal cosmology comes into place, because it provides the framework or pattern from which these kinds of experiences can be best fit into.
It allows for the communication to adequately and accurately reflect the communion. In other words, it enables the mind to be entrained with the heart, so that the words reflect the truth of the experience. In this way, we learn to truly speak from the heart. Communion — union while communication, oneness while communicating is like heart and communication is like brain… These 2 words give me wonderful thought about connecting heart and brain.
We are constantly besieged with new theories of justice, massive legislation and legislative proposals, arms treaties, and rhetorical symbols. These are good and worthy human efforts. But we must continually recall that both our human family and our personal worth have a transcendent model and value, the only one that makes human efforts fully worthwhile.
And to assure such recollection, there must be in the world a community in which Jesus dwells with his Father and Spirit, a steady reminder, a sacrament, of the communion and friendship to which all are called by the Trinity. The Trinity is, indeed, a mystery, a secret, but one that has been revealed in Jesus, the Son sent by the Father and, with him, sending the Spirit into the world. Our Christian creeds, our Christian commitment, are structured around this mystery. From the beginning, apostles, missionaries, bishops, Christian philosophers and theologians have searched, probed, and struggled to unfold the meaning, and maintain the integrity, of this central message.
For all reflective Christians, it has been the inspiration for both thought and devotion. With a journey through Scriptures, St. Irenaeus of Lyons searched into this mystery with a loving and a questioning heart. The Father creates, embraces, and draws all humankind to himself through his Son and Spirit. By creation and redemption, the Father, with the Son and the Spirit, initiates and consummates this search.
The Trinitarian community is the source, model, and goal of our communion with one another, and with God. This is the model that Jesus from the cross set up between Mary, his mother, and John, the beloved disciple. In and through them, this was to be the model of the Church, and the call to all people.
The crucified Christ incorporates his mother and beloved disciple into his life by giving them his Spirit The Father lives in Jesus Jesus can give that life, the Holy Spirit of the Father ; , because he possesses it. As the Father loves the Son, the Son loves the disciples Through the gift of the Holy Spirit of the Father, they are in communion with the Father in loving the Son. The Holy Spirit is equally the gift of the Son, through whom they are in communion with the Son in loving the Father.
Jesus promises us that the Spirit of that eternal life and love will dwell with us forever , ; , or, in still fuller words, the Trinity will draw us into its triune communion through the efficacy of his self-giving death and resurrection The Triune God is a koinonia of the three Persons. The Incarnate Son is the koinonia of the Triune God with humankind. He is the only divine person with a human mother, and the only human being with a divine Father.
His distinctness and uniqueness does not separate him from divine and human others; rather, it is his distinctiveness and uniqueness that he shares in communion with divine and human others.
This was not the view that St. Vanhoozer, Ed. Press: Cambridge, , pp. The eternal communion of the Father and Son is both seen and communicated in the crucified body of Christ that draws Mary and John together in the reciprocity of mother and son. The Father, who eternally pours himself out in selfless, self-giving love, is seen in the icon of the Triune God, in the human self-giving love of his Son, pouring out their Holy Spirit to draw all humankind together within the loving reciprocity of the triune communion.
Jesus Christ expresses and communicates the grace and demand, the gift and call, of the Triune God for life within the triune communion. He is the icon of the God who both gives his love, and calls for reciprocity in communion. If God is love, that love has its imperatives or commandments e. Jesus commands his disciples to love one another ; he tells his mother to make John, the beloved disciple, her son; he tells his disciple to make Mary his mother.
With filial love, he welcomes the divine life of his Father and the human life of his mother, and he pours out that life for the ultimate fulfillment of all human life in the triune communion. Every beloved disciple is called to welcome that same life, and share it with others, just as Jesus welcomes and shares it.
Our incorporation into the life of Christ gives us a direct share in his mission. Communion with God, through and in Christ in the Holy Spirit, makes us sharers in the life of each other, in the communion of the saints, a communion that transcends death itself.
By interpreting his self-giving death as the culmination of his life, John is saying that, in his death, Jesus was most alive, that Jesus was most alive in the giving of his life.
The crucified Christ for John is not an icon of death, but of life even in death. John can assert this paradox of life and death from two perspectives. First, in giving his life, Jesus gave not this or that part of himself, but his whole self, his whole interpersonal life, with both his divine Father and human mother.
There was nothing more that he could give. Laying down the fullness of his divine and human life, in the triune communion for his friends, is the greatest act of giving, the greatest act of divine and human love.
But it is also the greatest act of love from a second perspective. Jesus gives the fullness of his interpersonal life in the most complete and final way.
From both perspectives, John can interpret the death of Jesus as the climax and culmination of his life, as the moment when he was most alive. Loving his own unto the end means not just to the final moment, but to the very limits of which love is capable. For John, then, Jesus was not passive in his dying, and his death was not just something inflicted on him. As seen by John, Jesus, in his death as an act of self-giving, reached that moment in his life when he was most active, most personal, most free.
It was an affirmation of life in the triune communion even in the face of death. This is a clear allusion to, and interpretation of, the death of Jesus as the fullness of his community-creating, and community-sustaining, self-giving love for all others. The communion of the Christian community reveals, and communicates, the Holy Spirit of the self-giving Father, and his self-giving Son, integrating humankind within the communion, community, and communications of the Triune God.
Christ crucified is the icon of the loving outpouring of diving and human life in reciprocity that constitutes such communion koinonia. He is the icon of the divine and human selflessness in communion with all divine and human others, willingly paying the price that such communion entails; for there can be no communion koinonia without selfless self-giving kenosis. Death itself cannot quench the invincible Spirit of love that is the eternal life of the Father and Son in the triune communion.
Because God alone fully loves all others, good and evil, only the gift of the Spirit enables us to love all others with the same love that no human evil or death itself can quench. Our receiving the Holy Spirit of the Triune God is not passive. The mother and faithful disciple stand by the crucified Christ, actively welcoming his love commandment, and the gift of his enabling Spirit. We are never more fully alive and intensely active than when we love God with all our heart and mind and soul and all others as ourselves within the triune communion enabling such love.
The Christian community — the body of Christ and the temple of his Spirit — is the living icon of the Triune God when it stands faithfully by its crucified Lord, actively welcoming the gift of his Spirit in obedience to his call to the fullness of life within the triune communion. Our ongoing Christian conversion metanoia means our learning in the Spirit of Christ to become a self-bestowing person kenosis , serving others diakonia for the fullness of life in the triune communion koinonia.
We cannot do what we cannot, at least in some way, imagine. We cannot perform the deeds of faith and hope and love without living icons or images that orient us to decision and action. The Eternal Word became flesh in the perfect image or icon of God that is Jesus Christ, in order to transform all human hearts and minds, enabling us through the gift of his Spirit to love and hope in God above all, and our neighbor as ourselves. The friends of God are the manifestations of his beauty, the glory or impact of God in human life stories.
So walk in wisdom, redeem the time, meaning making the best of it. Be aware of how grace, undeserved favor, kindness that is usually reserved for friends but now given to a stranger, can have way more powerful an effect than you trying to impress them with you.
That effect of grace and the salt is the way the Holy Spirit shows up in you. You do your part and it invites the Spirit of God to move through you for His purposes. The words that you use will only be the lesser part of your communication. Autism has been called a gift because it enables certain people to excel at some things enabling exceptional things to happen. Communion can be defined a number of ways. Paul lists at least eight people who have communion in person or prayer with the Colossians.
We commune with one another in the sharing of news of other believers, we commune when we seek to comfort one another, we commune when we show hospitality to others. We commune when we restore relationships as with Onesimus, the runaway slave being vouched for by Paul. Luke and Demas send their greetings and then Paul asks that they, the Colossians, would take this epistle to some of the other Christians in the area, to Laodicea and Hierapolis.
The letter was to be read aloud to the congregations there, it would be a communion of the saints knowing they were together in Christ.
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