Roderick’s Rambles

Prepositions as Gateways to Christ Consciousness?

This is an invitation for you to join me on a remembering and a quest. The inquiry that I hope may take shape for us – as a response to, and yet of course beyond this blog post – will be one that finds form and texture over a period. What could be involved would be a exhilarating healthy dose of interior acuity and reflective development. Would you be interested in noticing and perhaps charting the extent to which your own following of the Christ path, your own pattern of being, knowing and doing may be further integrated, stretched and nurtured by attending to the subject of our search: prepositions as gateways into Christ consciousness? If so, I would hope to feed in these thoughts, musings and stories to a presentation/workshop/resource that might happen in 2012.

For a good many years I have been fascinated by prepositions. Why? Because of the key role they appear to play on the journey in Christ. There we are.  It’s started already!  “In Christ”. What, for goodness sake, does that mean?  Is the first word of a phrase such as “in Christ”, to be scooted over on our way to the really important word in the phrase? Are phrases such as this to be relegated to the barren wastelands of one of the six impossible things to believe before breakfast? Or could the first word of micro-phrases such as “in Christ” be a conduit to and an indicator of a mystical theology and praxis that weaves its way through the scriptures and great spiritual tradition?

The passionate Paul, in his epistles written to erring, wobbling and sometimes engaging believers, makes so much use of these two words “in Christ”, that the only conclusion can be that something must be going on for the heart as well as the head, for the person as well as the community of faith. I recall wandering along the corridors of my theological college in a sort of personal, blissed-out lectio divina process, muttering two new Greek words from the Pauline epistles which had just been introduced to me: “en Christo”, “in Christ”. I was, and still am, bowled over by their energy, promise, power and evocation. Why such a strong personal response to two wee words? “In”, like so many prepositions – perhaps all – is a relational word; it builds rapport with its connector(s). Paul and so many since, have been profoundly impacted by the mystery compacted in that preposition attached to the anointed one, Jesus the Christ.

A further fascination for me since the early eighties has been the field of consciousness studies. Unfortunately, articles and books, symposia and studies in this discipline are phrased and framed in such intricate and rarified scientific and philosophical language that it is all too easy for the ordinary enquirer to be relegated to the sidelines. And so with me. Yet the word “consciousness” refuses to leave my working vocabulary.  It stays with me as a guide or coach or prompt. I’m not sure what’s going on, but I do know, if only at an intuitive level, that states and stages, levels and dimensions of consciousness have a part to play in how I and we – as individual, community and culture – live, move and have our being.

So, I invite you to explore with me. This inquiry, I hasten to add, is not intended to linger in, or even to visit, the terrain of abstraction. I do hope that, should you be willing to accept my invitation, you might be moved to measure and report your internal and spiritual response to such phrases as “with Christ”, “into Christ”, “through Christ”, “before Christ”, and of course “in Christ”.  On this journey of exploration into the role of prepositions in relational faith, as “partakers of the divine nature” (II Peter 1:4), let’s take up and apply the sound advice from one of his mentors, shared today by Giles Brandreth on BBC Radio 4’s “Desert Island Discs”: “Don’t dabble, focus.” I would be really interested to learn your experience of Christ consciousness, especially that mediated through what we might call a “prepositional relationship”.

The discernment is for us to begin to note with a touch more awareness, how our personal experience – frail, robust, embodied or imaginal –  of encounter with the teaching Christ or the healing Christ, the boundary-walker Christ or the crucified Christ, the risen Christ or the ascended and cosmic Christ, has been aided and leavened by those bridge or gateway words we refer to as prepositions. If the Word is powerful in the Judaeo-Christian tradition , the word will be powerful.  If God invests in Word becoming flesh, it would be highly appropriate if word also might help carry the charge of transformation.

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