The Wild Reed: “The Most Authentic Statement of Created Life”

– “True Passion” by Lester Kern

Writes Ilia Delio in The Emergent Christ:

God is not a lonely deity at the top of a medieval cosmos, spinning the stars and governing the heavens; rather, God is selfless love poured out by the power of the Spirit* as dynamic newness of love desiring a beloved – to make whole, to unify, to evolve toward an infinite depth of love. God acts in creation as God is in Godself – dynamic love. It is out of this love that we are and continue to be created.

Walter Kasper describes the cross [of Jesus] as the revelation of the divinity of God, the very power of God to heal, make whole, to emerge in evolutionary creation. “God need not strip himself of his omnipotence in order to reveal his love,” Kasper writes. “It requires omnipotence to be able to surrender oneself and give oneself away; and it requires omnipotence to be able to take oneself back in the giving and to preserve the independence and freedom of the recipient. Only an almighty love can give itself wholly to the other and be a helpless love.” Thus God’s love, shown to us in the weakness and powerlessness of the cross, is the power of love to heal and transform death into life.

God is more godlike in the suffering of the cross. God does not remove suffering but transforms it from within to what is godly – to a new future. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from prison, understood that the powerlessness of God on the cross is the power of God in creation: “God lets himself be pushed out of the world onto a cross. . . . He is weak and powerless in the world and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which God is with us. . . . Only the suffering God can help.” It is precisely God’s self-emptying that empowers creatures to do new things, to evolve.

. . . [T]he cross indicates that new life cannot emerge without suffering and death. God suffers the new creation not out of need but out of an abundance of love, out of sympathy for the beloved. The only way to evolve toward greater wholeness is to let go and die to those things that hinder the emergence of love from within. Such death involves suffering, accepting pain as part of the birthing process to richer life. Pain rends, but it is in separating that love gathers the scattered pieces and creates anew. The very thing we fear – death – is the beginning of what we desire – wholeness. Sin is the refusal to love and hence the refusal to die; it is the protest against relatedness and community. Those who cannot love cannot suffer, for they are without grief, without feeling, and indifferent. We suffer when we experience in suffering the lack of love, the pain of abandonment, and the powerlessness of unbelief. The suffering of pain and abandonment is overcome by the suffering of love, which is not afraid of what is sick and ugly but accepts it and takes it into itself to heal it. “Anyone who enters into love,” writes Jürgen Moltmann, “and through love experiences the inextricable suffering and fatality of death, enters into the history of the human God.”

The profound reality here is that the problem of suffering is not God’s problem; it is ours. When we aim for the perfect human life free of defects and disease; when we seek immortality through artificial means trying to bypass death, we stop being human and nature also stops being itself. Jesus’ death on the cross is the most authentic statement of created life – it speaks to us of the wild love of God, the drama of evolution, and the trust that is needed if a new future is to be realized. The illogical cross is the logic of God. It is the logic of self-involvement that requires a self-emptying, a space within oneself for new life to be born.

By domesticating the cross, we strip the Godliness of God, the wildness of divine love that refuses to be controlled or manipulated. God’s love is the untameable terror of the Holy New. To be a whole-maker, to evolve, is to embrace this Spirit of love, to trust that love is greater than death. Bonaventure wrote: “Christ on the cross bows his head waiting for you, that he may kiss you; his arms outstretched, that he may embrace you; his hands are open, that he may enrich you; his side is open for you that he may let you enter there.”

If we desire to move from conflict to resolution, from divisions to unity, then we must ask: Can we be wounded for the sake of love? Salvific love that heals and makes whole is born out of human infirmity. Salvation takes place in what is weak and fragile. Unless and until we grasp the inner core of evolution as a necessary death we will continue to spiral in violence and fragmentation. Belief in God incarnate is belief in the wildness of divine love to seize us from within, turn us upside down, and move us in a new direction.

– Ilia Delio
Excerpted from The Emergent Christ:
Exploring the Meaning of Catholic
In an Evolutionary Universe
Orbis Books, 2011
pp. 122-124

* Writes Ilia Delio about the Spirit:

It is the Creator Spirit who continues to breathe new life in evolutionary creation, who weaves together the cosmic body of Christ. The Spirit is the “holon maker,” the one who breathes new life, generates new love, searches for a new future by uniting what is separate or apart, by healing and making whole. Where there is the Spirit, there is the divine Word expressed in the rich variety of creation, and where there is the Spirit and Word there is the fountain of fullness of love. Christ symbolizes this unity of love; hence, the fullness of Christ is the creative diversity of all that exists held together by the Spirit of luminous love. (The Emergent Christ, pp. 70-71)

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The Wild Reed’s 2021 Holy Week post:
• The Final Say

The Wild Reed’s 2020 Holy Week posts:
• Holy Week, 2020
• God’s Good Gift

The Wild Reed’s 2019 Holy Week post:
• In This In-Between Time . . . of Both Loss and Promise

For The Wild Reed’s 2018 Holy Week series (featuring excerpts from Druid author and speaker John Michael Greer’s essay “The God from the House of Bread” in the 2012 anthology, Jesus Through Pagan Eyes: Bridging Neopagan Perspectives with a Progressive Vision of Christ), see:
• The God from the House of Bread: A Bridge Between Christianity and Paganism (Part 1)
• The God from the House of Bread (Part 2)
• The God from the House of Bread (Part 3)
• The God from the House of Bread (Part 4)

For The Wild Reed’s 2017 Holy Week series (featuring excerpts from a 1999 interview with scholar and teacher Andrew Harvey, accompanied by images that depict Jesus as the embodiment of the Cosmic Christ), see:
• Jesus Our Guide to Mystical Love (Part 1)
• Jesus Our Guide to Mystical Love (Part 2)
• Jesus Our Guide to Mystical Love (Part 3)

For The Wild Reed’s 2016 Holy Week series (featuring excerpts from Richard Horsley’s 1993 book Jesus and the Spiral of Violence, accompanied by images of Juan Pablo Di Pace as Jesus in the 2015 NBC mini-series A.D.: The Bible Continues), see:
• Jesus and Social Revolution (Part 1)
• Jesus and Social Revolution (Part 2)
• Jesus and Social Revolution (Part 3)