Redefining Christ

One Sunday last summer Tom and I joined his parents for a service at their church. The nave of church, spare and white in classic Swedish Lutheran style, is undecorated except for a huge cross accented with eight glass blocks, one at the each end and four at its center.

As I listened to the pastor and looked at the cross, the language and stories he was telling took on a new meaning for me.

I'd been contemplating the vertical and horizontal dimensions for some time. In Ganesh Baba's Cycle of Synthesis, the horizontal line across the center represents time, moving from past to future, and the vertical represents consciousness, moving between spirit and matter.

Suddenly, I saw that the four glowing glass blocks at the center of the cross in front of represented the Christ: spirit manifest in time and space - "the son of God," Jesus, born into space/time of an earthly mother (mater/matter) and the heavenly father (spirit/consciousness). Phew. It was a pretty intense revelation for me, growing up in a non-religious Jewish home.

From this new perspective, everything the pastor was saying was about recognizing spirit in the material plane. It no longer mattered whether his, or anyone else's, interpretation was different; it was still, as Alice O. Howell would say, all about seeing the sacred in the commonplace.

And it still is.

(In the version of the Cycle of Synthesis at the top of this entry, Christ, at the center, is represented as love at the heart chakra.)