The Next Phase

Propers: The Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 33), A.D. 2019 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

“The sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings,” proclaims the prophet Malachi, and “you shall go out leaping like calves from the stall.” Now there is an image of pure unbridled joy: calves leaping from the stall into open field.

When reading Church history, one cannot help but be struck by the joy of the early Christian community. Oh, it wasn’t all roses and sweet cream in the gardens, of course. They had their fair share of conflicts. But they so clearly evidenced a fullness, a richness, an exuberance of life, which drew Jew and Gentile alike to inquire as to the source of this hope, the font of this life. “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly,” sayeth the Lord. And that promise found fruition in the early community of Christ’s disciples.

What a contrast this is to modern perceptions, which see Christianity, and religion more broadly, not as liberating and life-giving but as stifling, strangling, limiting our options. These days we seek life not in the Church but in escape from it. What has changed? What have we forgotten, that the Good News of new life in Christ Jesus sounds now stale and sterile to postmodern ears? How have we failed to tap that depthless well of everlasting life which has supported our forebears through every imaginable adversity for the last 2,000 years? And how can we get it back?

How can we reconnect in such a way that Christianity becomes a source of life for the world again? I’m not talking about forced enthusiasm or emotionalism, those plastered-on smiles of feel-good preachers too afraid to be afraid. I’m talking about real religious experience, individual and communal; spiritual, yes, but also mystical, sacramental, incarnational. When all about us seems in a state of exhaustion and confusion, how can we make God real, in us, for all?

Thankfully, we aren’t the first folks to think about this. Last century there lived a British philosopher named Owen Barfield. He wasn’t terribly famous, but he had some famous friends: namely, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. And Barfield had a remarkable theory regarding the spiritual predicament of our age. He realized that human consciousness evolves over time, by which he meant that all societies go through phases of self-understanding and broadening awareness.

More specifically, he said there are three of these phases: original participation, withdrawal from participation, and reciprocal participation. But don’t get hung up on the terminology. It’s really a quite elegant and insightful idea.

The first of Barfield’s phases is original participation. A society at this phase does not draw sharp distinctions between the individual and the community, the inner life and the outer life, the natural and the supernatural, history and myth. Rather, everything intermingles. When the Bible uses the same word for spirit, wind, and breath, that’s original participation. When you go to a sports game and get swept up in the crowd, in the cheering, in the communal exaltation, that’s original participation. We surrender ourselves to the whole and take a step back in time.

The next phase Barfield called withdrawal from participation. It happens when there’s a shift in societal awareness such that we are pulled out from the whole. We are no longer entirely immersed in the life of others and of nature and the gods. We become aware of an interior self that is, relatively speaking, our own. We begin to ponder the great questions of life, the universe, and everything, seeking answers not without but from within. We grow skeptical of societal norms and taboos.

By its very nature, this second phase is often experienced as a severing or separation, even as an isolation, and that indeed is a high price to pay. But its benefits are equally profound: withdrawal from participation allows us to discover moral responsibility, philosophy, and a deeper understanding of the divine.

This leads us, then, to the third of Barfield’s phases: reciprocal participation. At this stage, people come to realize that the discoveries of phase two—that deeper understanding of morality, philosophy, and God—must now be incarnated in the world. These truths cannot remain pure theory but must become example. Phase three is the conscious choice to take what withdrawal taught us, what the interior life taught us, and to return with it into society to live out these truths for others. In other words, the purpose of the mountaintop experience is to come back down.

If wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience, then that’s what this third phase is. People at this stage can forge purposes and intentions. The awareness of participating in communal life still involves shared rites and ceremonies, but these are now undertaken freely and consensually, not simply because some priest or king demands it. It is the best of both worlds: the synthesis of the individual and the whole, the inner and the outer, the sacred and the secular, God and Man. Here is where true life dwells.

Keep in mind, however, that these phases are not linear, not once-and-done, but cyclical. Societies slide back and forth in their awareness, ever changing, never static. You can see this unfold in the Bible, in its repeating pattern of exile and return.

Early on, in Genesis, God walks with Man, the serpent speaks in the Garden, and life is understood almost exclusively in terms of family and tribe. That’s phase one, original participation. Then come the prophets, meditating on mountaintops, utterly unconcerned with societal respectability or worldly gain, focused exclusively on union with the will of God and fulfillment of His Commandments, come what may. That’s phase two.

But then the truths revealed to the prophets and the sages had to be incarnate. To be wholly realized, the inside of the cosmos had to be manifested in the life of an individual. Only then could human beings return and reconnect to the world, to each other, and to the divine.

And this individual is, of course, Jesus: Jesus, who shows us how what comes into a man from without cannot defile, but only what comes out from his heart; Jesus, who demonstrates a life made aware of an infinite Kingdom not only above but within. Jesus is the perfect union of God and Man, of the individual and the community, the unseen and the seen. Jesus is reciprocal participation perfected.

Now, like I said, these three phases are not once-and-done. All societies go through them multiple times. I could offer examples from ancient Greece or the Middle Ages or even the life of the Buddha. But I think just one more will suffice. And that is the example of our own time and the spiritual crisis our society faces today.

See, a hundred years ago everything was all about nationalism, and nation-states were going gangbusters. Every day, in every way, things were getting better and better: new technologies, new discoveries, new conquests all over the globe. And every nation-state had its own little pet church, so that personhood, people, piety and patriotism all got mixed together into one big mishmash, a towering monolith of one people, one language, one faith, one destiny. That’s phase one writ large.

And all that came crashing down in the catastrophe of the twentieth century: World War I, World War II, the Cold War, the Atomic Age, the Holocaust, the Bloodlands, horror upon horror, so that we all recoiled; we all leapt back. We all retreated into individuality, collectively losing faith in our society, in our institutions: government, military, church, university, what-have-you. We withdrew from participation out of sheer and awful shock. That’s phase two.

And that’s where we are today: separated, isolated, consumed with becoming individuals just like everybody else; forever attempting to build ourselves up by selecting from a list of infinite choice available on Amazon and purchasable through PayPal. People don’t come to Church because people don’t come to anything. We’re still recovering from a societal collapse which began just over a century ago.

So Good News: if Barfield is right, then the next phase is reciprocal participation, the phase of Christ. People will need to reconnect. We will need to come out of isolation, come out of the exclusive self, and learn to live again, truly live, in connection with God, nature, and one another. And this is what we do. This is what Christians are for. Show them the life of Christ, a life of humility and boldness and wisdom and joy and love, and watch how it shall grow—so that in this next century, all the West comes leaping out again, like calves freed from the stall!

And we shall all have life, and have it in abundance.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Credit where credit is due: the homily above is largely taken, at times word-for-word and phrase-for-phrase, from Mark Vernon’s book, A Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, the Last Inkling, and the Evolution of Consciousness (2019).