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2011 Series
Abiding in the Living Body of Christ –
Learning from the Saints, Prophets and Spiritual
Guides who point the way

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in North London. Advance booking is recommended

Christian mysticism is that experience of God in the Spirit coming through Christ from the Father. This makes us members, as we saw, of the mystical body of Christ. The whole of humanity is brought together, in principle, in this unity of the Spirit, recovering the unity which was lost through sin. This being brought back to unity extends to the body itself. Not only the soul but also the body is recreated and renewed as a spiritual body (soma pneumatikon) in the mystical body of Christ. The whole person, and eventually the whole creation, is restored to unity with the Father, in the Spirit, through the Son. That is the basic pattern of the Christian revelation and of the Christian experience of God.

Father Bede Griffiths, A New Vision of Reality, p 229

Yes, his physical form no longer walks the planet. But if we take him at his word, that poses no disruption to intimacy if we merely learn to recognize him at that other level, just as he has modelled for his disciples during those first forty days of Eastertide. Nor has that intimacy subsided in two thousand years – at least according to the testimony of a long lineage of Christian mystics, who in a single voice proclaim that our whole universe is profoundly permeated with the presence of Christ. He surrounds, fills, holds together from top to bottom this human sphere in which we dwell. The entire cosmos has become his body, so to speak, and the blood flowing through it is his love. These are not statements that can be scientifically corroborated, but they do seem to ring true to the mystically attuned heart.

These same mystical visionaries have tended to claim that this ‘pan-cosmic’ saturation of his being into the deepest marrow of this created world was the cosmic cornerstone turned in his passage through death. Without in any way denying or overriding the conditions of this earth plane, he has interpenetrated them fully, infused them with his own interior spaciousness, and invited us all into this invisible but profoundly coherent energetic field so that we may live as one body – the ‘Mystical Body of Christ’, as it’s known in the Christian tradition – manifesting the kingdom of Heaven here and now.

Rev Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus, p 134