One night, in a very expensive exclusive restaurant, so well attended it is fully booked a year in advance, a man is being refused a seat, but he feels far too important for this, so he shouts repeatedly at the maitre d in the lobby: “Do you know who I am? Do you know who I am? Do you know who I am!”
And just then, the maitre d happens to spot a psychiatrist on his way out of the restaurant, so he turns and says: “Excuse me sir, but would you please tell this gentleman who he is?”
To answer the question, who am I, brings the fullest rest and joy, but how will it happen? Here it is a clue described by the character Edmund, in an otherwise very depressing play by Eugene O’Neill, called ‘Long day’s journey into night’.
“When I was on the squarehead, a square rigger bound for Buenos Aires, full moon in the trades, old hooker driving forth in knots, I lay on the bough stead facing the stern with the water foaming into spewm under me, the mast with every sail white in the moonlight towering high above me.
I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself, I actually lost my life. I was set free, I dissolved. I became sea, became moonlight, and the ship and the high dim starred sky. I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy.
I belonged within something greater than my own life or the life of humans, to life itself, to God, if you want to put it that way, to the joy of belonging to the fulfilment beyond man’s lousy pitiful greed and fears and hopes and dreams.
And several other times, when I was swimming far out, or alone on the beach, I have had the same experience. I became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swinging in the tide. Like a saint’s vision of beatitude, like the veil of things as they seem, drawn back by an unseen hand.
For a second you see, and seeing the secret, you are the secret. For a second there is meaning, then the hand lets the veil fall again, and you are alone, lost in the fog, as you stumble on again to nowhere for no good reason.”
The answer then is that to experience who he is, Edmund loses who he is not. This is also what St Paul means when he says I live, yet it is not I, but Christ lives in me. In Romans Paul calls this the death of the old man, and here it is once again, explained in Thomas Merton’s favourite story.
When Chuang Tzu and Hui Tzu were crossing Hao River by the dam, Chuang said: “See how free the fishes leap and dart. That is their happiness.”
As they walked, Hui replied: “Since you are not a fish, how do you KNOW what makes fishes happy?”
Chuang said: “Since you are not I, how can you possibly KNOW that I do not know what makes fishes happy.”
Hui argued: “But if I, not being you, cannot know what you know, it follows that you, not being a fish, cannot know what THEY know.”
Chaung said: “OK, then let us get back to your original question. You asked me, HOW I know what makes fishes happy. From the terms of your question you know already THAT I know what makes fishes happy. The answer is that I know the joy of fishes in the river THROUGH MY OWN JOY, as I go walking along the same river.”
When it feels that you are not separate from others, that you know them through the same river, there is only this unity behind nature, the wisdom mind. As John’s gospel states: ‘In the beginning was the word,’ and this word, ‘word’ comes from a Greek word, ‘Logos’: the Logos which became flesh and dwelt among us.
Because the word Logos is translated into English as ‘word’, but it really means wisdom, the wisdom of God, because it signifies Christ, the word of God, who is not a book, just as a ring is more than a piece of metal, because it signifies a commitment, and a house is more than a pile of bricks, as it signifies a home.
The word Logos was coined by Heraclitus six centuries before Jesus, and it suggests the shared aliveness of eternal reason, a cosmic pattern, an expression of unity behind nature, the mind of the universe, a first principle, a unity hidden from view, which balances out all the opposites.
When the New Testament was translated from Greek to Chinese, the Logos was rendered as DAO. In the beginning was the Dao, it said, and the Dao dwelt among us. Lao Tzu was writing about Dao as Heraclitus was writing about Logos.
Lao Tzu taught a return via the way, to the golden age, when people were closer to heaven and nature, when man was in a pure state, just as our Judeo Christian creation myth teaches an original state of union with God rather than self-sufficient clinging and subsequent fear of separation, in life and death.
Immeasurable indeed were the ancients, said Lao Tzu, subtle, unfathomable and penetrating, in pristeen simplicity, rising above the desire for created things, like an uncarved block, like water, which unresistingly accepts the lowest level yet also manages to wear away the hardest substance.
In the same way, Thomas Merton said what sin is to the Christian, cosmic disorder or personal anxiety is to the Daoist.
A shared joy comes in contemplation, intuition, meditation, a seeing expressed in spiral galaxies above us when we walk on the beach, spiral shells on that same beach which we walk on, spiral fingerprints on our hands holding them, and the spiral dna helix inside the flesh of those same hands.
This joy is a practice, but it was revealed to us from beyond our reach, in the flesh of a Palestinian Jew who said Love your neighbour as Being yourself.
All this talk of union between self and God is a paradox, like the Nicene Creed, which describes Jesus as both fully human and fully divine.
If it seems they can’t both be true at once, they can’t be resolved, then we still need to access the resolution through ourselves, a likeness between the seer and seen, so spirit and matter can coexist, a particular expression of the whole.
Jesus suggested this way of being was closed to those who claimed it. Jesus probably didn’t call himself Christ either, because Christ was not his last name.
It is the Greek translation of Messiah, a Hebrew term for anointed one, someone acknowledged as a leader approved of by God. But in the New Testament, Christ the Logos, the wisdom of God, means much more than a leader:
In John’s Gospel: “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not understood.”
In Colossians: “In the Son all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
In Ephesians: “With all wisdom and understanding, he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment—to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ.”
In the first letter of John: “What was from the beginning, what we have heard what we have seen with our eyes, looked at and touched with our hands concerning the Word of Life, we have seen and testify and proclaim to you as eternal life. That which was with the Father and was manifested to us, we have seen and heard and we proclaim to you so that you too may have fellowship with us.
"Indeed our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ. These things we write, so that our joy may be made complete. This is the message we have heard and announce to you, that God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.”
So if, as we have just heard, the whole universe existed in Christ, this can’t mean the whole universe existed in the human Jesus who grew up in Nazareth, walked around the fertile regions of Galilee and headed for Jerusalem.
What the whole universe existed in Christ means is that the whole universe existed in the wisdom mind whom Jesus embodied on this earth.
So it was Christ as spirit materialising in a Big Bang 14 billion years ago, it is Christ religions seek today, it will be Christ left when it all expires in a heat death.
Christians believe that when recorded history was ready, the cosmic Christ, the mind of this universe, became incarnate, so that it wasn’t just mathematical wisdom, but so, as love, we could fall in love with it, see it, and touch it, and as a result of its being embodied, intuit it in this world.
The bliss of contemplative Christianity is that pre-existent love, not a concept, not a book, not a system to relieve guilt, but the love which loves you first and loves you more, is in the world.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and you are this beholder, so beauty is really you.
None of this requires the euphemistic justice of a death of Jesus, which was really a miscarriage of justice, and much of atheism is a valid rejection of a sick view of God.
Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest theologians, said that no-one needed to die, it was just an appropriate way of showing what God suffers in redeeming the world. Jesus died saying forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.
What it does require is the birth of Christ, because Christianity is the good tidings into a world saved before creation. It is a blissful birth, not a violent death. A saved world before the creation through a virgin birth which floods the world with liberating gnosis, or self-knowledge, like Edmund’s knowledge on that square rigger under the moonlight, so that each moment is a confrontation with the cosmic heart.
But what is our over analytical and reductionist modern mind to make of this virgin birth? Modern cloning techniques suggest a man’s sperm is not required for a birth to happen anyway, so it really shouldn’t be too problematic. But that’s not the point.
Christ’s virgin birth was more than just unusual, it was actually a political statement. Alexander the Great’s birth had been attributed to a virgin, and the Roman Emperor Augustus’ birth was attributed to a virgin, so acknowledging Christ’s birth as a virgin birth was pledging one’s allegiance to a wholly different leader, not a time bound empire builder with a will to impose and the military means to do it, but someone eternal, someone non violent, someone existing in this world in such a way as to appear other-worldly, like Lao Tzu’s water, accepting the lowest level, but still wearing away the hardest substance.
Nor was this the birth of a non-violent mystery teacher like Buddha, who taught the dissolution of the self as the end of psychological suffering.
What purpose, Buddha had asked, is served in identifying with a fleeting, flickering, flux like body mind, its changing thoughts, its ephemeral sensations and emotions, clinging to I, me, mine.
Socrates had also said, “the unaware life is not worth living”.
And as someone else said more recently: “I would like to look at the mountain for what it is, and not just as a comment on my life.” Jesus would agree with this, in his parables and teachings, and that the Kingdom of God is within, but Jesus is more.
So let’s draw some conclusions.
If Jesus says you are the light of the world, and the first letter of John says that in God there is no darkness, who does that make you?
If Buddha’s birth was the birth of a wisdom teacher, Christ’s birth was the birth of the wisdom itself. St Irenaeus Bishop of Lyons put it well in 202 AD: “In his infinite love God became man, so that man could become God.”
Jesus will return, but possibly not literally, all wet and damp and aquaplaning in at 33 miles per hour through a cloud, maybe a nuclear mushroom cloud somewhere over the Red Sea.
There will be an end of history, but isn’t that always the case when eternity enters time?
Spirit filled poets, seers, visionaries, apocalyptic dreamers and God-inspired prophets all rise from the present moment. Now you are the space in which God is at work. Now time disappears, and a favourite Eastern Orthodox saying is that a person whose mind is full of thoughts is far from Jesus.
In the 2nd century, Ptolemy wrote: “Mortal as I am, I know that I am born for a day, but when I follow the serried multitude of the stars, my feet no longer touch the earth”.
Ptolemy’s earth-centered universe is long gone, now we theorise multi verses, now we know of a thousand million stars in a thousand million galaxies, and time may not end until they have all run their course, with any undiscovered life forms they may hold.
Human life is bewildering, but in a positive sense. If we put one fingernail up against the night sky, behind this tiny little space which our one tiny little fingernail obscures, there are one million galaxies hidden.
Studying the healthiest people he could find, to see what they all had in common, the psychologist Abraham Maslow concluded the most humane people have all had mystic experiences.
These experiences imply a loss of control, rather than a firm grip. And there is a reason for this. What we grasp is knowledge, but what grasps us is wisdom. The wisdom of God. Not the sick God atheism is allergic to, but Love, and not our love, just Love.
An existential ‘yes’ to belonging to wisdom, whether we like to or whether not. We do need an ego to relate to one another, but we don’t need to identify with one. Wisdom can play with the ego in silence, and enter down into the abyss of God. It is not fearful. ‘Fear not’ is the most common Biblical command, and the angels are always saying it.
At night, our eyes are 100,000 times more sensitive to light, and every second, not even as long as it takes to breathe in once, as many blood cells will die and be born in our bodies as London has inhabitants.
Your blood vessels, if lined end to end, would reach around the world, but your heart needs only 60 seconds to pump all your blood through the network and back, because it beats 100,000 times a day, and still you have no control over it.
Nor do you give instructions to the 35 million digestive glands in your stomach to digest even one strawberry. Frankly, you may as well be absent.
Except that as well as absence there is the Logos, a liberating presence, which the New Testament calls the parousia, the making present of Christ.
This cosmic Christ, who can never become the private property of any Church, any person, any company or human society, is more than any of us can imagine. He embraces within His universal body saints and sinners.
All separation from Him shall be removed when the world is absorbed into Him again, inevitably, irresistably.
So to answer our original question, who am I, we are not little waves of material and psychological expressions, but we are the ocean who expresses them, in whom they are expressed, the cosmic Christ, still at large, still elusive, still utterly accessible, and still dangerous to each and every anthropocentric religious system, in this conscious and sacramental universe.
Psalm 39 says everyone’s life is but a breath, so we breathe, and God is breathing in us.
In Christ, we become who we are.
