Our contemporary world is driven by four basic narratives. Narratives are those stories in which we try to understand our lives. The narratives of our post- modern age are security, meaning, liberty, and belonging.  God enters those four basic narratives and opens them to a path of radical inclusivity where everything will be integrated in the love that is God.  That entry of God into the human story is called Incarnation.

Security:

The chaos of our times has challenged us to our core. We have become de-stabilized by the rapid changes in our world. Ways of communicating have changed; borders have been redrawn and are in flux; our neighbours speak languages we did not grow up with; we have become suspicious of those in authority, be they secular or ecclesial.

One can even regard the officials of law enforcement as just another gang. These are just a few obvious manifestations of the unstable world we find ourselves in.   

In the midst of this we are drawn in our basic and deep desire for security. Closed myths offer us security in these times. They dogmatically assert to us that their political, or social, or ecclesial ways of reading reality are the only true and divinely approved ones. In our vulnerable state we are often tempted and seduced into accepting their claims.

But we need to be aware of how these closed myths operate. They exclude and demonize those who do not go along with them. They maintain their authority by fear. Their orthodoxy and law is established by a centralized government that uses the politics of coercion to intimidate and suppress.

What the path of spiritual intimacy offers those who reject the security of the closed myth is a rootedness in God. Intimacy is found not in belonging to socially approved groups, maintained by shame and guilt, but in the shameless and liberating embrace of God.

Institutions that offer us security offer us ways of reading the world and of evaluating it. They offer us an ethic; they cannot offer us faith, as a lived relationship with God.

Meaning: 

Our post-modern age has often been defined by a lack, or a conflicting excess, of meaning. There are many different incompatible points of view available and each is supported with valid reasons. The search for an understanding of what is going on, for clarity and direction, to overcome the confusion we feel and see around us becomes an urgent concern today.

Too often we are attracted to leaders, or institutions, who promise us such meaning. They offer us an author-ity which will deal with the crises in our religious, social, and political worlds. Often they claim their authority is from God.

Yet we see that their behaviour and their policies do not accord with our own awareness of how God operates. The path of spiritual intimacy, which allows us to be personal witnesses to God’s compassionate mercy, leads us not to clarity and systems of meaning but rather to mystery.

Such intimacy creates real relationships, and we are asked to live in those relationships we have with the mystery we call God rather than in the clarity of systems. We are asked to place our first trust in God, rather than in leaders or institutions. What such powers want from us is orthodoxy not our intimacy with God.

To live in mystery does not mean we abandon meaning, institutions, and those socialised forms of interaction which give us access to ourselves and each other. To live in mystery means that we appreciate those ways of be- ing as fingers pointing to the moon.

Those fingers are not the moon. In fact it is the moon which illuminates the fingers pointing. It is mystery which gives those institutions their life.

But it is wrong to equate the institution with the mystery. Institutions give us a socially approved way of living but they avoid the deeper question whether those ways of living are spiritually healthy.  They offer us a clarity which emerges from internal relations within their particular systems.

They often forget that the system itself is situated in a mystery bigger than what is intellectually available.

Christ’s reproaches to the institutions of his day was that they used themselves to justify ways of behaving which ignores the greater call of love.  They displaced mystery with meaning, love with clarity. Their ethics is ultimately one of self-interest or of a truncated self-transcendence.

Liberty:

Such a displacement leads to an ethical dead-end. Too often in our contemporary worlds we confuse license, liberty and freedom.

License is the social permission to behave in particular ways. These ways can be ethical or unethical.

Liberty defines license. Institutions can grant us liberty but we need to realize that our understanding of liberty is dependent on that institution we adhere to.

The quest today for liberty is often understood as the overthrow of oppression and victimisation. But what is not understood is that the secular longing for liberty — personal, social, or cultural — creates oppression for some other.

The cost of the liberty we desire is the enslavement of some other. We need to distinguish very carefully between liberty and freedom. Christ in the Garden of Gethse- mane gives up his liberty to maintain his freedom.

Freedom is how spiritual intimacy manifests itself in the world. That intimacy declares the right relationship with God is more human that the social constructions of liberty. Our freedom is as creations of God. Our freedom is not to be as Gods.  That deception is the one offered Eve in the Garden of Eden.

A spiritual intimacy with God on the other hand would declare that some times to be human we give up our liberty to be free. It is when we abandon our freedom and seek liberty that we inflict violence in our world.

This is not to say that we do not desire liberty, and that it is a good thing. But the liberty we desire flows from freedom, not from enslaving others.

The tension between liberty and freedom is shown in the use of power. Christ gives up his own power to be defined by the world, and so appears powerless in his passion, so that the power of the Father could manifest itself in its own way and its own time.  Christ belongs first and foremost to the Father.

Exclusivity:

Often we define our freedom by myths of belonging. We demand to be free to worship, to live out social and cultural identities be they race, gender, or creed.

These identities create boundaries. The other becomes the alien and is held as secondary to our primary values of self-determination. Then we ghetto-ise ourselves.

But before we are defined as racial, or gendered, or members of a religious tradition, we are human. In that humanity we are all creatures of God. We are all called to spiritual intimacy. Each call is unique but of equal value.

To abandon that call divides us into camps, ghettos, and forms of exclusivity. By accepting our identity as defined by such we deny or ignore a simple fact. We are creatures. We do not define ourselves. God defines us.

We are unfinished business. We are open myths and what exclusivity, of any sort, does is trap us into accepting ourselves as closed myths. When we live this way we use violence to assert who we are by destroying the other.

There is a despair that is endemic in any form of exclusivity. It is a despair that abandons the invitation of the Other to help us reach a richer understanding of ourselves, and thus to a fuller way of living our lives.

Security, meaning, liberty, and exclusivity are the plots of the stories we live by in our world today. These are not bad things in themselves. They become bad things when they replace a relationship with God.

Then socially defined forms of orthodoxy replace spiritual intimacy.

Then social acceptance betrays the deeper human desires for a rootedness in God, for a life lived in mystery, for freedom and for the drive to community where no one or nothing is excluded.