Farther into Mystagógia
[“(You have) self-disclosed to us the Mystery (Mystérion) of Your will, as purposed in the Christ, to be realized when the time was full (kaíros): to draw together into a headship everything (anakephalaiósasthai ta pánta) in the Christ, things both in the heavens and things on the earth” (Eph 1:9-10).]
O Lover,
We are approaching the liturgical ides of Mystagógia, the seven weeks of Eastertide concluding with Pentecost. Rooted in the patristic era, the term, literally “exploration of the mysteries,” is today most often used for the concluding formational segment in the Roman Catholic Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA).
Upon first hearing the term Mystagógia in 1991 at the outset of my own RCIA experience I was immediately on alert, for I was eager for a fuller theological understanding of the ecclesial Rubicon I was about to cross. However, during the intervening decades the term and its liturgical season have increasingly segued to the profoundly encompassing role of Your Mystérion in . . . EVERYTHING! More specifically, my doctrinal interest was belatedly yet inexorably being eclipsed by the Jesus tradition’s mystical edge in which You, transcending thought, reason, image, and language, are Reality Itself. What follows are three of my after-the-fact slices of Your unsliceable Mystérion, yet another attempted “raid on the inarticulate” (T. S. Eliot).
First, I am increasingly intuiting everything You have wrought, O Lover, as correlative, as characterized by mutually reciprocal relationship. This is a statement about both omni-inclusion and the webbed interconnectivity of everything. Rather than some New Age innovation dismissible as fad or pantheism, this correlation is implicit in the approximately 110 references in the Christian Scriptures to ta pánta (“everything”). More specifically, the Incarnation is Your declaration of having taken up permanent residency in all having being. The M.O. of Your heílsgeschichte is neither oblivious to finite reality nor can it be reduced merely to rescuing us from it (e.g., sóma / séma [“body / prison”]). To the contrary, Your embodiment extends to flora, fauna, and fungi; the vast cosmic reaches of the inanimate; and beyond. Ergo, all is of a single interdependent cloth with nothing existing in isolation. Within Your Mystérion vision there is no “outside,” only correlative unítas.
A second after-the-fact slice of Your Mystérion I dub convergence. A key text in the newer testament is Ephesians 1:9-10 in which You are described as Self-disclosing, at the propitious time (kaíros), Your drawing up into a headship in the Christ of everything (ta pánta). The later Fourth Gospel has Your Christ speaking this: “I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all things (pántas [Gr]; ómnia [Vlgt]) to myself” (12:32). Much of the subsequent mystical edge of the tradition of Jesus evidences influence by the circular convergence theme of Neoplatonism in which You are both Source (exítus)and Télos (redítus) of all having being. Rather than judging the creation as ripe for burning, Teilhard de Chardin names Your ubiquitous convergence dynamic the “Omega Point,” the flowering Ultima of millennia of Your Self-disclosure. It was as if You had Self-embedded a centering homing impulse within being itself. The correlative, Your surest habitation, does indeed converge around You.
Finally, a third Mystérion slice I refer to as Christification. Although hinted at in the other religious families and elsewhere, in the tradition of Jesus this convergence is seen as proleptically present in the Anointed One. The Incarnate is the harbinger of the completion of what is already intimated in the grain of the kósmos and the variegated fabric of its denizens. The Christ, across two millennia found to be vastly larger than any historical person, epoch, institution or religion, becomes the name for Your “restoration of all things” (apokatástasis [Acts 3:21]). The concussing paradox of the Tríduum, You oxymoronically drawing forth life via and out of death, is thus the watershed wisdom regarding everything!
What better time than Mystagógia for yet more exploration of Mystérion of the Cosmic Christ?
