Do You Actually Live Here?
[“Does God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain You. . . .” (from dedicatory prayer of Solomon [I Kings 8:27]).]
[“And I heard a loud voice from the the throne, saying, ‘Behold, the tabernacle of God is among humans, and God will dwell among them, and they shall be God’s people, And God Godself will be among them’” (Apoc 21:3).]
O Lover,
On August 15 the liturgy in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at the University of Notre Dame included the celebration of 138 years since that building was consecrated in 1888. The first reading, taken from Solomon’s dedicatory prayer in I Kings 8, took on an expanded meaning for me beyond the “dedication of the house” theme, and occasioned this prayer post.
Rather than getting stuck on the linkage between our text and a temple or institution, I heard the excerpt from Solomon’s prayer as skewering the central paradox of the entire biblical story: how is it that You, O Lover, uncontainable by “heaven and highest heaven,” are yet present throughout the cosmos in general, us humans in particular? Thus lifted slightly out of its ancient context, his query affected me deeply on the ides of August.
Solomon’s query thrust me into the newer testament. It is fascinating to ponder that You, the Self-named, should identify Your Incarnation Project with the name of Immanuel (“God with us” [Mt 1:23]), and in so doing respond frontally to our question. Furthermore, that the vision of Your culminating “all in all” (I Cor 15:20-28) should employ the same paradoxical “tabernacling” language found in the Apocalypse (21:3) as does the text pertaining to the Christ in John’s prologue (1:14).
Segueing to the interrogative, is not the Christic enfleshment then “foretaste” (e.g., Rom 8:23), harbinger, prolepsis, anticipatory glimpse into . . . everything? Might this congruence point to the expansion of the meaning of the title “The Christ” to encompass all that You have wrought? Indeed, is not the title “The Christ” thus shown to be also the proper name for Your Mystérium of drawing up all beings up into a unity (Eph 1:10)? Is it not this universal convergence for which Teilhard de Chardin employed pregnant terms like “Christogenesis,” “Christification,” and “Omega Point”? Does not the universality of Your Anointed One bear witness to, and indeed is, the ubiquity of Your tabernacling? Is this not Your declaration that, in response to Solomon’s query, You do indeed reside in our finite neighborhood, in every here and in every now?
Whether among the ancient Greeks, devotees of the 18th century Enlightenment, or present day practitioners of consumerolatry, there has been and remains a deep aversion, variously grounded philosophically, to the possibility of the wedding of the Infinite with the finite, to what Eckhart terms the mingling of the Bullítio (“boiling”) with the ebullítio (“boiling over”). In short, for this trekker the theme of Incarnátio (“enfleshment”) in the tradition of Jesus constitutes a foundational affirmative in response to Solomon’s question.
So gather round, all manner of beings, interconnected effluence of You, O Lover, all: the collective name for the totality of us finites—trekkers being drawn into wholeness and unity—is “The Christ”!
