notes on the Resurrection Body
“And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.”
“…in this, our evolution: to be conquered
by beings of ever greater might.”
—Rilke, “The Witness”1
Each human person lives by the grace of all Creation in the most unequivocal sense. The world is our body and our body is the world. The air we breath is a gift of the grass on which we trod; the fire in our heart is drawn from the furnace of stars and the time that it keeps is a measure from the score of cosmic history.
If God is anywhere, he must be everywhere. If a single man realized and made manifest this presence and identity in him, then the rest of the universe became his body, the body of God. Now we remain outside of this divine body only to the extent that we do not know this gospel, and only as a leaf knows not its vine or as my fingernail remains unaware of its station amongst the higher corporality. Our not knowing this is “the Cherubims,” at the East of Eden, “and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.”2 But in knowing this, our self may at once partake in communion in a higher identity and divine life. As Jesus, who is the Christ sayeth:
“I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing. If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.”3
To wit, God became Jesus and Jesus became Christ, and when he died on the Cross, his blood flowed into the Earth to lave and permeate every atom, imbuing it with the seal of Heaven. Our own bodies are wrought of these same atoms, and now we may partake the Divine Body of Jesus as members, just as every cell and organ in our body participates a higher life. As the Apostle proclaims:
“For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ…That there should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care one for another. And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it. Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular.”4
The Resurrection Body is the reality of the corporal body once its illusions have been cast off:5 “I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me,”6 “and I in him.”7
my translation of the final stanza of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Der
Schauende”:
“WHOSOEVER beaten by the Angel, (which so often declines even to fight) shall depart upright and rightened made greater by the firmest hand, that formed him to transform him. to win presents no temptation. in this, our evolution: to be conquered by beings of ever greater might.” (Wen dieser Engel überwand,/welcher so oft auf Kampf verzichtet,/der geht gerecht und aufgerichtet/und groß aus jener harten Hand,/die sich, wie formend, an ihn schmiegte./Die Siege laden ihn nicht ein./Sein Wachstum ist: der Tiefbesiegte/von immer Größerem zu sein.)
Genesis 3:24.
John 15:5-6.
1 Corinthians 12:1, 12:25-27.
“But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.” (2 Corinthians 3:18)
Galatians 2:20.
John 15:5.
I dunno if the resurrection body is just a state which we could even conceivably achieve if we had less blinders. Yet on the other hand, Mary was assumed without significant change, which would seem to imply that that glory is not a sea-change, but a gradual progress. Which implies that the mind meets God's action. But God does not change; therefore the action is always going. THEREFORE, it's the mind's "fault," so to speak (as distinct from something which can be solved through some particular gnosis or even a furious act of will). I always thought there was something very interesting in Fachinelli (Lacan's chosen disciple), who speculated against the Lacanian "Lac" that there was always, phenomenologically speaking, a sublime infinite surplus of joy, and all our evil was just so much rejection of it. We could fit this in to the Christian picture without altering it, I think.
Max - thanks for this brief flash of resurrection light - closing with a footnote that brings to mind the dynamic of gazing into a mirror to see our very true selves(!) (few seem to see this undeniable implication in, perhaps, Paul's most mystical statement) - and, therefore, seeing Christ... who (in and through His Body) "fills everything in every way..."