TO LOVE AND NOT BE A MONK

We can live boldly in the circle of life that is Christ in us and us in Christ. We can love ourselves, love our wives and girlfriends and those we don’t particularly like due to their politics or manner.

Not every-one wants to be a monk. Some have an inclination to contemplation that comes from who they are. A few, who have been mis-taught to despise the body and hate the self, might incorporate monkishness into their mode of sin-management along with a degree of self-flagellation. I knew a man whose penchant to legalism was about afflicting his non-liked self.

It’s difficult not to surmise that some prefer a gospel of law rather than a gospel of the Spirit because it suits their natural morbidity. Real joy is the effect of the Spirit of Christ with us.

Other’s cling to the law due to their absorption in rationalism and their religion of the knowledge of good and evil. This is the tenor of fundamentalism and its counterfeit spirituality. It should not surprise us that fundamentalist males find it easy to abuse their wives and children in the name of God.

MISGUIDED ATTRACTIONS
We might be attracted to a compartmentalised life as a way of controlling and ‘sanctifying’ the self. A mistaken ‘holiness’ is hiding from pleasure.But we are wholly justified, sanctified and progressively glorified when Christ is our life in all our expressions. God has made us holy as God is holy by re-joining us to His being in Jesus.

In Christ we are sons of God. Out of Christ we are sons of Adam.
As Believers we can blunder on in ‘ignorance is bliss’ mode. Or proceed in a gentle but stubborn passivism excluding truth and rationalising our distorted gospel. But Truth and the Spirit of life is there for us if we are astute enough to possess it. Margaret Shuster wrote, “What is truth? The True Man said, ‘I am the truth.’ True men, responding in the faith of God’s grace, can start nowhere else than to proclaim, ‘Indeed, He is the truth.’” This is the truth that draws us out of slavery into sonship. The truth that makes His life our life. The truth that makes us gracious to ourselves and the women in our lives.

THINK IT THROUGH
There is nothing dour about  Christ our life. Thoughtfulness and contemplation are aspects of being that all can adopt - even those who are not contemplatives. There is great advantage in thinking through who and what we are according to the beliefs that have been handed to us. Why? Because some of these beliefs may be less that our inheritance in Christ. Or they may add up to a false gospel and a false christ.
THE MARTHA CHURCH
Mary positioned herself better than Martha. There is no indication that Mary was less practical or capable in the home than was Martha. Mary was more perceptive in knowing where life was to be found. Fruitful doing is always rooted in oneness with God. When Mary began her womanly duties again she would be energised with spirit and life.
BUSY, BUSY YET NOT ALIVE
If Martha was as sensitive as one would hope and interested in being more ‘godly’ than ‘busy-busy’, she may have taken on board that Christ was her life and become an imparter of spirit and life in her industry. Certain Christian cultures are filled with busy-busy people – all under the misapprehension that they are Godly because they are Christian workaholics. Don’t let other people’s sense of mission rob you of how Christ is expressing Himself through you.
We can be busy and Godly if we are incarnated. If not we are just busy.
AWARENESS AND SPIRITUAL DISCERNMENT
Thomas Merton writes, “Monasticism aims at the cultivation of a certain quality of life, a level of awareness, a depth of consciousness, an area of transcendence and of adoration which are not usually possible in an active secular existence. This does not imply that the secular level is entirely godless and reprobate, or that there can be no real awareness of God in the world. Nor does it mean that worldly life is to be considered wicked or even inferior. But it does mean that more immersion and total absorption in worldly business ends by robbing one of a certain necessary perspective. The monk seeks to be free from what William Faulkner called "the same frantic steeplechase toward nothing" which is the essence of "worldliness" everywhere.” (1)
RIVERS OF SPIRIT AND LIFE
I am not entirely in agreement with Merton. I would urge that active and enterprising people will become agents of spirit and life, releasing living water where they are – if they live the incarnation. But not by self-vindication or efforts to earn Christ’s favour. We already have it.
HOLY ENTERPRISE
Active, and enterprising people can overflow with spirit and life. Anyone can live an active sacramental life when Christ is their life. In the incarnation God’s presence spreads through us into the world. Activism only has negativity when it is ‘a work’ – when it is a substitute for union with God. Oneness with God does not mean separation from the world. But it does mean we are done with worldliness, done with the construction of the self in separation from Jesus – which means done with living from the false self.
One can adopt a Godly thoughtfulness and consciousness without being a monk. Jesus demonstrated His oneness and commitment to His Father by doing what Father was doing in the hurly-burly of ordinary life.
SACRED/SECULAR IS GONE
Differing with Merton I would argue that since the cross and resurrection there is no secular world and no compartment of life that is more sacred than any other. There is no time or place where God is not with you and in you. You have a Sabbath life.
LORD’S FEAST
Since we are one substance with Christ the sacrament of the Lord’s Table is never some religious motion. The sacrament is Christ our life lived as Christ come in our flesh. In Jesus we are incorporated into heaven and in Jesus God is incorporated into earth – in us. This is theosis in spirit and in truth.
BY THE ONE SPIRIT
The incarnation is key. Firstly, God becomes a man in Jesus Christ. Secondly Jesus Christ becomes every man and every woman by the Spirit of Sonship. In The One Spirit we are one with Father and Father is one with us. As sons and daughters, we are the manifestation of God. This is our life-giving purpose where we are.
GOD IS
God has always been incarnated in a general way in the creation and in a more visible way in the life of Israel. The Spirit of God had agency and influence in many of the better religions of the world before Christ. But God revealed Himself personally in the person of Jesus Christ.
Jesus revealed in His person what it meant to be a human being who is a son of God. Jesus is the pointy end of the revelation of God – the revelation that God so loved the world that He gave His only Son.  The life of God is for the world and is never separated from the world. The Son of God came in a human body and walked on earthly dust. Our being in God is woven into our being in the creation. In Christ we are one with God, one with self, one with people and one with the ceation.
GOD SO LOVES THE WORLD
“As a way of summarising the distinctive ways in which the Triune God creates, Torrance alludes to a doctrine of theosis (union with God) thus: The supreme end for which God has designed his creation and which he activates and rules throughout all his relations with it is the purpose of his Holy Love not to live for himself alone but to bring into being a creaturely realm of heaven and earth which will reflect his glory and within which he may share with others the Communion of Love which constitutes his inner Life as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
It is in the incarnation of God’s beloved Son in Jesus Christ, and in our sharing in that relation of the Son to the Father through the Holy Spirit, that the secret of the creation, hidden from the ages, has become disclosed to us. … Here theosis is a sharing in the Divine Life in a creaturely way as a direct result of the creation from the Love of the Father through the omnipotent grace of the Son and realised by the life-giving work of the Holy Spirit.” (2)
MORE THAN MAGIC
‘Heaven invading earth’ is more than healing the sick and giving prophetic words. It is more than charitable works and victory over sins. The divine life is Christ in you, Christ in us. It is through the trinity in us that that God’s life becomes us and through us in this life that the new creation – the transformed earth becomes the Kingdom of God. The most accessible example of heaven invading earth is you as a manifestation of the Christ by the Spirit. Because Christ has come in your flesh and the flesh of the Church.
(1) Merton T, Contemplation in a World of Action
(2) Habets M. Theosis in the Theology of Thomas Torrance