“Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in the newness of life.”
~ Romans 6: 3-4

The Self-Implicating Nature of Being Christ-ened

By now, since most of us are well beyond our youth, we should be aware, if not intimately familiar with the reality, that participating in (not merely hearing, reading, or learning about) the death and resurrection of Jesus, involves participating in our own daily relinquishments, diminishments, and dyings. We easily give assent to poet-farmer Wendell Berry’s counsel to “practice resurrection” but, farmer-poet that he is, living so intimately within nature, he is well aware that we cannot practice resurrection until we first “practice dying.” That’s the rub of the gospel of Jesus and the paradoxical pattern of the paschal mystery— through death into life, into life through death. All told, becoming Christ-ened is rather inconvenient and more than a little self-implicating.

Catholic, Orthodox, Mainline Protestant, Evangelical, and Fundamentalist Christians, all in our own unique ways have been complicit in reducing baptism to a one-time “get out of jail” card instead of a portal to a lifelong Christ-ening process, the ongoing restructuring of who we are and a deeper passage into Christ-consciousness, Christ-vision, Christ-action, Christ-dying, and Christ-living.

As excruciating, subversive, and life-altering as these dyings sometimes are, they are invitations to shirk our false selves and to participate in the life of God who in Jesus participates in our own agony and suffering (Philippians 2: 5-8). Our very real dyings that are precursors to our mortal death invites us to practice trust and hope, leaning into the solace and truth to which Julian of Norwich’s words allude: “All shall be well, and all shall be well. All manner of thing shall be well.”

╬ Dan