[Oe List ...] Dec. 29 Saipan Tribune

[Jaime R Vergara]

I Niño Jesus
 
El Cristo Niño is the other acceptable phrase to describe the San Vicente manger.
 
Think one and you are with the Hebrew Yahwist (YHWH) and the Hindu Om, embracing existence’s totality.
 
Persia’s Zoroaster distinguished light from darkness, good and evil.  Graeco-Roman Christians embraced the dichotomy but reconciling the human and the divine in Jesus ever since Paul wrote the Romans.  Athanasius of Alexandria deposed Constantinople’s Nestorius on the unity of the Incarnate.
 
Think twos.  The Nestorians hightailed it to Persia while Athanasius’ colleagues defined orthodoxy. The Nestorians kept the human and the divine separate while the Roman Church insisted on the human/divine unity in Jesus Christ, thus, the role mistaken for the last name!  
 
On Rome’s decline, Augustine declared that De Civitate Deus as also The City of Man.  But ecclesiastical unity would not hold.  In 1054, Constantinople and Rome split over the ascendant Holy Roman Empire, leading to Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians hurling ‘anathemas’ to each other.  A millennium transpired before they felt their shame.
 
Medieval Aquinas kept the unity of Truth to encompass the natural and supernatural orders in his Summa Theologica; his systematic theology collapsed with the onslaught of enlightenment.  Socrates, Plato and Aristotle returned and we started thinking in threes again, but with a twist.  Plato’s dialogue became Hegel’s dialectic; synthesis after thesis and antithesis issued from contradiction.  The Church already had its triune formula of Patri et Fili et Spiritum Sancti, but Hegel’s contradictional thinking headed left in Marx, Mao, and Marcuse.
 
I am reminded of this thread because Christmas in China is contentless.  Jesus Christ, dichotomous or otherwise, is not required.  Celebrative consumerism universally abides, not dissimilar to those of other urban centers around the world.
 
“Blue shirts” once ran around Micronesia.  We used terms like “contentless Christ”, having drunk deeply in the silhouette chronology above.  We were passionate about transforming self and others in order to transform society.
 
Queried by a Chuuk SJ whether I was still a Christian, I answered that one need not be a Christian to play the Christ game.  For better phrasing from a colleague: the Christ Word or Happening does not depend on any historical tradition; it is a life process. There is no content, behavioral or historical or sociological or psychological or religious or economic, that is required for the happening to occur. It just happens, and when it does, everything is transformed. 
 
We plumbed the depth of what is real (e.g., how do we actually learn; and designed imaginal education), and beckoned all to join the journey.  A brother called it, “bending history”.  Mapping memory with built-in inevitabilities is a western construct, like Toynbee’s waves, and Marx’ triumph of the proletariat, to which Fukuyama gleefully announced to have ended with the Berlin wall. 
 
Freedom, not determinism, is the ethos of our time.  
 
Polite teachers at our colloquy greeted us before the end of the term with the standard “Merry Christmas”, so I pulled out my triune definition of the “contentless Christ.”  Our lives are caused into being by genes and memes, chanced by the vicissitudes of the fate, but always offered a full palette of choices with the invitation to live life fully, nevertheless.  Our emphasis was on ‘nevertheless’.
 
I drew two circles on the board, one shadeless but with a small shaded circle in the middle, and the other, the reverse.  I labeled one as “cause” and the other, “chance”.  Then I drew a bigger circle around both, erasing half an arc on either side of the original circles, creating a taiji (yin-yang) image, adding arrows to indicate a swirling of the two bodies inside the circle. Where the arcs meet, I placed an “X” and announced that at the pivot point of the eternally balancing dichotomy is where one stands to live, a “choice”.
 
We all gestalt to deduce, all count to sum.  Some think in threes, e.g., triangles like the “social process” of the economic, political and cultural; others, in fours like sides, in fives like the ‘fifth dimension,’ and still, some speak of the ‘sixth sense.’  Some ‘blue shirt’ colleagues think in 9s with 4x4 on each.  That’s 144 categories, too deep for our reach. But we all create overarching categories from which we spin our story.
 
I always add a center table with a centerpiece, and on this day, with spilled uncooked rice on shards of a cup bowl, an imaginal technique.  After my cause-chance-choice routine, I moved to the table with my coffee thermos, unwrapped leftover crackers, and said, “to be eaten, crackers are broken.”  Uncapping the bottle, I added, “bottled coffee is useless unless poured.”  
 
A teacher who studied in the West got wide-eyed.  Laughing loudly, I distributed the ‘elements’, called each teacher by name, and mumbled: “my broken body, my spilled fluid, always broken, ever poured out; eat, drink, all of it!”  Then I raised my cup, and said, “Cheers!”  There was silence.  We might have caused a paradigm encounter!
 
Got that last touch from the old TV sitcom at a Boston bar “where everyone knows your name.”  Something happens when one’s name is called.  Celebrating cause, chance and choice, at once, nevertheless, and loudly, is my ‘blue shirt’ version of the ‘contentless Christ’.  We had a Merry Xmas!
 
 



j'aime la vie
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