Along with Richard Rohr,I think Jesus was the first prominent non-dualistic thinker in the West. And, generally speaking, the West hasn’t known what to do with him. The West doesn’t understand his essence or his thinking.
The East apprehends Jesus’ paradoxical essence. The East understands the incarnation with more depth and subtlety than our dualistic “in two persons” Western theology. For the Oriential Orthodox tradition Jesus could never be “in two persons,” which is tragically dualistic. For the Oriental Orthodox, Jesus is “one united dynamic nature: at once God and human.” This is the Jesus Paradox (Miaphisite in Greek).
We need something we can trust in an ultimate sense, somewhere to turn when our health fails, when our job falls through, when our loved one dies. The mystics affirm there’s no relationship, community, belief, or form of prayer we can completely trust. Nothing is worthy of our trust, nothing but the person of Jesus.
In The Philokalia, Gregory of Sinai (d. 1346) puts it well: “Behold your liberation, which is Jesus Christ, the redemption and salvation of souls. . . who is both God and man (human).”[1] Jesus: God’s dynamic human form—the prize of the mystics—the game changer—paradoxical, active, a moving target.[2]
[1] Palmer, et al, The Philokalia Vol. 4, 234.
[2] May, The Awakened Heart, 189, 198.
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