The 8th Day
A Christocentric view of History
Christ is Risen! Alleluia!
I first set foot on the grounds of Mt. Saviour monastery a few weeks before my 20th birthday. I drove up a long, steep drive, noticed an ornately carved wooden crucifix on the edge of a pasture, then travelled past a few hundred sheep meandering across light snow on a winter hillside. Finally, I parked and walked about 50 yards to the monastery chapel. The chapel was light and spacious, and had a feeling of transcendent peace, the kind of peace that saturates a place when it has been filled with prayer and praise for decades. After a few minutes in prayer, I looked around and was struck by how the chapel was structured as an octagon. The stone platform that raised the floor around the altar was an octagon, too. During my retreat, I asked one of the monks about the chapel and its structure. He replied, ‘it’s an octagon to remind us that we’re living in the eighth day of Creation - the day of Christ’s Resurrection.’
I’d heard of the seven days of the Biblical story of Creation, but I’d never heard of ‘the eighth day’. And the idea that we’re living in the ‘day’ of the Resurrection? Almost two thousand years later? These monks were living in a very different sense of time than the secular world I’d come from.
In recent posts I’ve explored aspects of a Christian sense of time. In Time, Liturgy and Eternity and Sabbath, I pondered how our experience of chronological time can exist along side a lived sense of eternity, and that the practice of sabbath can deepen and ground this sense of living in the fullness of God’s providence, here and now. In these posts, I chose to highlight the more ‘circular’ sense of time that emerges from a Benedictine rhythm of life.
I’m drawn to exploring this theme because our experience of time on the Metanoia homestead has both a circular quality (unending cycles of the day and of the seasons) and an eternal quality (steeped in awareness of God who is beyond time and change). This differs from the anxious forward lurch of time in the secular world, which has a sharply linear quality. I’m convinced that an exclusively linear sense of time, locked into a ‘flattened cosmos’ where conscious awareness is confined to the material plane, is at the root of much of our modern dis-ease and sense of alienation from life. Yet when I’ve spoken with other Christians about this other, more circular and eternal sense of time, many comment on how Christianity does have a linear notion of time. For us who are Christians, they emphasize, time has a beginning and an end, and history is going somewhere. In one sense, they’re right, Christianity does have an acute sense of time, as a religion founded on the conviction that God entered into human flesh at a specific time and place. However, there are major differences between the original sense of time in Christian sacred history, and the linear sense of time that fuels the modern1 world.
Christocentric History and the Ancient Church
How did the early church understand history? It might be summed up by three momentous acts of God, each initiating a new era. 1st: Creation, 2nd: Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection, and 3rd: Parousia or the Second Coming.
The first era of history began when God created the heavens and the earth, and the human race. God’s infinite love and creative energy burst forth, making the world anew in love. The world was created good, and a humanity made ‘very good’ was created in God’s image and likeness. Yet, the human race lost its original union with God, and suffered the disastrous effects of the Fall. For the rest of this first - and by far the longest - phase of history, every human heart was destined to frustration. We longed for God, yet were mired in an inability to return to union with God. In mercy, God revealed Himself to Abraham, to Moses, and to the Prophets and sought to draw us back to God. Alas, we proved too fickle, and were unable to ever fully return. Some of the prophets envisioned and longed for a future, deeper union that was to come.
The second era of history begins when God enters into the human race in the person of Jesus Christ, fully human and fully divine. Jesus takes on the sins of humanity and dies on the Cross for the forgiveness of these sins, and in Rising from the Dead conquers death. As the ancient pascal hymn declares:
Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!
On the day of the Resurrection, God’s creative action begins again, in a new and even greater fashion. Entering into the fallen world, God restores the union between God and humanity through the Incarnation, Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. God’s creative love breaks forth anew. The lame walk, the blind see, the dead are raised. Humanity’s frustration is ended, and every human heart is given the opportunity to enter into eternal life through faith in Christ. A new humanity, restored in our souls and reconciled with God, emerges, as Christ’s Mystical Body, the Church.
Yet in this era, the old decay remains. All is made spiritually new, and from time to time, this renewal breaks forth into the physical world in astounding, dramatic ways. In every generation from Christ until our own, mighty miracles have taken place. The blind still have their sight miraculously restored (occasionally), the lame still walk at the prayer of a believer (occasionally), and even the dead still rise (occasionally). In some saints we see dramatic examples of Christ’s divine life interpenetrating the human body. These include:
Inedia (people living on no food except the consecrated host for months, years, or decades
Levitation (the body rising above the earth, usually while in prayer)
Miraculous healings (instantaneous restoration of health through prayer)
Incorruptibility (when a deceased body resists the natural process of decay, sometimes for several centuries)
Bilocation (being present in two places simultaneously)
Stigmata (the wounds of Christ replicated on a believer’s body)
The healing of all animosity between humans and nature (wild animals and even the impersonal forces of nature live in friendship with the saint)
All of these point to the mystery of our current era. Spiritually, redemption has been accomplished. Jesus Christ has opened the door to paradise, and all can enter who trust in him. Yet our world remains fallen, both perfectly redeemed and yet tragically incomplete. We who have entered into Christ experience the joy and the tension of this dual reality - we are already set free, yet bound, our hearts are in eternal heaven while our bodies are subject to time and space. With St. Paul, we both long to be with the Lord in heaven but know we are called to labor here and now.
This is the world we live in. It is the world of the first century Christians, and the world of the 11th century Christians, and the world of the 21st century Christians. Cosmically, we live in the same reality, in the space between the Resurrection of Christ and the Parousia, or Second Coming. In this age, the Kingdom (or ‘Realm’) of God is already, eternally present, and is realized in an instant by the pure in heart. There is nothing left to do, cosmically, as Jesus Christ has redeemed the world. We are called to live in the world, yet not of it, continuing to walk through time as we await the full reconciliation of time and eternity in what Jesus refers to as ‘the age to come.’2
I believe that, in this current era, the original Christian understanding of salvation history is ‘holographic’. The infinite perfection of Divine Life breaks forth in the Resurrection of Christ. In every generation since, there are some who discover this source of unending life, and embody (or ‘manifest’) it in various degrees of intensity in this world. In each generation and each era, any Christian is equally saved, and the saints of that age are equally infused with a radical expression of this same risen Christ. Saint Sharbel of Makhlouf in the 19th century radiates divine power in the same manner as Saint Anthony of Egypt in the 4th century. Healing miracles took place in the 2nd century, and they take place in the 21st. The divine energies of Christ are at work in the same way - in every era since the Resurrection, the Realm of God is close at hand for those who trust in Jesus Christ. The greater the trust, the more intensely the power of Christ tends to materialize into our particular moment in time and place in the world3. Some early protestants spoke of the ‘age of miracles’ ending with the 1st century (God’s manifest power is strongest in the past), and contemporary progressive Christians often speak of ‘building up the Kingdom of God’ to an ever greater extent via social progress (God’s manifest power will be strongest in the future). The witness of the saints reveals instead that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever4, ‘until the end of the age’5.
The third era of history is ‘the age to come’, when the Christ returns in glory, time and history as we know it will cease, and the material world and the spiritual world are more deeply reconciled. There’s much speculation about the nature of this age to come, but scripture points to an age with a radically different nature of our own. ‘A new heavens and a new earth’ are created, and the human experience of God is more fully united to a new personhood, where body, soul and spirit are made whole in God. Death and decay end, and the natural world as we know it is re-created. That which miraculous in the saints becomes the experience of a risen and redeemed humanity.
I’m not going to try and articulate the specifics of the ‘age to come’ in this post - the essential point for now is just to realize that orthodox Christianity has a positive vision of a future where God’s healing power is more fully revealed, and that future is of an entirely different order than our own. We can no more bring it about by human effort than we can make the sun rise faster by willing it.
In this Christocentric perspective, there is a positive direction to history, but it is not guided or fueled by human striving. We live in the ‘middle time’ of history, after the age of fall and futility, and before the time of full redemption. In this age, the world is both fully redeemed (spiritually) and still subject to corruption (materially/outwardly). The epoch-defining event of this ‘middle time’, the Resurrection of Christ, has already occurred, and eternally present as a reality we can participate in, in every instant through the opening of our hearts to Jesus Christ.
Living the Resurrection in a world that is passing away
When a human being has become a new creation in Christ, we depart from a primary identification with the world that is passing away6. In the philosophical traditions of the East, this ‘world of things that pass away’ would be considered the world of karma, or the world of ‘cause and effect’. It’s the chronological, time-bound world where each event feeds and leads into the next event, in a seemingly unbroken chain of causality. It’s also the world of materialism. For the past 400 years secular Western thought has, with increasing boldness, asserted that this material, cause-effect, time-bound world is the only reality. Yet in the New Testament, this ‘only world’ is depicted as a temporary, partial world, and precisely the world that Christians are called to leave behind as a center of preoccupation.
To awaken to new life in the Risen Christ is to awaken to eternal life, to a life that is always and forever a participation in the infinite love of God. When we enter into this life, there is no ‘boundedness’, not by time, and not by space. Our hearts are elevated by a love that is boundless, timeless, omnipresent and eternal. We have entered ‘the eighth day’, the time wherein God can, and does, make all things new. This is the experience that many speak of as being ‘born again’ - an awakening to eternal life, a second and more substantial life that occurs even as we continue to live with a body and a psyche that are subject to age, illness and eventual death.
Life in Christ is thus both timeless and time-bound. We walk the timeless way of our ancestors in the faith, knowing that we are living in the same essential spiritual reality as all Christ-bearers who have gone before us. We are all equally dwelling in the timeless ‘eighth day’ where Christ is renewing the human race. At the same time, the external bounds of our place in time (and space) are different than past generations. Unlike most generations of Christians, we in modern times have an astonishing ability to travel across the earth with our technologies, and an equally astonishing ability to distract ourselves from spiritual truth with endless entertainment and access to information. The conditions are different. Yet at its essence, our age is fundamentally no better or no worse than any other of this interlude between the Resurrection and the Parousia. Both our blessings and our obstacles differ, but the essential task remains the same - to live in spiritual freedom in Christ while still participating in the world of form.
Remembering the Christocentric view of history can have immense spiritual value in our time. We live in a time where the dominant, secular view of history is rapidly unraveling. It’s becoming harder and harder to believe in the myth of progress, even as the institutions, economy, and intellectual edifice of secular modernity remain founded on the idea of continuous improvement and growth. As Paul Kingsnorth has often quipped, this ‘machine’ is unsustainable, and that means that it will not be sustained. Many, perhaps the majority, of Christians I meet when I facilitate retreats or preach have gotten caught up in the anxiety of our age. We easily end up sharing with the secular world the rising sense of panic when things of the present order threaten to fall apart. From the perspective of the eighth day, we should not expect anything in the outer world to last forever, least of all a way of life that is built upon a continuous expansion of material consumption and identification with the ego.
Where Christians in particular can get ‘hooked’ on a horizontal, linear view of time is when we morph the Christian idea of compassion and loving service to others into the idea that we can, and should, make a substantially more perfect world here on earth through human progress. This has long been the dream of social engineers and utopian visionaries, based on the idea of the perfectibility of human life (both personal and social) through horizontal or ‘this worldly’ means. Historically, it has never quite worked out. There have always been good times and bad times, time of human expansion and times of human contraction. Every new social system and every new technology brings some blessings, and some curses. Ironically, the effort to force human perfection through rational means has often, in time, resulted in the most horrific inflictions of human suffering. The tens of millions killed at the hands of both National Socialists and the Communists in our supposedly rational age attest as much.
While they may appear similar at a casual glance, the ‘Christianized’ version of the goal of continuous social improvement has a vastly different origin than the divine love manifest by Christ in the Gospels. The first is calculating, based on human striving even when it is motivated by loving intentions. The second is utterly free, originating from the supernatural love of God. It’s worth noting that Jesus had no plan for utopia, he simply walked the land healing and blessing individuals and proclaiming that the Realm of God was already at hand. It was the Sadducees, tasked with governing, who came up with the plan to ‘save’ the nation by executing Jesus7.
The Gospel message places the origin of love and mercy in the Realm of God. It is not our place to perfect the world. It is our supreme task, each and every one of us, to enter into Divine Life. To the extent that we do so, we will be empowered by Christ and His Holy Spirit to love and serve those around us with extravagant love. Immersed in a love that is timeless and boundless, we will do so without anxiety or effort to manage the world to perfection. We will instead do the work of loving those we encounter as an expression of the eternal love the Risen One places within us. In doing so, we retain our interior freedom, and can stay awake to the ‘eighth day’ and sense of eternity even when immersed in intense service of others.
It can be a subtle affair. But I’ve come to believe that this is a key aspect of Jesus’ call to ‘losing one life to save it’ in the Gospels.8 The ideal of progress is not a Christian teaching. It may actually be a Christian heresy, one that spun off from the combination of the Christian call to love and serve others with the Christian sense of time having meaning and purpose, corrupted by the addition of the Luciferian idea of deification through self-will. In its secular form, the form that drives the modern world, it has thrown off any notion of a transcendent source of goodness, instead upholding a worldly view of a future ‘salvation’ that is obtainable via human effort and calculation. This myth of progress is failing badly in our current time9. What a terrible burden we place upon ourselves when we attempt to co-opt the work of ‘saving the world’ as our personal task, only to see the world continue to go up in flames.
To live in the way of Christ, I believe we’re invited to a stance of ‘holy indifference’ to the progress of the world at large. We’re called to solidarity with all who suffer, to bear the pain of the world with Christ. We’re called to sacrificial love. But to govern the fate of the world is a task reserved for God alone. The very idea that we humans can do this apart from God is at the heart of our fallen state, and the heart of our modern misery. To be ‘indifferent’ is not to fail to love, it is to love with a complete freedom in Christ. It means to keep our primary awareness not on this passing world, but on living in 'the ‘eighth day’ of Creation, as one sharing in the life of Christ who makes all things new. Whether we live in an era of prosperity or of calamity makes no difference - we live in Christ, love and serve in all seasons. This service may appear foolish to the world, or it may be applauded as a major advance in human welfare. We may go against what is popular, or we may participate in popular efforts to promote human welfare. Whatever the outer conditions, we’re called to remain unattached to outcome, and fixed on our desire to love. Far from aloofness, this ‘holy indifference’ actually allows for greater compassion, as compassion flows most freely from a heart that is open to life, without attachment to particular outcomes.
When we do this, we are already free. We await the final fulfillment of all things in Christ, yet paradoxically we already share in a foretaste of eternity while still in this life. Our hearts are pointed towards a supremely hopeful future -both in heaven at the end of this life, and of risen life in the ‘life of the world to come’. Yet at the same time, we have no need to control or manipulate the future, because at the deepest level of our being we are already freed from chronological time. We participate in history, not as authors, but as free children and ‘agents’ of the author of life.
This is the Christocentric view of history. Christ has risen, and every human heart has the opportunity, in this life, to share in His risen life. Christ will come again, and the sorrows of this world will one day be fully healed by the infinite mercy of the Redeemer of all. We’re living in the interval between these two great explosions of Divine Love10. We must not let our hearts be deceived. Not by the news. Not by utopian dreams or dystopian nightmares. Not by the burden of history or fantasies of the future. We live in the age of the Resurrection of Christ. Metanoia, let us expand our hearts to open to the one perfection that is a reality right here, right now, and forever - God, within us, among us, for us.
and post-modern, and post-post-modern, or whatever we’re now calling the era we’re in.
Mark 10:30, Luke 20:43-36, among others
This principle is echoed in the Gospels, where Jesus frequently tells people ‘your faith has saved/healed you’, and it’s reported that He could not do many mighty deeds in Nazareth because of the lack of faith of those who lived there (Mark 6:1-6)
Hebrews 13:8
Matthew 28:20
See I Corinthians 7:31, I John 2:17
John 11:45-54
Mark 8:35
How many people do you know who think the world is going well right now?
And we’re still blessed by the innumerable gifts of the first explosion of divine love, the Creation.
A beautifully written and for me, a very timely piece. Thank you.
I loved reading this. Thank you for your wisdom.