Conversations with Christine
Conversations with Christine, Chapter 8: Reconnecting
Photo by Connor O’Keefe on Unsplash
After I paid for our icecream from the Canteen at Fort Worden, we crossed the street and walked out on the pier to sit in the shade from the sun. We sat together with our backs against the Marine Science Center. Christine was engrossed in her icecream so I waited patiently while she carefully managed the drips.
“I feel like I need to go back even further in history to try and understand where religion, particularly Catholicism, got so off track. Even with my limited knowledge and study of history, world religions, and psychology, the God of our childhood seems off.” I lay down to look up at the sky. “It just all seems so limiting. How did we make Brahman and the Godhead so small?”
“I wouldn’t underestimate your intelligence, Becky,” Christine responded as she bit into her sugar cone. “You are addressing more of a macro version of things that many people can’t see. You’ve always been a person who needed to understand the big picture to understand the details.”
I let that sink in. I loved that my sister could truly see me and help me remember who I was.
“But if you are looking for some history of certain events that could pinpoint this narrowing of God, we would have to go back as far as the 5th century CE to the Council of Chalcedon,” Christine explained. “Because prior to that era, the early mystics and Eastern Church fathers taught Theosis—the idea that the ultimate goal of human life is to become divine, or to realize our inherent union with God. They frequently taught that God became human, so that humans, through the Holy Spirit, could participate in the divine life of the Trinity.”
“So, wait! What?” I blurted out as I sat up to look her in the eyes. “We once remembered the truth of who we were and then we lost sight of it?”
“Yes,” she replied as she shaded her eyes to see me directly. “I think it is safe to say that humanity has been asleep for 1,500 years. A sleep brought on by Roman politicians and theologians.”
“What happened at the Council of,” I paused trying to remember what she called it. “What was it that happened in the 5th Century?” I asked.
“The Council of Chalcedon. Just like you, the early founders of Christianity were trying to understand the concept of the Trinity. These weren’t necessarily bad people, Becky; they just couldn’t understand what they hadn’t experienced.” Christine paused as I pulled my notebook back out of my backpack. I was going to need to start building a timeline so I could visually see what she was talking about.
“Scholars and many theologians of the Roman Church hadn’t experienced firsthand the divine presence that this indigenous man named Jesus invoked in the early disciples and early Christians,” Christine continued. “You have grown up with these concepts and know firsthand that it is intellectually difficult to understand what the early Christians experienced. I think they had mystical experiences, spiritual awakenings, spiritual emergences—whatever you want to call it—to help them have a deep knowing or gnosis of the Godhead.”
“Okay, so let’s back up to our earlier conversation when you talked about what the early Christians believed. You stated that pure spirit doesn’t have a physical body, a race or gender and is within all living things. It is pure consciousness, a source that connects us all together to one another and to all living things. Right?”
“Yes,” Christine responded. “And the early mystics and Eastern Church fathers taught that the ultimate goal of human life is to become divine, or to realize our inherent union with God.”
“Let’s bring in some modern mystics of our time so I can fully grasp what you are talking about,” I said as I lay back onto the pier’s wooden floorboards. “The mythologist Joseph Campbell, for example, talks about the Hero’s Journey. How each one of us develops an egocentric self through our early childhood wounding, a term that Hindus refer to as Karma.”
“Campbell, who took most of his understandings of enlightenment from the sacred texts of the Upanishads and Vedantic philosophy, taught that this Karma, or woundings, are the very thing that drives our journey. The goal is to shed the egocentric self and be guided back to this divine union that you are describing that the early Christians knew all about!”
I sat back up and felt the need to cry. “Christine, this is all so sad! I can see why in Hindu philosophy they say this is all an illusion. It is Maya, madness. It really is!”
“You can think of it that way,” Christine responded as she placed the palm of her hand on the center of my back. “Or you can think of it as Joseph Campbell does. It is the journey of the soul, the hero’s journey. It was designed to be like this.”
“What do you mean? Neither of us believes in a punishing God, so why is it designed this way? It makes no sense!” I was on the verge of tears.
“Look at it this way, Becky.” Christine said softly, trying to calm me. “We can’t know our own divinity, our oneness with all, unless we know our separateness. When we wake up to this understanding—that all of this is an illusion—we realize we are one with everything. We experience what is described as Unity Consciousness.”
“I can understand why so many of my generation and yours threw the baby out with the bathwater when we rejected the religions of our childhoods,” I said as I wiped a couple of tears from my cheeks. “It all seems like it was designed this way: for us to have something to push back against so that we could find a new era of enlightenment, to find our own practices, communities, and values to help us reconnect to Source.”
“I agree,” Christine eventually replied. “I like to look at the source of where words come from—a term called etymology. The roots of the word ‘religion’ trace back to the Latin verb religare, meaning ‘to bind fast’ or ‘to reconnect’. I believe that is the work that we are doing together. We are binding fast and reconnecting to one another, and ultimately to Source through our union. It really is a beautiful and perfectly designed world Becky. It’s just hard to see it sometimes.”
This did provide me a bit of comfort. I wasn’t fully on board yet, but I did trust my sister’s wisdom.
We both stood up and started walking down the pier. I reached over to take her hand. We smiled at each other and remained silent with our own thoughts as we made the journey back home.
Conversations with Christine Series
Becky has been exploring creativity, spirituality, and the patterns that shape us through her ongoing series, Conversations with Christine. The series imagines two sisters in deep conversation about life’s larger questions, who we are, what shapes us, and why we are here.
Chapter 1: Archetypes, Symbols and Talismans ·
Chapter 2: Defining the Ego ·
Chapter 3: Woundings ·
Chapter 4: Vices and Virtues ·
Chapter 5: The Spiritual Practice of Journaling ·
Chapter 6: Redefining God ·
Chapter 7: Trinities
Chapter 8: Reconnecting
Chapter 9: Evolution of Consciousness
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