nor one ray without Him

not everything holy hurts

Yesterday was Pentecost. Our advocate the Holy Ghost is out haunting the streets. She is anointing the heads of her apostles and they are speaking in tongues of righteous rage, of Love that refuses to look away, of compassion and protection. Christ is in the crowd, overturning tables and driving out agents of greed and evil. The young are having visions of what will happen if power is left unchecked and the old are dreaming dreams of justice.

[ID: “Christianity itself is this— temporal, relative— to some extent. To every age Christ dies anew and is resurrected within the imagination of man. This is why he could be a paragon of rationality for eighteenth-century England, a heroic figure of the imagination for the Romantics, an exemplar of existential courage for writers like Paul Tillich and Rudolf Bultmann. One truth, then, is that Christ is always being remade in the image of man, which means that his reality is always being deformed to fit human needs, or what humans perceive to be their needs. A deeper truth, though, one that scripture suggests when it speaks of the eternal Word being made specific flesh, is that there is no permutation of humanity in which Christ is not present. If every Bible is lost, if every church crumbles to dust, if the last believer in the last prayer opens her eyes and lets it all finally go, Christ will appear on this earth as calmly and casually as he appeared to the disciples walking to Emmaus after his death, who did not recognize this man to whom they had pledged their very lives; this man whom they had seen beaten, crucified, abandoned by God; this man who, after walking the dusty road with them, after sharing an ordinary meal and discussing the scriptures, had to vanish once more in order to make them see.” End ID].