The Underworld God

There are two underlying dogmas which inform the modern man as he confronts and criticizes what he experiences on a daily basis: the historical ‘religious’ and the fairly fresh and modern ‘atheistic’. Each play off of the other. It should never be understated the degree to which Nihilism has affected the Christian doctrine- in practice -particularly in the west. The official Christian teachings may lack this nihilistic flavor (or may imbibe it, depending on your perspective) but the modern man has most definitely affected a living change in how Christian teaching is perceived in western society- and it is underscored with a perhaps surprisingly atheistic foundation. A foundation of non-belief, or of self-exception.

The ‘Modern Man’ sees things in a fatalistic light. He knows that his fate is fixed and feels oppressed and unrewarded by society. He believes either God does not exist, or that God is cruel, or that God is playing an incredibly long and debilitating game with the future of humanity. He blames our current state of affairs on a genuine or jesting recognition that we are “in the end times”. He thinks not about Christ’s death as a victory and responsibility for humanity, but as an escape from the consequences of his own sin. 

Christus Victor is a foreign concept to him. God’s incarnation as a man, his presence amongst us and decision to live and love and teach on our level, eludes him. The western man seems to focus on Christ’s passion and death above all else. He does not sense the importance of Christ’s daily life of 33 years. His love and respect for his mother; his unique individual human life. 

God incarnated as a man, took his first breaths as a man. He grew from a boy to a man, he honed his professional skills and his body changed and grew with the passing of years. He lived with his mother and laughed with her and learned from her. He blessed the condition of humanity by doing every simple daily human thing right– with love and care and reverence. His death was not holy because it was dealt out as a crucifixion (a common enough practice at the time), but because it was His death. He could have died a number of other ways, surrounded by different people, in a different place or different time. Perhaps, even, he could have died of old age instead of murdered by his peers. But his continual love, his connection with the Divinity, his patience and sincerity while undergoing a brutal and unjust punishment set upon him by his fellow country men, was indeed important. It underscored his perfection- his nearness to the Divine, his utter virtue. His death blessed the afterlife, just as his life blessed the living, and lit a path for the souls of the dead to reach a peaceful dwelling. His trail still blazes, and each and everyone of us can catch glimpses of it. 

The Mother of God shown always in Eastern renditions with the Christ Child. It was her wise and humble and personal decision to accept the immaculate conception which began the rest of history.

We do not need to believe in the Western God, but we do need to believe in God. It has been well stated by many through the centuries that the death of the living belief in God, is the death of spirituality itself. We do not need to think of ‘Jesus’ in terms of movie portrayals or plastic figurine representations- we need to sense his humanity as we are human, and his divinity as we are blessed. We do not need to plead for material benefits and fortunes, we need to ask that we be aided in cultivating patience and compassion and honor and seriousness. We need to think of Christ in ourselves, and live as if each and every move we make was each and every move He made- because it was, once. And it lives on still in the presence of the Holy Spirit. 

We do not need to cower from the Evil One, whatever form it may take. The jealousy of a neighbor, the hatred of an old flame, the sourness and bitterness in our own hearts- we need to flush the vileness away with virtuous self-conditioning. We need to train ourselves to believe that the right thing is a purifying thing, and that purification is what we truly want. We need to take note that the Divine is here, the gifts are now. That they are not of this world but that they can be in it. We need to recognize and respect those of us that have come before and re-articulated the truths of life for the people of their times. Recognize them as brothers in faith and teachers worthy of remembrance because Christ’s efforts- God’s presence -was their reality and inspiration, as it should be ours. We cannot live a Christian life if we never recognize our past and future Christians, if we cannot see Christ in the Saints and recognize them as individuals living a reality that we ourselves would like to cultivate. 

It took me long years to break myself from the illusion of the Western God. To learn to find Christ again after straying away in search of other, more interesting and foreign gods. It wasn’t until I recognized that Christ WAS a foreign God, that I found my deepest and most sincere spiritual reality. I believed I knew God, knew the curated Western veneer. Knew the Americanized and overly de-humanized and confusing concept on a billboard. Knew a cruel God that would have His only Son murdered, instead of understanding the more mystical and straight forward reality- that God became man. That they were one and the same. That the ‘Son’ and the ‘Father’ was rhetoric for something completely incomprehensible to the otherwise logical and progressive human mind. God is timeless. God is ageless. God was born and God passed away, but it was His humanity that was born and his humanity that passed away, so that his Divinity could be passed into our lives. Physically, literally, passed into our lives. In the Eastern Orthodox tradition they say “God became man so that man could become God”. God became man so that mankind could re-establish a fading link with the Divine. And for what purpose?

Today, when we think of God and desire His hand to move the world around us to whatever we wish it would be, perhaps it is pertinent now to recognize that the most complete and lasting and world-altering act has already been done– and humanity has it within them, each and every moment, to pursue an awakening of virtue and an endurance against evil because of it. All at the dirt-cheap cost of believing in ourselves and believing our heartfelt performance matters. Of believing that His life and heartfelt performance matters. After-all, it was God who did the most extraordinary thing and became a man to show us exactly how it’s done. We are not nothing, us humans. We are designed to accept the corruption of the world and to open our arms to it in order to purify it with the God-given grace of the living presence of God– the Holy Spirit which was imparted to each of us at Christ’s birth. We are meant to take what is presented to us and transfigure it, as Christ transfigured humanity. What form does that Spirit take? Honesty, of course. Sincerity, compassion, faith and enduring belief in what we ourselves and those around us could be. It is faith which transfigures, for it is faith that carries every other virtue. And it is every other virtue which purifies our own hearts and touches the hearts around us.

The Jesus of Nazareth (BBC miniseries) was in my opinion the most skillful portrayal of Christ by any actor, as a sensitive and phenomenally grounded man who knew what he was about, but still must endure the suffering caused by everyone else’s fear and loathing.

We do not even need to believe in the Christian story to do this. We simply need to believe in life, and honesty and truth. And that will take you remarkably far. But to stay our course and never waver, one has to re-discover and make peace with the story. One has to internalize that God would become man. That mankind is something more than we usually think it to be- something worth the Grace of God. Because if we do not take this to heart, then we reach a point where we lose the plot, don’t we? And to live without meaning is the same as atheism. To live as a pawn of the Creator and not as the heirs to His dynasty of purification and God-likeness is to live in a nihilistic stupor. We have destinies. And we have free will. We are victims of fate, andalso heroes of adversity, if we so chose. We are caught in a timeless story of creative potential. A rich and exquisite myth of epic proportions. The story of all ages is alive in each of us. God is not human, but He was. And what an awesome and interesting and touching thing, that the Creator and Sustainer of all elements and possibilities would accept the same yoke of physical reality as we ourselves must accept, and navigate it and explain it, from its basic physical realities of birth and death to it’s human realities of work and finance. Christ taught us to approach each of life’s experiences with a spiritual and wholesome perspective. How interesting, how truly fascinating it must have been to be amongst us, and teach us and love us as one of us. In all the world there was never a myth of a more interesting and complex and timeless Deity, for the Christian God was truly a man, and not just disguised as one.