Meeting the Risen Christ on the road to Damascus changed everything for Paul. He experienced the great paradox that the crucified Jesus was in fact alive! And he, a “sinner,” was in fact chosen and beloved. This pushed Paul from the usual either/or, dualistic thinking to both/and, mystical thinking.
Not only did Paul’s way of thinking change, his way of being in the world was also transformed. Suddenly the persecutor—and possibly murderer—of Christians is the “chosen vessel” of Christ, chosen and sent “to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel” (Acts 9:15). This overcomes the often artificial line between perfectly good and totally bad, between evil and virtue, which he believes cannot be resolved merely by obeying laws (see Romans 7). The paradox has been overcome in Paul’s very person. He now knows that he is both sinner and saint
Once the conflict has been overcome in you, and you realize you are a living paradox and so is everyone else, you begin to see life in a truly spiritual and compassionate way, which demands that you let go of your too easy dualisms.
Paul often presents two seemingly opposing ideas, such as weakness and strength, flesh and spirit, law and grace, faith and works, Jew and Greek, male and female. Our normal, dualistic thinking usually wraps itself fully around one side and then fully dismisses the other—thinking this is truth—when it is much more just a need for control or righteousness.
The dialectic that we probably struggle with the most is the one Paul creates between flesh and spirit. I don’t think Paul ever intended for people to feel that their bodies are bad; he was not a Platonist. After all, God took on a human body in Jesus! Paul does not use the word soma, which literally means “body.” I think what Paul means by sarx is the trapped self, the small self, the partial self, or what Thomas Merton called the false self. Basically, spirit is the whole self, the Christ self that we were born into and yet must re-discover. The problem is not between body and spirit; it’s between part and whole. Every time Paul uses the word flesh, just replace it with the word ego, and you will be much closer to his point.
Your spiritual self is your whole and True Self, which includes your body; it is not your self apart from your body. We are not angels, we are embodied human beings.
The Egoic Operating System
We come into existence with a certain operating system already installed. We can make the choice to upgrade.
Our pre-installed binary system runs on the power of “either/or.” I call it the “egoic operating system.” This dualistic “binary operator” is built right into the structure of the human brain.
.. But this sense of identity is a mirage, an illusion. There is no such self. There is no small self, no egoic being, no thing that’s separated from everything else, that has insides and outsides, that has experiences. All these impressions are simply a function of an operating system that has to divide the world up into bits and pieces in order to perceive it. Like the great wisdom teachers of all spiritual traditions, Jesus calls us beyond the illusion: “Hey, you can upgrade your operating system, and life is going to look a whole lot different when you do it.”
Richard Rohr: Returning to Enduring Wisdom
Soon after the dualistic fights of the Reformation, and after the over-rationalization of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Christians took on a more rational form of thinking and covered it with churchy or pious words. Our own doctrines were henceforth presented in an all-or- nothing, argumentative, and apologetic way rather than through a contemplative, mystical knowing. Almost all Catholic priests and Protestant ministers were educated in their own version of this headiness until it began to fall apart in the mid-1960s.
In the 1950s and 60s, Thomas Merton almost single-handedly pulled back the veil and revealed the contemplative mind that had largely been lost for five centuries.
.. They told me then that Merton was not very popular with many of the older monks in those early days, and was considered a rebel because “he told us that we were not contemplatives. We were just introverts saying prayers all day”—but still with the dualistic and judgmental mind fully in charge.
.. Without a contemplative life, poverty, chastity, obedience, and community itself do not work or even make sense. And ministry becomes another way of running away or trying to find yourself instead of real service for others.
Contemplation is a positive choosing of the deep, shining, and enduring divine mysteries that are hidden beneath the too-easy formulas. It is not fast-food religion, but slow and healthy nutrition.
Making Christianity Relevant Again
And we must be frank: in their behavior and impact upon the world, Christians are not much different than other people.
The majority of Christians are not highly transformed people, but tend to reflect their own culture more than they operate as any kind of leaven within it.
.. Most Christians have not been taught how to plug into the “mind of Christ;” thus they often reflect the common mind of power, greed, and war instead. The dualistic mind reads reality in simple binaries—good and bad, right and wrong—and thinks itself smart because it chooses one side.
.. It’s time to rebuild from the bottom up. If the foundation is not solid and sure, everything we try to build on top of it is weak and ineffective. Perhaps it’s a blessing in disguise that so much is tumbling down around us. It’s time to begin again. This will be our new Daily Meditation theme: rebuilding from the bottom up.