Know Christ but Talk to Jesus
Part Two
You’re Never Alone — Meeting Your Spirit Guides
The Apostle Paul often talked about Christ in beautiful cosmic terms. However, in the New Testament, he was never recorded as talking to Christ. Instead, Paul spoke to Jesus in a person-to-person way as a crucial dimension of his spiritual journey. This distinction is often lost, even among biblically and theologically sophisticated Christians. This misunderstanding results in believing that Christ is all one needs to consider in the Christian path outside of the historical Jesus.
For evolving Christians, the idea of talking to Jesus may be regarded as unnecessary or even embarrassing when desperate situations drive one to revert to a former way of praying. One may even have an amorphous sense of the presence of “Christ.” Talking to Jesus may be viewed as regressive personalism, a part of long discarded devotional Catholicism and “born again” evangelicalism. Let examine this common dismissal of an essential part of integral Christianity.
What’s in a Name
Jesus is the personal name for the historical Jesus, the resurrected Jesus, and the Living Jesus present with us now in his risen, nonphysical body. Most people had only one name in ancient Israel, what we think of as a “first name” but not a “last name.” To distinguish similarly named people from one another, individuals were further identified either by their geographical origin as in “Jesus of Nazareth” or their occupation, “the carpenter.”
“Christ” is a title, not a name. It is the Greek version of the Hebrew “Messiah.” The brilliant Apostle Paul took this title “Messiah” or “Christ,” which Jewish tradition wanted to assign to Jesus, and transformed it into the incredible Cosmic Christ.
However, Paul is also responsible for the widespread use of “Christ” as if it were Jesus’ name rather than his title. The boundary between a “name” and a “title” can be murky or fluid in Paul’s writing and those letters written by others attributed to him. Paul sometimes seems to know that “the Christ” was a title, not a name, but more commonly he referred to Jesus as “Jesus Christ,” “Christ Jesus,” or even “Christ,” as in Romans 6:4: “Christ was raised from the dead.” In all these cases, “Christ” is used as if it was part of Jesus’ name.
Theologian par excellent Ramon Panikkar points out that Christ is the Christian symbol for all of reality – divine, human, and material. This is the cosmic manifestation of the historical Jesus, who exists today in the same personal spiritual dimension he did after the resurrection. His friends talked with him then, and they have ever since. Christ is the “beyond the personal” cosmic expression of the personal Jesus of history. The latter is now accessed personally and intimately as that same human Jesus, only now in a nonphysical spiritual body.
Theologically, I’ve called him “The Living Jesus.” But personally, we’ve used other names.
Paul talked to Jesus rather than Christ
In Paul’s personal conversations with Jesus. Paul always uses the name Jesus, Lord Jesus, or Lord, meaning Jesus. I hope you read my italics here as pointing to a crucial, often unidentified, reality in the life of Paul.
Let me repeat — Paul talks extensively about “Christ.” But Paul does not personally talk to Christ. He talks person to person to Jesus. This is an important distinction. Paul’s conversion from persecutor of Christians to protector of Christians begins with him talking to the person Jesus. After a brilliant light flashed around him, Paul [his Greek name] says, “I fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to me, ‘Saul, Saul, [his Hebrew name] why are you persecuting me?’ I answered, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ Then he said to me, ‘I am Jesus of Nazareth whom you are persecuting.’ I asked, ‘What am I to do, Lord?’ The Lord said to me, ‘Get up and go to Damascus; there you will be told everything that has been assigned to you to do’” (Acts 22:8-10). Notice that Paul knows this is the historical Jesus talking to him because Jesus identifies himself that way. Paul then refers to Jesus as “Lord.”
This is identified as a conversation with the nonphysical presence of the ascended, Living Jesus, not the “Christ.” It was informative – he was persecuting followers of Jesus, which Jesus said was the same as persecuting him. It was instructive – get up off the ground and go on into Damascus.
At the same time, a man named Ananias was having his own conversation. It was a visionary experience and talk with this same personal presence of Jesus. Jesus told Ananias to find Paul and pray for him. Ananias argued with Jesus, saying that Paul was doing evil things and had the authority to arrest him. Jesus said to go ahead anyway because Paul was essential to the spread of the good news that Jesus brought to all people. When Ananias saw Paul, he said, “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on your way here, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the holy spirit” (Acts 9:17: See Acts 9:1-19 for the full account). Notice again that these personal encounters with Jesus as a spirit guide refer to Jesus as Jesus and not Christ as Paul does in other larger, cosmic manifestations of Jesus as the Christ.
In another key conversation with Jesus, Paul says, “I returned to Jerusalem and was praying in the temple when I fell into a trance. I saw Jesus, and he said to me, ‘Make haste, and get out of Jerusalem quickly because they will not accept your testimony about me’” (See Acts 22:17-21 for the continued conversation about Paul’s future). Paul is clear that he saw Jesus rather than “Christ,” and the discussion was between him and Jesus.
Paul also describes his three conversations with “the Lord,” meaning Jesus, where he talked about his “thorn in the flesh.” He writes, “Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses so that the power of Christ may dwell in me (2 Cor 12:7-9). This is a personal conversation with the personal “Lord.” Notice when Paul leaves the language of personal conversation and references the larger manifestation of Jesus as the Christ, he moves to “Christ” language saying, “the power of Christ may dwell in me.”
Talking about Christ in place of Jesus can be an attempt, consciousness or not, to avoid the living presence of Jesus, the person. Instead, one deals with a somewhat abstract or theological “Christ” or an amorphous spiritual presence. I use “amorphous” in its Oxford dictionary definition of “without a clearly defined shape or form.”
This avoidance of a personal relationship with Jesus is quite common today among many modern Christians. Why is that?
Father Richard Rohr
The brilliant Richard Rohr is a friar within the Franciscan tradition of the Roman Catholic Church. His books are widely read, and he is an international advocate of progressive Christianity. In a 2015 Integral Life video interview, he disclosed why he was reluctant to talk about his personal life of devotion and conversation with Jesus for the first time to my knowledge. He was asked, “What is your relationship to Jesus?” Here is his response:
“My relationship with Jesus is, in some ways, more intelligent but also more sweet and more personal. There is a dearness to how he has communicated the Godself to me that I am more in love with than ever before.
I said something to my students this week that I don’t think I ever said to a group before. I have been here at the Center for 29 years to teach contemplative prayer, and it is still my daily practice to try to free myself to let go of myself, to open the field as a reference point. If I’d be honest with you, and this will probably make some of you lose respect, but I actually pray to God, to Jesus. I say prayers that come from the heart, in a very I-Thou personal give and take way of talking.
I have to attribute that to Jesus. He brought the transpersonal God, the universal God to an interface experience.
I don’t think I would begin to have whatever relationship I have with the divine if I did not have this combination of open-ended prayer and very personal prayer that probably to some people would sound naive, too sweet, too personal, too relational, too chummy.
Of the more healthy Christians I have worked with around the world over the years, I have to say now, that is the unique aspect that they bring to spirituality. It’s a kind of sweet, intimate personalism.
If they combine that with a life of contemplative prayer, I think we have the best of both worlds. It doesn’t become too heady, too abstract, too conceptual. Sometimes I fear my teaching does become too conceptual. When it does not, when it does come home, it is invariably from the personal I-Thou moments that carry it home.”
Richard is vulnerable and revealing when he says, “If I’d be honest with you, and this will probably make some of you lose respect, but I actually pray to God, to Jesus.” He correctly reads his primarily postmodern audience as moving away from traditional Christianity and surmised they were not ready for his, in many ways, very traditional, personal prayer life. He even describes the reaction he has seen in his culturally creative audience to this “naive” way of praying to Jesus. They see this way of talking with Jesus as “too personal, too relational, too chummy.” Perhaps, he left this “sweet, intimate personalism” part out of his teaching in order to reach those who would otherwise “lose respect.”
The question for us, in Rohr’s words is:
Have you let Jesus bring the transpersonal God to an
interface experience of sweet, intimate personalism to you?
If you’d like, you can use this guided meditation to have a time of sitting with Jesus in sweet, intimate personalism:
(Or if you’re new to experiencing guides, you can practice with our introductory meditation: Meeting Your Spirit Guides)