Resurrecting Hope
“Christ of the Abyss”
Part Eight: WeCreating the Future of Christianity and the World
For you did not receive again a spirit of slavery to fear but rather a spirit of adoption in which we cry “Abba, Father!” The spirit itself testifies along with our spirit we are God’s children. And if children, heirs as well; on the one hand, God’s heirs and, on the other, co-heirs of the Anointed [Christ], since we co-suffer in order that we may be co-glorified…
in the hope that creation itself will also be liberated from decay into the freedom of the glory of God’s children. For we know that all creation groans together and labors together in birth pangs, up to this moment…
For in hope we have been saved.
(from Romans 8, translation by David Bentley Hart)
In these times, it’s easy to lose heart. We live under a strain unprecedented in human history, burdened with the conscious awareness of global suffering delivered to us at any moment we light up one of our screens. The energies of disruption and dismay swirl around us seemingly at all times, just behind the veil of entertainment and distraction, ready to catch us and be pulled in the vortex of “doomscrolling.”
Even if they are across the world or in our very own country, we live amidst the horrors of war and genocide. We witness or are subjected to wicked political atrocities and abuses from growing authoritarianism. And underneath these current events loom the existential growing threats of the climate crisis, system collapse, and even extinction.
Living amidst the traumas of what is sometimes called “the metacrisis,” we can easily find ourselves in a perpetual state of stress response, reacting out of fear and unconscious survival behavior. Our more primal, base instincts take charge and greatly affect our mood, energy, perspective, and behavior—with how we feel ourselves and how we treat others. We are not made to live in a state of constant crisis.
In the evolving, mystical, Christian heritage we have an antidote: Hope.
Again, as we are freed from our transcendency bias of a hope rooted solely in a heavenly afterlife, we set aside “hope deferred” and denounce spiritual detachment from this earthly realm. This hope we can live from is no denial of the present world and the suffering that exists throughout it.
We groan with and as creation, longing for rebirth, or perhaps today we might say, for resurrection.
This is no apocalyptic deferment plan; the resurrection is not a distant hoped for rapture we keep waiting for—even after thousands of years have passed.
No, the hope of the resurrection comes to us now, today, in ways that transform who we are and how we live in this day and age. And this hope truly saves us—not from a future hell but from the dismay and fear of a world seen only through the opaque lens of death and despair.
We can find our living hope, mystical and eternal in the here and now, resurrected for life everlasting, today.
Eternal Hope: Rooted in the Stability of Living from Our Divine Source
“Have a mighty encouragement to lay hold of the hope set before us: which we have as an anchor for the soul, so that it may not be shaken, and it penetrates beyond the veil to the inner sanctuary.”
(Hebrews 6:18-19 – Translation: DBH/Hamsa/NIV)
The hope we speak of here is not as a wishful fantasy for a certain conception of the future. It is not, either, a general mental state of optimism nor “pie in the sky” naivety.
Rather, our hope is eternal. This means that it is not only never-ending, but that it is ever-present in all time. Its strength does not lie in a possible future alone, but a grounded, living reality that is of a different order of time.
It can be difficult to tap into this non-linear way of hope, as we are so used to looking ahead for that which we hope for.
Instead, if we look within, into the inner sanctuary of our divine being, in the anchorhold of our very soul, we can discover the cradle of hope born out of divine vitality. This hope springs from the eternal, and can be a great stabilizing force in our lives.
We are not so shaken by the events of our time, for our eternal hope is not bound to our singular perspective in this place and time. It does not depend on what we can see, what we know, or what is happening around us, for it is of a more solid ground than the disruptions of the present day. It is far stronger than the many instabilities we may feel in the quakes of modern life and society. It is rooted deeper than our ordinary foundations of society, government, family, health, or any standard measure of wellbeing.
Yet it is also not removed and disconnected from the circumstances of our lives and the world. As we looked at in part seven, this great inner source of divine vitality emerges in one form as evolutionary love—the love of God pouring out into the universe in ways that continuously create anew all that is still unfolding. All the ways heaven is coming to earth.
In eternal hope, we are stabilized by this ground of love which is so much greater than any fear we might have in any circumstance or possible eventuality. It conquers even death, for we dwell in the reality of the resurrection that death is not even the end of the story nor the loss of hope.
As such, our hope is not bound to linear time and the sequential events of the near future. We need not fear for tomorrow. Rather, we can find the deep, eternal hope rooted in the ever-present alpha and the ever-emerging omega—alive in us, from the very deepest source within.
In God alone is my soul at rest.
God is the source of my hope.
(Psalm 62:5 – Translation: NIV—emphasis mine)
Mystical Hope in the Unseen Divine Mystery
Now faithfulness is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of unseen realities.
(Hebrews 11:1 – Translation: DBH)
Eternal hope arises from the ultimate ground of trust in the divine source from which all things flow, regardless of how they then develop and eventually diverge. Another word for this foundational trust is “faith.”
Our hope then is not attached to a particular outcome that can be grasped by our singular and limited perspective. For we are not all-knowing and all-seeing, but dwell in the great mystery.
And so our hope is also a mystical hope. It lives in the shadows and moves in the unknown—yet it is not hidden away from us. But we don’t find this hope through clarification, knowledge, and explanation. It becomes known deeply through the inner act of touch. It is discovered and felt in the direct contact with that which we can’t fully grasp or even describe. Another name for this is God. Or to be more precise, God-Beyond-Us.
Here, the divine principle is not a distant and foreign thing we wish upon afar, like hope in a distant star. The infinite face of God is encountered in the transcendent beyond that is immanently present and surrounding us—even irrupting in us from the primordial source of our innermost being. It is present, though also “beyond” our ordinary consciousness and regular experience of ourselves. This is the inhabited mystery, unseen but intimately understood in ever-unfolding ways—which sometimes include our mind.
Or, in another way of description: the God in whom we live, move, and have our being. Beyond and yet not apart, for we are immersed in her.
And so we are free to give up our strategies for certainty, for control, for prognosis and prospective prediction—ways we try to stem the tide with conceptualized outcomes. Hope tied to these limited future results will inevitably be flawed, quick to falter in the face of perceived failure and loss.
In mystical hope, we are stabilized by not just accepting but experientially touching our unknowing. Stemming from the generativity of true faith deep within (ultimate trust rather than belief), the substance of our hope is felt all around us, living and moving in all things.
The more we feel and embrace this way of living and moving in reality as totally encompassed by God, we can find ourselves becoming less bound to forms of reactivity. Yes, we will be affected by disappointments, by tragedies, by loss. But these cannot touch our ultimate faith and true hope in the divine reality that is always more than we can fully perceive or know—even in the face of horror.
We don’t dismiss or ignore results and effects, nor do we suspend judgment on what is right and wrong, what is good and better. We don’t throw our hands up in blind faith. But at any time, in the face of whatever may come, we can go deeper within to our eternal, mystical hope that we hold in ultimate faith; touching and being touched by the mystery; our real and living trust in God.
“Mystery is not something that you cannot understand, but it is something that is endlessly understandable! It is multilayered and pregnant with meaning and never totally admits to closure or resolution.”
— Richard Rohr
Inhabiting Living Hope through Creative Presence Together
“And may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace so that in trust you may superabound in hope by the power of holy spirit breath consciousness.”
(Romans 15:13 – Translation: my “Integral” version based on various renderings & Integral Christian theology)
From the loving core of eternal hope, and immersed in the beautiful mystery of mystical hope beyond us, we are empowered to step into a substantiated and concerted living hope.
Unlike airy, fanciful hope that powerlessly wishes for things to change from afar, living hope engages. It fills and spreads through the substance of our inner being and into the changes and transformations the world is desperately longing for.
This infilling from holistic hope is a formidable force of love (eternal hope), characterized by joy and peace, rooted in faith (mystical hope), that “superabounds” in the power of divine presence, divine consciousness, which we inhabit and live out in the world.
We are enabled, through a deeper power and fuller consciousness, to live our hope into manifestation in the world. This is the God of hope who enters into the world, who fills us and inhabits all things to become more whole, more true, more good, more beautiful.
We call this “the Christ,” the divine interfused and permeating through the material. The world anointed with God’s indwelling.
And so in living this hope forth into the world, we become the resurrection, enacted anew again and again in the face of ongoing suffering, continued death, and the crucifixions carried out by today’s empires.
Here is where WeCreating comes in, because we cannot do this alone (though our individual actions and efforts matter). As we come into and inhabit the greater reality of our communion consciousness—that we are not separate and disparate individuals—we feel our part in the greater substance of being that is the divine life, the body of Christ.
This body of God, this divine reality is here in part. It lives in us but is still coming into being. There are many places in this world still to be resurrected. This happens not through a one-time descent from on high, but through our manifesting, healing, and making more complete the living God in the parts still dwelling in death.
And so our hope lives through WeCreating the resurrected divine body in the world today. We do this together with God in and through one another, from God emerging and arising within us, and into the greater immersion of God beyond, still becoming in the world.
Our hope grows stronger as we make it more manifest. Our WeCreating both stems from and is further empowered by the full, eternal, mystical, living hope we now hold.
In living hope together, we are stabilized through the collective kinship and mutual inspiration that comes from owning and stepping into our divine vocation together. This vocation is not a job, but a communion of enlivened being as we dwell in who we really truly are, come alive once again to be in the world in a new way, full of joy and peace.
We come into the substantiating, manifesting of living hope through WeCreating its ongoing reality together.
We are one, after all, you and I;
together we suffer, together exist,
and forever will recreate each other.
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Resurrecting Hope
“Do not depend on the hope of results … you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself … gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people … In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.”
– Thomas Merton
We are the resurrectors of hope.
We are being resurrected in the body of God coming alive in our midst and in the world today, more and more.
Though it may not always seem so to our view of all that is happening, we know that what we see in the news is not the truest reality. For we are stabilized and rooted in a deeper hope. An eternal, mystical, living hope full of power, mystery, and love.
And it is rising from the grave again.
Resurrection always comes on the other side of death. We are here not to dwell in the tomb nor be caught up in the throes of death happening to the systems of the world—even with all the pain and devastation that brings to so many. We don’t bypass the suffering. But we do pass through the doubt, despair, fear, and loss, arising into the living resurrection.
That is our hope and our calling. It is part of our sacred vocation in this time as integral, mystical Christians—or even just as human beings touched by the divine in this way.
It is also already our ever-present reality, for we have already been raised with Christ through the mystical and eternal participation in the resurrection of the body of Christ, living now.
And so we live in this resurrected hope.
We rise up from the eternal, full of love.
We reach out in faith, touching the mystery still becoming all around us.
We create together in power, bringing forth the coming of heaven on earth in the still-unfolding resurrection of God in the world today.
We are the resurrection of Christ among us
here and now
alive in our midst
full of hope
in and through us
becoming ever new
the salvation of the world.
“God-Beyond-Us joyfully reveals to all who desire, the wonderous mystery abounding within and among you—Christ, the hope of magnificent divine manifestation.”
(Colossians 1:27 – Translation: My “Integral” version)
“Christ, the Hope of the World”
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