The Mystery of Christ
The Liturgy as Spiritual Experience

by Father Thomas Keating

Chapter 2 Part IX

The Easter-Ascension Mystery

Father, How Can I, Your Son, Become Sin?

    To become sin is to cease to be God's son--or at least to cease to be conscious of being God's son. To cease to be conscious of being God's son is to cease to experience God as Father. The cross of Jesus represents the ultimate death-of-God experience: "My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?" The crucifixion is much more than the physical death of Jesus and the emotional and mental anguish that accompanied it. It is the death of his relationship with the Father. The crucifixion was not the death of his false self because he never had one. It was the death of his deified self and the annihilation of the ineffable union which he enjoyed with the Father in his human faculties. This was more than spiritual death; it was dying to being God and hence the dying of God: "He emptied himself, and took the form of a slave. . . accepting even death, death on a cross!" the loss of personal identity is the ultimate kenosis.

    In the crucifixion, his relationship with the Father disappeared and with it the loss of his experience of who the Father is. In his resurrection and ascension, Jesus discovered all that the Father is, and in doing so, became one with the Ultimate Reality: all that God is emerging eternally from all that God is.

    This passing of Jesus from human to divine subjectivity is called Christian tradition the Paschal Mystery. Our participation in this Mystery is the passing over of the transformed self into the loss of self as a fixed point of reference;^1. of who God is into all that God is. The dismantling of the false self and the inward journey to the true self is the first phase of this transition or passing over. The loss of the true self as a fixed point of reference is the second phase. The first phase results in the consciousness of personal union with the Trinity. The second phase consists in being emptied of this union and identifying with the absolute nothingness from which all things emerge, to which all things return, and which manifests Itself as That-Which-Is.

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FOOTNOTE
1. cf. bernadette roberts, The Path to No-Self  and The Experience of No-Self, Shambhala, Boston, MA.

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