I can see you were up late and obviously thinking, and feeling, some deep thoughts, the strongbox of your soul was opened, and you handled the contents, turning the treasures over, maybe surprised at what you found there.
Your short message is enigmatic to me, who don’t really know your spiritual side very well, and can’t pretend to. I ask myself, why is Palm Sunday your favorite Sunday of the year? We all have special feast-days that are our favorite.
As a young man and new Christian (I was born a Christian but didn’t become one until I met the Lord at age twenty-four) I had a favorite season—Advent—because it was the serene, purple time, the time of quiet, not violent, repentance, like pre-dawn before the real dawn and sunrise.
I was an Episcopalian then—that’s the English form of Catholicism—and later when I, following the cloud in the wilderness, migrated to the Orthodox Church, then Pascha became my favorite time, Holy Week culminating in the Great Vigil of Pascha—Christ is risen!
I was following the Lord—not looking for Him, not trying to find myself, because in meeting him on a cold November morning all seeking was swallowed up in finding—and becoming a Christian in the world. Religion became both home and point of departure for Home.
But it was a truth that has taken a lifetime to sink in—Christ is risen from the dead, trampling death by death, granting life to those in the tombs—that has been gradually changing me from the inside out, from a creature who was a spirit living in a body, to one who is a body living in the Spirit.
Can this be something like what you mean when you say, ‘I am a Spirit with human experience. I used to think I was a Human with spiritual experience’? Your words seem to hint at a very beautiful truth, but I am cautious as I approach, because as beautiful as Truth is, it has its unfruitful twin.
In the film Brother Sun Sister Moon, Pope Innocent III tells Francis of Assisi, ‘My dearest son, errors will be forgiven. In our obsession with original sin, we too often forget original innocence.’ This is what I thought of when I read your words, ‘Time to claim my innocence.’
Why I am cautious is the emphatic feeling given to your thought by your use of the word ‘claim.’ It is a word that has been much abused in recent times, especially by writers of religious books, and by popular preachers. It pretends to an indignant attitude of self-entitlement.
I can ‘claim my innocence’ only if I mean, I want to turn myself in, to the only One who has power and authority to give it back to me. I was born innocent, but almost with my first cry the contamination began to set in, a noose was wound round my neck, and I was dragged into life.
But not into the life that I was meant for, that I was created for. Instead, I was pulled kicking and screaming directly onto a battlefield that I didn’t desire, that I was unprepared for. Think of it. Only an infant, born for paradise, bred for heaven, but abandoned on a battlefield.
So there is a God? Where was He when all this was happening? Doesn’t He care what happens to His creature? Isn’t He all-powerful? Isn’t He moral? Well, there are stories. They tell us in mythic terms about an event that takes place in each of us, how freedom is bestowed, and how lost.
Being dropped on a battlefield has nothing to do with God’s will, but everything to do with freedom. As we learn even before we have words within us to speak of it, freedom is anything but free. It must be won, and by hard struggle. Struggle against whom? Against what?
We are created, we are born, and in the moment we emerge from the womb another point of freedom has come into being, because will can exist only in freedom, beyond all categories of thought we can imagine, such as being spirits in bodies or bodies in spirits. This is just talk.
‘Time to claim my innocence.’ Yes, that is, in fact, what time is for. What God created us to be, yes, that is the treasure, the jewel of our being, beyond all human price, which was purchased at the price of the Blood of a Lamb without spot slain before the foundation of the world.
To claim, yes, to present yourself to Him who is the only One who can hand over to you what was yours from before time was, but which can only be received in time and only from His hands. And innocence, yes, that jewel, that white stone (Revelation 2:17) that has your real Name written on it secretly.
No one but you can know that Name, except for Him who gave it to you when He begot you before all worlds. That white stone which He exchanges for the black stone of sin and death that you were born carrying, like the ugly deformation that makes one a hunchback.
Yes, innocence, another word to cover the incorruptible being that is a created will, that the Uncreated takes to Himself to make it uncreated, another name to call the indefectible freedom that can no longer diverge from the Freedom that lives in the undivided Triad of the Divine Nature.
‘Time to claim my innocence.’ Yes, time it is, and given that you do not delay. Some doors are opened and stay opened. Other doors open and close again. We never know which is which in the moment of our lives when we see that open door. If we walk through it, what have we to lose?
If we walk through it, what have we to gain? ‘I know all about you; and now I have opened in front of you a door that nobody will be able to close…’ (Revelation 3:8). This is the innocence worth claiming, this is the freedom that costs, this is being a spirit who in time lives as human, and in eternity a human who lives as God.
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