By Doug Scott

How might a metamodern Christian mysticism understand Paul’s evocative injunction in  Philippians 2:5: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus”? Reflecting on this within a larger metamodern exploration might be good food for a tasty dialog.

For me, “putting on the nous of Christ”¹ means that the phrase “I am me” alchemically transforms into “I am the sacred marriage bed, and the passionate lovers, and their passionate lovemaking, and the release of their passion, and the sower that embeds their passion into the garden of the world.” ²

The experience of transforming from “I am me” to “I am me who is a we-ing” is feeling and responding to a love so strongly that only one single way to exercise my free will becomes crystal clear: to allow divine fire to burn my edges away by a heat so intense, whose longing is so urgent, that I become an instance of flame; wood enkindled into a roar. The “me” that I remember burns “up there,” sighing from le petite mort, while the “me” that I am becoming “down here”

— is the womb sheltering the consummation, insemination, and gestation of Christlovefire;

–is the midwife that facilitates the birth of Christlovefire; and

–is the embodied bearer of Christlovefire³ participating in alighting a larger woodpile inside a larger womb.

I am one event of the One Flame that must burn because there is no other way to be, and there is nothing else to do. 

I am a process of one complexity being filled up with so much love and so much light and so much joy that I burst into a larger unity—and again—and again—and again.

How I as an event of divine fire spread—how I as an occasion of love, light, and joy bursting beyond the container cope—is to freely will [that no longer I, but] Christ who lives within me encounters Christ in the other by:

—entering into solidarity with my other-self;

—cultivating hope in my other-self;

—enkindling desire in my other-self to serve an other-self; and

—modeling the joy-in-travail of participating in the divine concrescence where the many become one, and are increased by one⁴.

We are all Mary responding with our Mary’s, “Yes!” to bring forth Christ into incarnation.

We are all Jesus embodying as singular, visible icons of an invisible, universal Mystery-of-Unity.

We are all Jesus Christ revealing how to upgrade the cones in our hearteyes so as to adjust to the luminosity of wholeness and see the whole from within the illusion of separation.

We are all Jesus and the Marys as we affirm how our pierced hearts hold all of these things together while reaffirming not our wills but the One Will be done: in us, through us, as us.

We are all the authorities, the crowd, Jesus, the Marys, Thomas, and the Beloved Disciple as we crucify, and are crucified; die and are raised; surprised and are transformed; scarred and are gods.

We are the Paschal Mystery flowing into occasions of time, marking the sacrament of experience for God—the Who, the Why, and the How of eternal becoming.

1. Nous meaning “heartmind,” or the seat of consciousness that arises when the mind is brought into field of the heart. ↩︎
2. See the works of John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Francis of Assisi, Teilhard de Chardin ↩︎
3. “Christopher” is one bears the light ↩︎
4. Alfred North Whitehead’s notion of “concrescence.” ↩︎

• Cosmic Christ