What It Really Means to Follow Christ

 Bernadette Roberts 

Several years after I had begun to practice in earnest there came an insight that resolved the quandary of why my experiences of God had nothing to do with the historical Christ. Quite simply I realized that the God Christ had experienced within himself, the "Father" as he called him, was not Christ -- was not himself. So too, like Christ, the God I experienced within myself was not Christ. Rather, what I experienced was the same God that Christ experienced. In other words, Christ did not experience merely himself or tell us he was one with himself; rather, he spoke of his Oneness with God, his father, which is the same experience of Oneness he wished for all of us. After this it dawned on me what it really meant to "follow" Christ. It meant to follow his most profound experiences of God, his own spiritual journey and not merely the externals of his life -- limited as they are to historical circumstances and mentality. 

Thus everything he said and did came out of his interior, experiential life with God which was the source of his external public life -- his words, insights and behaviors. What he wished for us was that we too discover the inner source, and from this same source work out our own historical lives, manifest the source in whatever circumstances we might find ourselves.

(Continued tomorrow)

Journal of Ongoing Formation, November 1987