It takes thousands of years to understand the Crucified Christ. Many people wonder why did he come down to live thirty-three years? Why not twenty? Why not twenty-five? You could ponder this stuff forever. Why did Christ have to start as a baby? Who wants to be a baby? Was being a baby part of our salvation? And why choose that particular time in history? And Such a place. Dirt, grit, sand, rocks everywhere—I have never seen so many rocks as in the Holy Land—bare feet, sandals, camels; imagine those times. No wonder they used to stone people! Did it have anything to do with the sheer simplicity of the clothes and hair. Christ coming in the era? I think it did. Furthermore, I think Christ chose Crucifixion because hence forth in every depiction He would be seen extending His arms in the loving embrace. Once you see the Crucifix in that manner, everything changes. You see Him reaching out to all the World. He knew it has to be abstractable. He knew it had to be reproducible. It is no accident that we can take the image of this ghastly death and wear it around our necks on a chain. #RyanPhillippe 1 of 13

God thinks of all these things, does He not? We should not conclude that a man who strives earnestly for success does so with a strong sense of his own merit. He may see how little success has to do with merit, and his motive may be his very humility. His deep selflessness, his profound spirituality, come not only for his complete love of Christ but from all his life lived under the essence of a vaunting spiritual code. In Jerusalem, two sons of Alexander Jannaeus, the second king of Judaea from 103 Before Christ to 76 Before Christ, were contending for the kingship. One of them invited the Romans in to assist him in his cause—and that was that, 63 Before Christ. Now it is of the very greatest interest to remark the sense that seems to have prevailed throughout that period, among the Jewish of many persuasions, of the imminent end of the World. The nations were to be annihilated. Even of Israel only a remnant would survive. And it was in this atmosphere of immediate urgency that Christianity came to birth. #RyanPhillippe 2 of 13

The prophet John the Baptist, baptizing only a few miles up the Jordan river from the Dead Sea Covenanters, was also waiting, preparing the way, and to him it was that Christ came; who thereafter fasted for forty days in the desert and returned to deliver his own version of the general apocalyptic message. And so what, then, is the outstanding message between the message of Christ and that of the nearby Covenanters of Qumran? It would seem to me to be this: that the Covenanters were thinking of themselves as about to engage in battle as the Sons of Light with the Sons of Darkness, their posture, that is to say, being of preparation for war, whereas the gospel of Christ was, rather, of the battle already resolved. You have heard that it was reported that you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. However, I saw to you, love your enemies and pray for those that persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in Heaven; for he makes his Sun to rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and unjust (Matthew 5:43-45). And exactly this, I would say, is the difference between a gospel of war and one of peace. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 13

However, we come a little later to those startling words of Matthew 10: Do not think that I have come to bring peace on Earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; a man’s foes will be those of his own household. He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worth. And again in Luke 14 we encounter another echo of the same: If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Well, I will tell you what you do. You go out of here, you just take a good look around where you live. Look at not only how you live, but look at how anybody that you know lives—that way, you will be sure that you are not just a bad-luck accident. #RyanPhillippe 4 of 13

The key to the meaning of all of this, I believe, is in the last line here cited, and in the words immediately following each of our sources. In Matthew: He who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it. And in Luke: Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me, cannot be my disciple Still further, returning to Matthew (19:21): Go sell what you possess and give to the poor; and come, follow me. And again: Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead (8:22). The ideal of this teaching is of an ascetic absolute abandonment of all the concerns of normal secular life, family ties, community and all, leaving “the dead” –i.e. those that we call living—“to bury their dead”; and in this of the earliest Christian teaching is seen to have been the order of the early Buddhist and of Jain. It is a “forest teaching.” And what it does to the general apocalyptic theme is to transform its reference radically from a historical future to a psychological present: the end of the World and coming Day of God, that is to say, are not to be awaited in the field of time, but to be achieved right now in solitude, in the chamber of the heart. #RyanPhillippe 5 of 13

When will the kingdom come? It will not come by expectation they will not say: See here, or see there. However, the Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the Earth and men do not see it. Moreover, that the allusion of Christ’s reference to the sword which he had brought cannot possibly have been to any weapon of physical warfare appears clearly in the scene of his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. Judas came, and with him a great crowd with swords and clubs, from the chief priest and the elders of the people. And the betrayer had given them a sign, saying: The one I shall kiss is the man; seize him. And he came up to Christ at once and said: Hail Rabbi! And he kisses him. Christ said to him: Friend, do that for which you have come! Then they came up and laid hands on Christ and seized him. And behold, one of those who were with Jesus stretched out his hand and drew his sword, and struck the slave of the high priest and cut off his eat. Then Jesus said to him: Put up your sword; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword [Matthew 26:47-52]. #RyanPhillippe 6 of 13

Clearly enough! Is it not? And yet that stout wielder of sword, who is identified in John Gospel (18:10) as Peter, was not the last of Christ’s followers to betray as surely as ever Judas did their teacher and his teaching. From the period of the victories of Constantine, fourth century After Death, the Church founded on the rock of that same good Peter’s name was advanced very largely by swordsmandship. And at the height of the Middle Ages, under the mighty Pope Innocent III (1198 – 1216) deprivation and self-denial are intertwined in history like the double helix. It is no wonder that he could not yield his deep-rooted suspicious of the tumultuous voices of the prosperous capitalist countries. He simply could not grasp the pure charity that could arise from abundance, the sublime immensity of vision possible from the vantage point of secure excess, the selflessness and sweeping sacrificial ambition that can be born when all needs are luxuriantly met. Softly I talked to him. I began to elucidate these points. (Yeah, I know, he is the Pope, and I am an upir wiring this story; but in this story I am a great Saint. I cannot be intimidated with the risks of my own work!) #RyanPhillippe 7 of 13

Peter’s zealous weapon attained to a blazing climax in the crackling fires of the Albigensian Crusade—where the people going up in flames were the heretic Cathari, the self-styled Pure Ones, who had explicitly rejected the sword for the lives of ascetic purity in peace. Our biggest mistake Worldwide is our insistence on perceiving every new development as culmination or a climax. The great “at least” or “inth degree.” A constitutional fatalism continuously adjusts itself to the ever-changing present. A pervasive alarmism greets every advance. For two thousand years we have been getting “out of hand.” This derives of course from our susceptibility to viewing the “now” as the End Time, an Apocalyptic obsession that had endured since Christ ascended into Heaven. We must stop this! We must perceive that we are at the dawn of a sublime age! Enemies will no longer be conquered. They will be devoured, and transformed. #RyanPhillippe 8 of 13

An ascetic renunciation of the World and its life—and even of the will to survive in life—may be named, then, as the best-known discipline of peace that has be proposed, as yet, to mandkind. And if one may judge from the historic circumstances of its original pronouncement, it arose—or at least caught on—as a response to a desperate general sense of things falling apart. The earlier mythic notion had been of a great war, a holy terminal war, through which a universal reign of peace should ultimately be established at the end of historic time: which, however, was not properly a mythology of peace but a summons, rather, to war, perpetual was—until. And, ironically, no sooner had the ascetic Christian message passed from the lips of Christ to the ears of his closet followers than it became transformed into) and has remained ever since interpreted as) only another such doctrine of the Holy War, jihad, or crusade. However, here is the point I really want to make: Modernism and Materialism—elements that the Church has feared for so long—are in their philosophical and practical infancy! Their sacramental nature is only just being revealed! #RyanPhillippe 9 of 13

Never mind the infantile blunders! The electronic revolution has transmuted the industrial World beyond all predictive thing of the twenty-first century. We are still having birth pangs. Get into it! Work with it! Play it out. Daily life for millions in the developed countries is not only comfortable but a compilation of wonders that borders on the miraculous. And so new spiritual desires arise which are infinitely more courageous than the missionary goals of the past. We must bear witness that political atheism has failed totally. In the trash, the whole system. And even the most secular power brokers in America exude high virtue as a matter of course. That is why we have corporate scandals! And when you get through looking at where you live, then take a walk down across Central Park, and start to look at what this capitalistic God had brought to the brokers. I mean, take yourself a look down there at how the corporate American is living! And do not stop there. In fact, you will  not be able to stop for long—his doormen are going to tell you to “Move on! We don’t want your kind around here!” However, catch a subway and keep on downtown. #RyanPhillippe 10 of 13

Anywhere you may want to get off, look at the apartments of corporate America, businesses! Go right on down to the tip of Manhattan Island that this capitalistic society taken from the Indians for $20. Look at this City Hall, down there; look at his Wall Street! Look at yourself! Look at his God. That is why people get so upset! No morals, no scandals. In fact, we may have to re-examine al the areas of society which we have so blithely labeled as “secular.” Who is really without profound and unshakable altruistic beliefs? Judeo-Christianity is the religion of the secular West, no matter how many million claim to disregard it. Its profound tenets have been internalized by the most remote and intellectual agnostics Its expectations inform Wall Street as well as the common courtesies exchanged on a crowded beach in California or a meeting between the head of Russian and the United States of America. #RyanPhillippe 11 of 13

Technology-saints will soon rise—if they have not already—to melt the poverty of millions with torrents of well-distributed good and services. Communications will annihilate hatred and divisiveness as Internet cafes continue to spring up like flowers through Asia and Africa. Cable television will bring countless new programs to the vast Arab World. Even North Korea will be penetrated. Underrepresented groups in Europe and America will be thoroughly and fruitfully assimilated through computer literacy. Medical science will find cheap harmless substitutes for cocaine and heroin thereby elimination of the evil drug trade altogether. All violence will soon give way to refinement of debate and exchange of knowledge. Effective acts of terrorism will continue to be obscene precisely because of their rarity, until they stop all together. #RyanPhillippe 12 of 13

As for sexuality, the revolution in this regard is so vast that we of this time cannot being to comprehend its full ramifications. Short shirts, bobs. Car dates, women in the work place, gays in love—we are dizzy with mere beginnings. Our scientific understanding and control of procreation gives us the power undreamt of in former centuries and the immediate mysteries of the sperm and the egg, the mysteries of the chemistry of gender and gender choice and attraction. All of God’s children will thrive from out growing knowledge, but to repeat this is only the beginning. We must have the courage to embrace the beauty of science in the name of the Lord. The Pope listens. He smiles. I continue. The image of God Incarnate, become Man out of fascination with His own Creation, will triumph in the Third Millennium as the supreme emblem of Divine Sacrifice and Unfathomable Love. Once your inner spiritual nature is willing to submit to the life of Christ, your understanding will be perfectly clear. #RyanPhillippe 13 of 13