In two telling instances, Paul makes mention of the Mystical Body of Christ:

The problem is that, almost immediately, this fascinating concept is co-opted and becomes a kind of synomum for the Church -- for the official results of the ranglings between Paul and Peter in the claims made by the Roman Catholic Church.

Athough much of what Paul wrote has little or nothing to do with Jesus, this phrase makes suggestions of which Paul, himself, was apparently unaware. To put it short and sweet -- the Mystical Body of Christ is not the Church. Jesus spent his life and death decrying the use of intermediaries between God and the individual while, on the other hand, living and speaking of the immediate Presence of God that all could partake of.

This was a revolutionary concept beyond any we can conceive of today in our modern world. While, at Jesus' time, heroes were made up of extraordinary, often semi-divine individuals, Jesus was proclaiming that the Kingdom of Heaven was for each person -- especially the poor ("Blessed are the poor.."). He spoke of the Kingdom of Heaven and what we got, at every conceiveable opportunity, is the Church which Jesus, in spite of interpolated propaganda, had no intention of creating or commissioning.

Think of St. Augustine's words, when he said: "God has become man so that man can become God." And in The Dialogue of Saint Catherine of Siena, God the Father told her: "taking your humanity, and, freeing you from the servitude of the devil, I made you free. And if you examine, you will see that man has become God, and God has become man, through the union of the divine with the human nature." If man has become "God" does this mean that man is equal to God. Our Lord Himself said: "Is it not written in your law: I said you are gods." (John 10:34)

We are to partake in the same Mystical Body of Christ that Jesus himself knew to his very core. Obviously, none of this is possible if, as a Roman Catholic, one believes the term applies to a legalistic set of rules and creeds known as The Church. Likewise, it is impossible for fundamentalists who rely entirely on their profession of faith and know nothing of the experience of God nor of the dictates from Jesus and James both to tend to the needy, for there one finds the true face of Christ.

If one thinks of Christ as a noun, you're already down the wrong trail, especially if you're clinging to a proper noun. Christ is more "Christing" or a verb, a process of living that one enters, it is what the zen masters have called "Big Mind" as opposed to "small mind." Likewise, Mystical Body of Christ is akin to dharmakaya or buddhakaya, meaning the "body of truth" and the "body of Buddha" not on a personal, one to one basis, but cosmically speaking, indicating something of which each of us partakes and is, in some explanations, "a cell."

To realize the Mystical Body of Christ is to attain, in its own way, enlightenment, meaning to find the "light" that is often spoken of in Christian documents from the Bible to the Philokalia. It is to consummate Jesus' promise that there is no one good but the Father, that what Jesus did we can do as well. This is not the obvious -- we can heal lepers and expel demons at our command. Those were almost sideshow addtions of Jesus' true strength and depth. Instead, it is to realize that Jesus did not say, "Worship me," but, rather, "Follow me," as he moved deeper into a relationship with God through prayer, contemplation and the way of action.

TO BE CONTINUED.