Jesus as the two-way door - BwJ 26

We are starting up a new series in Breakfast with Jesus based on conversations that Anne and I enjoyed as we walked some of the famous El Camino trail recently. Let me say that I do not use the word ‘conversation’ lightly. Anne has been my thought partner all our lives together – and in a really productive way. I mean that she brings intuition and experience and truth-telling to our talks – and I tend to be the academic philosophical one. It is a great – and at times tense – interaction!  In this first talk, I am calling ‘Jesus as the two-way door’.  It began on the third morning of our walk at the now-famous Hotel Akerretta which was featured in the movie ‘The Way’.  This meditation began as Anne was praying for a young friend of ours. It was ignited by a sudden illumination as she prayed – which I recognised as the Spirit speaking since the thought came from nowhere – there was no cognitive trajectory in my mind that morning. But there was a festering unease to which this sudden illumination spoke. The unease was our religious jargon around “Jesus” which seems to position him as the entrance to a club or religious clique.  And the sudden illumination was ‘Jesus is the door – and two-way door’. I felt like I stepped out of a dark room into the sunlight.In this talk, I wander into the wondrous world of Maximus the Confessor a little. This foreshadows a later Camino conversation. I also intend to focus more on Maximus by interviewing Jordan Wood who is the current new master of Maximus and has just written a breathtaking book on Maximus called “The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus the Confessor”.I can remember David Hart telling me that for all his boundary-stretching thought, Maximus was actually only taking seriously the implications of the oft-repeated NT phrase ‘in Christ’.  Anyway join us on our walking and talking !! 

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