Who you do say I am?

----- Forwarded Message ----
From: William J ...
To: Donald ...
Sent: Sun, 20 June, 2010 19:38:56
Subject: "Who do you say I am"

Dear Father Donald,

• THIS is from a moment's pure excitement, and may be too oblique - except for me to share with one who is aware of the wandering nature of the thoughts of this pilgrim...

Discovered to me this very evening, an intriguing face of the prism that is the question Jesus addressed to his disciples in today's Gospel, whilst reading further on Thomas Merton's Christology in a book by Christopher Pramuk.

Pramuk writes: "Jesus was not only the son of Mary, or only a son of Israel, just as no person is simply the son or daughter of their biological parents or the religion of their birth. Jesus was also a "son of Adam" (literal: "son of the earth") and a "son of God", which is to say, a human being. If his question to his disciples - "Who do you say that I am?" - is first of all 'a Christian problem', that is, a question of Christian identity, nevertheless the living encounter with Jesus reverberates across all distances and absences to become the question of humanity as such: what does it mean to be a human being, to live in communion with God, the earth, and with all things?"...

Pramuk answers this question: "It is implied in the name Emmanuel, God with us: that God, humanity, and the earth belong essentially together and not apart; and there are many ways to express this central mystery of divine-humanity and sacred corporeality, many ways of growing into the truth of the incarnation."

The faces and the colours of this prism - "Who do you say I am?" - hold me speechless.

... in Christ Jesus,

William