There is a whisper in the wind as it blows through a field of wild and vibrant flowers set high in the back hills of a rolling, prairie country side. The animated colors vibrantly dance and swoon through the arms of their love, the wind. To spend the vast portion of their days lost in the frail rhythmic sway between them, leaves a mark on their being that is more incumbent than the long strings of borrowed time in which they would suffer to be trapped in daily – playing for themselves merely the contingent truths of this moment to that. But here, in this primal movement on the hills, there is something more…something deeper. There is some great connection; there is some primal truth that connects them with the heartbeat of what it means to exist, thumping and pounding in a syncopated pattern from the deep cavern chambers of the life of being. There is the unspeakable and yet familiar which comes near to these flowers as created beings flailing in the wind and yet beckons them to blossom, to grow. What does it mean to be? What is it to exist? How do we allow ourselves to be enraptured in the fullness and frailty of the deepest existence? How do we engage a reality in which we are one in being with Christ and yet know the equal reality of His working and refining as an on-going process in our lives? What does it look like for a child of God to sit confidently at the Eucharist table, a whore and yet a child? How does one take up the question of being and becoming as the whole of the Christian community upholds its identity as Christ's Kingdom?
To speak of the Kingdom of God, for the Christian, is to more rightly bring into focus the whole sweeping paradigm of what it means to be a Christian. The Kingdom of God is that much anticipated reign of God for his covenant people; it is the restoration of the harmony lost in the fall at Eden. However, at the same time, it is more than this. The Kingdom is also realized by means of the process in achieving harmony as well – God’s ultimate means of reconciling the world to this harmony. Tragically, and far too often, “[m]any of our traditions have taught us about a Jesus who wasn’t into shaping a world but into escaping the world – that’s the worldview out of which Gnosticism grows.”[1] In truth the urgency with which this topic comes, is revealed by the very nature that the full scope of realization in Yahweh’s theocracy has its heart in the tensions found in that minute space between being and becoming, an existential posit.
Here, one can lean on the ideas of the French philosopher Guilles Deleuze who, when speaking of language, talks about the pronounced anti-systematic intermingling of major and minor languages. This idea has to deal with the interaction of minor dialects in language to the overarching languages that house them and the extent to which the evolutionary nature of language is expressed when those dialects, as the minor language, over take the role of the primary creating a new language all together or, more accurately, the new phase of their common language. So, for example, one could look at the seemingly foreign tongue of Old English in classics like Beowulf and note that while the text was English, it was also becoming English; the phases of growth are actually contained within the identity of the whole so that “[t]here are not, therefore, two kinds of languages but two possible treatments of the same language.”[2] This is a fitting parallel for the orientation of the Christian to the Kingdom of God. It is that necessary position which speaks the truth of Christ’s message on the Kingdom as that reality which waits in expectant hope for Christ’s parousia and full reign, but it allows also one to take up an identity of full fruition in their orientation to that Kingdom as Christ does His work in the world and in the personal life. The Kingdom is and it is becoming.
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