Our Eternal Origin Story
A Lenten Journey with our Divine, Eternal Origin Story
During this Lenten season, we’re inviting a journey into the divine story. The divine story is not something we read in a book, but one we live every day. It is not just about Jesus, but Christ living in us. It is about our true Origin and our Eternal Life coming into the here and now.
We are invited to release the lesser stories we tell about ourselves, letting go of the limited ways we see who we are.
How can we uncover and embrace more fully our true nature, our divine essence, who we truly are?
May we enter into stories that live not just in the past, but in the fullness of life still to come. Telling the stories of our divine vocation, living and expressing here and now.
The gospels tell the origin story of Jesus’ divine vocation. Along with the birth narrative and a few stories of his early life, the lineage of Jesus is given twice, tracing his human and divine heritage. All four gospels recount the story of Jesus’ baptism as a foundational experience in his calling. We have welcomed how “Being named” is a core aspect of vocare, and Jesus receives his mystically from a voice from heaven, “This is my son, the beloved, in whom I have delighted.”
This season of Lent echoes the 40 days in the desert Jesus spent following his baptism. These, and others, are significant events in the origin story of Jesus.
The gospel of John begins by adding another layer to the deeper origin of Jesus.
In the origin there was the Logos, and the Logos was present to God, and the Logos was god. This one was present to God in the origin.
John 1:1-2
(trans David Bentley Hart)
This is the eternal origin story not just of Jesus, but of all things. The whole universe. And us too, in our Christ participation in the family of God. “All things came to be through this, and without this came to be not a single thing that has come to be.” (John 1:3 trans mine)
On one level, we may think of origin stories as the sequence of events that make up the beginning of who we become in our lives, our divine vocation. This is what we have primarily focused on over the last weeks as the first part of this Lenten journey.
On another level, our Eternal Origin story has been from “in the beginning.” In the origin. It goes deeper than the narrative story of our human lives. It is the eternal, divine story of our truest origin.
How do we tell our story from this Eternal Origin?
To start, we might reorient from looking back to more consciously looking through. To seeing the deeper pattern and shining through of Christ in our lives unbound from the past.
The word “Logos” has vast meaning and varied interpretation in historical, philosophical, and spiritual traditions. It is much deeper than the common translation of “Word,” which still points to so much more than written words of sacred scriptures. It is the “speaking” of God, the creative expressions that flow from the fundamental pattern of all things. The “divine reason” or order of all things. The essential blueprint or most primary design of how all things are understood and manifested. But not just as a schema or preconceived plan—it is the living, ongoing spoken “word” of being. The manifestation, the Christophany, the shining through and coming forth in lived reality incarnated.
Logos is more than Jesus, more than the words written about God. And it is not something of the past alone. It is the constant dynamic of how all things come to be, in every moment, from Living Origin. It is not a one-time blueprint “before creation,” but the ongoing and ever-present Source of all life, like an unceasing wellspring always flowing into all things.
And this divine font continuously creates us in each moment. It is the eternal flow of divine vitality interwoven with our finite human vitality throughout our lifespan. Jesus, in his Christ nature, embodied the fullness of this interwoven divine/human being in his lifetime, in his death and resurrection, and eternally—beyond and through all time.
As we make this divine, mystical dimension of our Christ being more conscious and more present in our human experience, we can come to live from this Eternal Origin in our day-to-day and moment-to-moment reality.
Eternal Time in Moments
Rather than a story with beginning, middle, and end, we can be with a different way of participating in time. In the Greek language, there are different words for these two experiences of time: chronos for sequential chronological time we can measure, and kairos, which reflects deep time that we experience in a qualitatively different way.
We all have experienced kairos moments, which irrupt into our normal experience of life. We may find them hard to describe, but somehow the moment feels thicker; it has a density and weight that we can sense is different. They feel more significant, more loaded, perhaps even in some way truer to the way things really are—and can be more. When the Really Real irrupts into the ordinary. When the eternal suffuses the temporal.
Sometimes we sense this in the moment, when “time stops” and everything is held up in an arresting way. Or sometimes we don’t really notice it until after, when “time flies by” and we don’t know where the time went (though this can also happen from a lack of presence).
These are more than just the significant events and most impactful moments of our life story. They may arrive in the most seemingly insignificant times: walking the dog, hiking on the mountain path, sitting by the water, in a word from a friend, a phrase of a poem, a smile.
I’ve heard them referred to as “glimmers” (the flip side of “triggers”), because we are suddenly sent into a clearer seeing, a deeper joy, a truer participation in the being of our life in an instant.
In an even deeper and mystical way, through our whole-body awareness, we can experience these “eternal moments” as one way we can begin to recognize and move with our deeper story, our eternal origin story that has shone through in flashes all throughout our lives.
These are beginnings in their own right. And they happen at any and all times. They are happening still.
The Eternal Irrupting into the Temporal
In the telling of my origin story of divine vocation, my calling did not begin when I first met Paul. I shared the story of my life as it had moved through time, but after that, while we were meditating, Paul and I shared an eternal moment. We both had an intuition, in that moment, that our connection had not only just begun in that moment. It took a while for it to come more fully into our awareness, but we both recognized a soul connection that went beyond the bounds of time.
That moment lives in my memory in a different way. It is not like other past experiences, but is somehow still alive and present to me, even now.
I have had other such moments in my life: in meditation, in nature, with people I love, and even in mystical experiences that aren’t quite memories because I can’t place them exactly, specifically in time.
How do we explain such knowing?
Well, provided I’m not losing my mind—which isn’t entirely outside the realm of possibility!—perhaps you have known similar eternal moments.
I believe that these come to us especially when we are prone and open to them. And I have recognized a part of that openness is cultivating a posture, an embodiment, an internal structure, dare I say even the logos of Christ in me. Or, rather, if you prefer the Apostle Paul’s favorite phrase, us in Christ. And this Christ-likeness goes far deeper than the moralizing I was taught in Sunday school growing up.
It is the “thisness” of our lives. It’s something like a portal of receptivity that lives in the core and source of our being. All things come to be through this Origin, not as a one-time windup and go, but an eternal and ever-present source energy and vitality. The eternal wellspring.
It is difficult to describe matters of the eternal—beyond time—in the sequential language of our mental logic. The Logos of Christ, the divine, operates by a different pattern, drawing upon more dimensions. And, at the same time, it is not completely inaccessible to our understanding.
Embracing the mystical opens us up to the mystery of it. And I love Richard Rohr’s description of mystery, which is “not something you can’t know. Mystery is endless knowability.”
Releasing the grip of our mental structure (without throwing it out entirely) makes space for it.
Sharing the experience with others in some way is paramount, rather than holding it close in secret in fear.
One of the crucial keys is for our spirituality to integrate not only the desire and movement to go from the finite to the infinite, but to welcome the infinite into the finite as much as we can.
Rather than a spirituality that seeks solely or even primarily to expand into the infinite, we embrace our nature of being in Christ to participate actively in the incarnation—which is the bringing of the infinite into the finite, the eternal into the temporal. The true light, coming into the cosmos, illuminating everyone (John 1:9).
Our eternal origin story is one of the divine ever-becoming in all things. In humanity. In us. We can call this “Christ” if we like.
The Eternal Story of Origin-al Union, Here & Now
These eternal moments or glimpses are something like portals. They are a way of consciously sensing the inbreaking of this great light, of the infinite touching into the finite, of the divine shining through more fully.
Another way to consider it, is that instead of seeking union with God as something not already true and real, we receive the inbreaking as a way of sensing a refraction of that eternal union into the here and now, into our personhood and into our lives.
Our divine story doesn’t end with union. Union is the place from which it begins, at any and all times.
These moments happen in many different ways. And I believe they happen far more often than we realize or recognize. Indeed, might they even be happening all the time? Why would they only be so rare? Is God really so stingy?
“You thought union was a way
you could decide to go.
But the world of the soul follows
things rejected and almost forgotten.
Your true guide drinks
from an undammed stream.”
No, the limitation comes from our perception. Our acceptance of the veil and subtle, unconscious denial of the possibility of living from the eternal, of being in union, of participating in our divine nature.
The challenge is that this perception requires more than our mental recognition. Our mental opening is a baseline precursor (for if we deny with our thoughts that it can be possible, it certainly won’t be).
But then we really begin to experience this through a conscious engagement through our magic structure of consciousness, which we in ICN seek to access primarily through what we call our spiritual womb. Here, we all have innate access, if latent, to the timeless. This inner way of being and knowing is in our heritage of consciousness, which we have not outgrown, but often forgotten.
We might recall it in the innocence of childhood. We perhaps intimate it in soulful encounters like I had with Paul. We can often recognize it in spiritual and indigenous traditions intimately connected to nature and the world of the soul.
These “eternal moments” speak to the ever-present origin and source of our unified being. And yet, we live in a fractured world. We experience life around us, personally and globally, with the pain of wounding and the horrors of unspeakable atrocities. Yet, they happen. They are happening still.
How can we live in these times?
We cannot go back to the unbroken beginnings, to the before of the past “when things were better.” Origin is not nostalgia, nor something to be recovered from a time before.
And, we can’t simply charge ahead into the future, to a “better tomorrow” and the hope of things to come. We work toward that loving evolution ever and always, but Origin is not utopia.
Our Eternal Origin Story in Christ offers us something deeper, something more. From alpha to omega not only through the arc of time. But so too from the eternal whole into the here and now.
Through the spiritual womb of God, the Divine Mother, we are continuously born of the eternal, from the Source of all life, unbroken and undivided. Before and after. Beyond time. Ever-rooted in the eternal divine essence of ultimate wholeness and unceasing, infinite love.
As we re-member this unified source reality, we bring this fundamental, eternal union into conscious integration with our whole being and into the present moment of our lives.
Our Eternal Origin Story is nothing less than the ongoing origin story of Christ.
Far from blasphemous, this is the message of Jesus, that we are to be in Christ, as we always already are, in this incarnated precious personhood. Our lives, in Christ, here and now. The fullness of life.
This is the Christ Logos, the universal pattern of God’s creativity still coming into being, ever and always. And it is our divine WeCreating invitation. To sing the song of love in the world, composed from nothing less than the Living Origin of eternal wholeness and union in God.
Christ emergent in all things. And us too.
This is the deeper story of us all.
Our Eternal Origin Story.
Our Living, Eternal Origin, Together
To actually live from the truth of this eternal origin story is no small endeavor.
That is, if we are even ready to accept and believe it. The views we’ve held and been taught of Jesus and of ourselves may contain many walls and entanglements. We may feel blocked or caught up in some of these, and the ways through may feel too challenging or inaccessible. And they are—at least if we try to navigate them alone.
Our call in this Lenten season is to journey together in the processes of telling our true origin stories, and releasing the lesser stories of who we are.
To release the less-than-divine and limiting self-views we hold.
To release the lesser stories of Jesus Christ, as something separate and of the past.
To release anything less than the deepest and truest divine origins of our ultimate being, our divine essence.
Here, as Jesus did, we are dying to the lesser stories of our lives and how we think we have to live.
We cannot do this alone.
That is why communion is another crucial key.
We need one another. For we are not separate, individual stories of Christ. We are, together, the children of God amidst the great family of God.
The protagonist of this story isn’t you. It isn’t me. It isn’t even Jesus.
We are all vital parts of the great story of the continual dance of union ever-becoming personalized, of our personhood ever-becoming united, and the creative inflow, interflow, and outflow of love in the world. In our lives. In our many interconnected communities of interbeing.
We can call this “The Body of Christ” if we like.
And we are all resurrecting into this Christ story together.
Next week, in our “Becoming” invitation, we’ll move further into shared processes of being and becoming this more together.
Statement of WeCreating Authorship
All of the wisdom, creativity, and spiritual emergence in ICN comes from the communal field of wisdom and spirit speaking in and through the “We.”
All text in this article is human-authored without the use of AI, according to our AI policy: 0 out of 10
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