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Autumn
Cosmic Golgotha Suppose the material order, as we have argued, is indeed the garment of Christ, the Temple of the Holy Ghost? Suppose the bread and wine, symbols of all creation, are indeed capable of redemption awaiting its Christification? Then what is the atom but the emergent body of Christ? It was on the mountaintop that Jesus was transfigured. He spoke with Moses and Elijah in the Ruach (Hebrew for spirit) world, on the mountaintop. He was the At-one-ment, the key to the spiritual and the material: unifying love. And His whole body glistened, the preview of His resurrection body. The Feast of the Transfiguration is August 6th. That is the day when we ‘happened’ to drop the bomb at Hiroshima. We took His body and we took His blood and we enacted a cosmic Golgotha. We took the key to love and we used it for bloody hell. Nobody noticed. I am not being cheap about other people. I did not notice it myself. I was celebrating the Feast of the Transfiguration, in a gown and a cassock, a hood, a stole, white hands, saying with the whole Christian ministry, ‘This is my body … This is my blood.’ The while our ‘Christian civilisation’, without Church protest, made its assertion of the complete divorce between spirit and matter. One man noticed. When the word came through to Washington of the dropping of the atom bomb – ‘Mission successfully accomplished’ – Dr Oppenheimer, in large degree in our name its architect, was heard to say, ‘Today the world has seen sin.’ Should any reader of this suppose that August 6th, 1945 was Nadir, the lowest point in human disobedience, let us remember that the world potential for perpetrating bloody hell (as ‘the lesser of two evils’) is now a million times Hiroshima. George MacLeod, Coracle, December 1965
