Christocentrism of Charism – Buggert - CarmelStream

upon God's self our history precisely to heal and fulfill it. At worst such an anesthetizing spirituality
which is focused upon one's "interior life" to the neglect of creation and history is a gnosticization or
Platonization of Christianity or a supposedly Christian form of magic or voodoo which attempts to
manipulate the divine and escape from the painful, and in some instances, death-dealing
commitments and efforts needed to make God's Reign more a reality in our world.
Second suggestion: walking in the footsteps of Jesus means taking up Jesus' own Reign of
God praxis. There is still a land of Christ with its people to be regained, but this land with its people
is not limited to the geographical land of Christ. Jesus was about much more than that. Jesus was
about the inbreaking of the Reign of God now into history, a Reign of God which would embrace
and transform all of creation and all of history, a Reign which even now in history would begin to
dispel the Reign of Satan and all of its consequences: injustice, violence, war, oppression,
domination; a Reign which would restore all to the paradisal state. From the perspective of the
Reign of God proclamation and praxis of Jesus, the land and the people of Jesus embrace all creation
and all history, especially the marginalized, the victims of oppression and injustice, the least of the
sisters and brothers. clxxxiii
Hence, to walk in the footsteps of Jesus Christ to reconquer the land is to insert one's self into
history and its conflicts, to take on earthly and political citizenship as did the original hermits of
Carmel. clxxxiv The obsequium of the Rule allows for no privatized, spiritualized, eschatologized
spirituality. It cannot be separated from the polis. Both the Jesus and the discipleship of classical
theology and spirituality must be "secularized," i.e. made relevant to the saeculum, the world and its
history. Carmelites also must attend to the wisdom of Marx' well-known eleventh thesis against
Feuerbach: "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to
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