Nature’s Great Parable
In the image of the grain of wheat falling into the earth, we see one of Nature’s greatest parables. Human beings, always sensitive to what creation is revealing to us about God, have always seen in this great cosmic cycle, a great mystery.
The Literal and the Spiritual Sense
The Literal
Like the revelation that we call scripture, the revelation that is creation can be said to have two senses, the literal and the spiritual. Christ reveals the spiritual senses of scripture and creation, but before the advent of the Word among us, religious men did the best they could interpreting the meaning of the cosmic mystery which is contained in that grain of wheat. The mystery already contained many religious values, which touched on:
- sex
- hope
- life
- death
- sacrifice
- restoration
- renewal’
…and many others. But their interpretation, before the completion of the revelation brought by Christ, was too literal. This literalness showed itself mainly in two ways.
- Human sacrifice. Life—it seemed clear—came from death.
- The ritual orgy. The orgy was a kind of intentional nihilism that was meant to precede the return to the ‘beginning’ which would renew and restore life. There is in it the same logic of sacrifice, that life must be preceded by death. The orgy was the literal interpretation of “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies…”
(It becomes clear as I write this, and maybe as you read this, how impossible it is to separate the religious values found in this great natural parable. You can’t separate sex from death, from the idea of sacrifice, from the mystery of life and hope for the future and for redemption.
And that sex is a cosmic mystery. It is very much connected to God because it is connected to creation. )
The Spiritual
Christ brought the completion and definitive interpretation of the ‘message’ of creation and the great natural parable. He did it by connecting it to his death and resurrection, which is the manifestation of divine love.
Life does not come from the literal death of human beings or other living things, it comes from that ‘death’ which is the gift of oneself to another.
The way that sex exemplifies the ‘great natural mystery’ is not by the symbolic destruction of order, but by the symbolic ‘death’ which is the gift of the self to one’s spouse, which is an image of Christ’s offering himself to his Church.
Once again, it is impossible to separate sex from the mystery of love, death, sacrifice, hope, the future, etc., properly understood through Christ—the true light of all of creation.
