The Undragoning

JMJ
✙

IAM CRUCIFIED with Christ,” said St Paul. “Yet I live, not I but Christ who lives in me.” What is “I” here? Who is crucified? Certainly St Paul had endured a lot in his life after conversion – scourgings, stonings, shipwrecks, hunger, homelessness, long labors. I’m sure there were nights of hunger on the road as well, and times of loneliness. The Epistles document some emotional turmoil as well: riffs with friends and coworkers, trouble with disciples and the Church. If Paul had an Irish mother she would say, “Offer it up!” But Paul says, “I am crucified”. What gets nailed down?

In CS Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader there is the story of Eustace, the boy who was turned into a dragon. Finally, Eustace is saved from being a dragon by Aslan, the savior lion. Aslan takes Eustace-the-Dragon to a lake to bathe and, for a while he lets the dragon wash himself and scrape off the old scales. Then finally, Aslan takes matters into his own paws and begins to rip the dragon-ishness off of Eustace, layer by layer. At the end of the “undragoning of Eustace” he’s a boy again, finally able to rejoin his friends as a human. He’s been helping them as a dragon up til now, though – flying around and lifting heavy things like a dragon can do, starting fires to keep people warm, and the like. But now, as a boy, he can return to them as an equal. Thing was, he didn’t want to be a dragon: although he was one for ever so long. He wanted to be human again.

Only humans can be crucified with Christ: dragons cannot be.

When you were conceived your father’s sperm joined your mother’s egg. They fused together, and in that instant, God created for you a spirit which flamed to life and, from that moment you are half Mom’s DNA and half Dad’s DNA and 100% God’s. This is your heart: it’s always with you. Your beingness is this. In the last day, your body and spirit will still be. This cannot be undone for, for God, un-being is a quality he cannot have. And since your being arises in him, being you shall always be. This is the heart of humanness: this union of spirit and body that is half Mom, half Dad, and fully God. The thing is, from that moment, for all of us, there is something that keeps us from connecting to it, something that keeps us from entering this heart and doing the one thing that we need to do – which is offer it to God. Yes, God is there, dwelling at the core of our being, like it or not, for it cannot be otherwise for any being. (The demons know this about themselves and loathe the knowledge and their very selves.) But God, at the core of our being, waits for us to come to him.

To do so we must be undragoned.

Some of our dragon layers are things we made up: ideas about who we are and how we present ourselves to the world. Some of these layers are things the world did to us: our parents, schools, pop-science, bad theology, and politics. Some of these layers are the results of our sins: fake ideas of self built on false foundations, then facades added, and layers of plaster to hold the facade in place, and huge flying buttresses to hold the plaster, and then finally giant works of art applied to the outside to make everything look pretty. We are Gothic cathedrals of fake selves. When we come to Christ, we hope to worship God in this temple – God welcomes us just as we are! But we soon discover this temple we built is the first thing that has to go. We take some art down, we take some arches away and say, “Now it’s ok”. But God says, “More.” OK, let me open the doors and rearrange the seating. But God only says, “More.”

Eventually, we realize that we must offer the whole thing to the Divine Demolition Artist and he begins to tear it down. Each removal, each destruction will hurt like hell. It will feel like we’re finally being crucified. We’re finally offering everything to God. But dragons (our fake selves) cannot be crucified. Only humans can be. Each removal is only preparation for more demolition, each departure of some well-beloved thing of merely-sinful beauty is only the prepwork.

This can take forever. It’s the whole purpose of Purgatory: but we can let God start on this now, if we dare.

In the end, and only by God’s power, we can be fully undragoned. Only then, devoid of our false layers, can we be crucified.