Carlyle Marney’s “Untying the One Christ Jesus Freed”

I’ve always loved how Carlyle Marney describes the spiritual life. Our task is to uncover our true self, which is already true (and always has been). Frances leans into her healing because she believes God loves her and knows her beyond her trauma.

Carlyle Marney, Priests to Each Other

“It requires much nerve to choose one’s life - to jump over the hedges of one’s images. Nothing requires more nerve than to put one’s feather systems under the fire. Romain Rolland has said, ‘Dare to detach yourself from the herd.’ Over against an ‘oceanic feeling’ one must achieve his personhood by standing out from the herd. The Book knew, centuries before Lecky’s old study of European morals or Eric Berne’s Games People Play, that society is a set of games we play, games played with various faces, personages, masks. The Book also shows how the game is upset when any man (Zacchaeus, Matthew) obeys his inner call. All our games are bothered when the person comes out from under the feathers of his personage. ‘If I lose my life’ becomes, here, an ‘I must lose my life,’ for whoever saves his own life does lose it; it simply never opens. This is perhaps why Soren Kierkegaard preferred to say ‘choose oneself’ instead of the Socratic ‘know thyself.’ For choosing here means I have renounced the provincial life of me. I have refused my feathers as my real or my best. I have discovered that to be person is the same as to be free.

In one of his early studies, Luther translated ‘Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free’ with the same word he had used for ‘untying’ the ass’s foal that Jesus would ride down David Street. This is the goal of our Christian years of Christian community in Christian education: to untie the man Christ Jesus freed.”