Christ Is My Own Kind
In Louisville I bought marvelous books for a few pennies--including The Family of Man for fifty cents. All those fabulous pictures. And again, no refinements and no explanation are necessary! How scandalized some would be if I said that this whole book is to me a picture of Christ, and yet that is the Truth. There, there is Christ in my own Kind, my own Kind--Kind, "likeness" and which means "love" and which means "child." Mankind. Like one another, the dear "Kind" of sinners united and embraced in only one heart, in only one Kindness, which is the Heart and Kindness of Christ. I do not look for sin in you, Mankind. I do not see sin in you anymore today (though we are all sinners). There is something too real to allow sin any longer to seem important, to seem to exist, for it has been swallowed up, it has been destroyed, it is gone, and there is only the great secret between us that we are all one Kind, and what matters is not what this or that one has committed in his heart, separate from the others, but the love that brings him back to all the others in the one Christ, and this love is not our love but the Divine Bridegroom's. It is the Divine Power and the Divine Joy--and God is seen and reveals Himself as man, that is, in us, and there no other hope of finding wisdom than in God-manhood: our own manhood transformed in God!
March 19, 1958, III.182-83
