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But eventually we will. And that’s really the point of this book. When I began by saying that Christianity in all its forms was pregnant, that something was trying to be born from Christian faith, what I meant (without really realizing it then) was that orange Christian faith was pregnant with yellow Christian faith, which is pregnant with green Christian faith, which is pregnant with blue Christian faith, which is pregnant with indigo, which is pregnant with violet, which will eventually become pregnant with something that is currently beyond our ability to see but is no doubt there. Why am I so confident that people of faith in yellow, green, blue, and indigo zones will keep moving forward? For two reasons, no, three—reasons that bring us back to my comments about the agency of God at the beginning of this chapter.

First, I am confident because of the reality and presence of the Creator with creation. This is God’s world. It is now clearer to us than ever that God created a universe of expansion and evolution. To resist growth and transcendence in God’s universe, then, goes against the grain of the universe; again, to recall Gregory and quote Jean Danielou, sin is ultimately a refusal to grow. All living things repeatedly face the choice between adaptation (or growth) and extinction, because this is not the static, sterile neo-Platonic universe of Theos; this is the dynamic, fertile creation of the living God. Where sin increases—where the resistance to growth, transcendence, and inclusion increases—what abounds more? God’s grace, God’s invitation to grow into ever increasing aliveness, goodness, and love. So I cannot help but have hope, because God is present with us.

Second, I have hope because of Jesus. We are stuck with Jesus, and he won’t go away. Yes, we can try to tie him up or cage him in with any number of absolute Greek lines. Yes, we can crucify him with Roman power and bury him in a rich man’s tomb. Yes, we can seal that tomb with the heavy marble stones of institutions, traditions, legalisms, and systems of thought. Yes, we can post armed guards in the form of theological thought police who try to keep Jesus in and us out, or we can practice identity theft and use Jesus’s name to do our own bidding in a thousand ways. Yes, we can do all these things, but Jesus cannot be contained. He rises again. He keeps coming back. We have been given a full-color portrait of Jesus in the gospels, against the backdrop of the Law and Prophets, lighted by the rest of the New Testament. And that portrait is so beautiful that it always transcends (and includes) every attempt to contain it in one color or zone. So as long as we listen to the stories of Jesus told in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, we will be prodded out of our current zone and summoned by love to continue our quest.

But we do not just have a portrait of Jesus, and that is my third reason for hope. We also have the presence of Jesus, the Spirit of Jesus, the Spirit and Breath and Wind and Fire of God, alive and active in us and all around us. We might even say that the call to transcend and include is a call that comes from the Holy Spirit, in whom all of us live, move, and have our being. So we cannot escape. We can throw a temper tantrum. We can sit in the corner and pout. We can cower in the closet in fear. But then we hear music from another room playing faintly. Gradually, eventually, we are enticed and magnetized by the Spirit’s jazz, and we have to come out of our closet and dance, to join in the unending improvisation and lively rhythm of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

So this quest is not just our little quest. It is part of the big quest—the quest of the Christian faith, and bigger still, the quest of humanity in general. And even beyond that, perhaps we could also say that we are participating in the quest or adventure of God: God is seeking, adventuring, questing to create (with us) a universe that will become God’s eternal dancing partner, God’s