Easter happens. Christ has risen.
And so can you…
I don’t call myself a Christian, and I wouldn’t say I’m not a Christian either. Sometimes I say I’m a closet christian (lowercase ‘c’), because I‘m a big fan of Jesus. For me he’s the model of what a man can be, and by man, I mean a human person. I wish I could be more like him.
I’m the child of a Jewish woman whose family emigrated from Eastern Europe long before she was born. To mitigate their pain that she was marrying a goy, she and my father promised her family that they would bring up their children as Jews. They neglected to do this.
Neither of my parents had a personal interest in organized religion. They made a half-hearted (or less) attempt to honor their promise by sending me to Jewish Sunday school for a few minutes. I protested, and the religious education project came to an end. They just didn’t care enough.
When I was around 30, married with kids, I had an intense platonic relationship with the priest at the Episcopal church I was attending. Why was I attending that church? Not sure. I think I felt that in order to understand my own culture I needed more familiarity with Christianity as a practice. And the almost-Catholic flavor of the Episcopal Church was more interesting—more ornate and ritualistic—than run-of-the-mill Protestantism.
Christianity 101
I was free from emotional resistance to Christianity formed in childhood. I was blank-slate curious. I don’t think I would have been able to play footsie with Christianity if my friend, the priest, had not been such a crazy mixed-up guy, who doubted his own faith. His faith-doubting made him accessible to me. He was supposedly a reformed alcoholic. I watched him drain the copious dregs of a big chalice of wine after every communion. I drank that wine too, ate communion wafers, and let my friend baptize me, with all the fixings. Baptism was my idea. I wasn’t just a researcher; I was an experimenter.
I never became a capital C Christian. I’m not a joiner. I get my inspiration and spiritual support wherever I find it, which is everywhere. Once, in response to a Jehovah’s Witness at my door telling me that I would love The Watchtower magazine no matter what religion I was, I told him that I was all religions. He left quickly.
Born to die; that’s our MO.
One thing I’ve never been able to buy in traditional Christian theology is the belief that Jesus died to save us from our sins — had to die for that purpose, or we would be screwed. There is so much I dislike and dispute in that idea. I don’t know where to begin… From the concept of a punitive father god who demands sacrifice, to the whole idea of ‘sin’ — what it is, how you get it, and how you lose it or have it forgiven.
This brilliant cartoon by Mr. Fish says it all… Jerusalem PR Firm, 33 AD
The god Jesus described to his followers was not a bloodthirsty, authoritarian monster who needed to be bribed by his son’s death. That god was an interior state of being. The kingdom of god is within.
If Jesus was more than human, an embodied god, or something along those lines—if his project was to experience being human, then dying was part of the project. What kind of human life would it be if you didn’t have to die?
Jesus lived, if not to save us, then to help us out. Give us a few pointers. He was a human person who walked around and felt things and said things. And he had to die sooner or later. He experienced a shitty too-early death because people are indeed sinful idiots. Jesus scared the people in power by modeling a way of being that was not subject to the dominant power structures of the day, and by encouraging others to adopt the same rebellious attitude.
Getting killed is a risk you take as a human, particularly if you go around saying things that directly contradict official doctrines. Jesus endured the very common human experience of getting slammed unto death by fear, by smallness. If he were alive today, same.
Jesus didn’t need to ‘rise’ in public after death to have lived his life the way he did. But it certainly helped to drive home the message to his followers that what he’d been saying all along was true… that human life is more than ham and potatoes and chocolate eggs.
Human does as human is…
We are all sinners. Another way to say this is we are human. Our redemption does not depend on someone dying. It depends on how much individual responsibility we are able/willing to take in the service of love. Jesus was willing to die in the service of love. And that is not something that can be demanded, or commanded, or driven by fear. It is personal devotion.
So what I really love about the Christian story is that it’s about living fully—suffering included. That’s what we do. We live and we suffer, we love and we fear. There is no enlightenment, while we’re in the flesh, that protects us from suffering, and from experiencing the consequences of being part of this confused species. Jesus got it, in every sense.
The life of Jesus represents the mysterious mobius strip that loops back and forth between the temporal and the eternal. His life encourages us to notice this. And if our noticing gives us the courage and/or faith to live into our lives as though our lives depend on it, then well done, Jesus. Thank you.
Rise and rise again
Rising is not something we do once after we die. Rising is something we do again and again (if we’re lucky). We can be called to rise any old time, all the time, and sometimes we can do it, and sometimes we can’t.
The Bible is full of exhortations to ‘rise’ and go forth... To rise means to remember, literally to re-member ourselves, so that, from a place of interior integration, without fear, we can see enough, feel enough, love enough, that creative action is possible. Like helium in a balloon, when you are filled with enough spirit, you rise. Artists rise all the time. That’s the job description.
Jesus was an artist. His medium was life. He lived fully into his life, and into his death too. Rise, go forth, and be like Jesus. Be an artist.
Does rising include awaking? Rising from the dead is a pretty big deal for a lot of people. I am thinking also of these oligarch type who are looking for eternal life that they can somehow buy. They may rise but will they wake up?