Such abandonment will weaken us fatally as individuals.
It will lay us open to possession by all manner of demonic conceptual alternatives.
It will make us vulnerable to our enemies within and without.
It is psychologically true that each
of us should open ourselves up to the tragedy of being.
It is psychologically true that we should pick up our tragic burdens and crosses,
die continually, and renew our souls, continually.
It may be more than psychologically true as well.
It may be a truth of cosmic significance.
That is the death and resurrection, celebrated by Easter.
And it is time for us to wake up, become conscious, and recognize it as such.
It is not possible to encapsulate within any finite written account the total
import of the idea of Christ's death and rebirth.
The impossible claim of the bodily
resurrection of one man conjoined with the notion that this event was both
of world redeeming and cosmic significance simply cannot be understood once
and for all within any singular frame of interpretation.
Even for die hard atheists of the scientific type, think
Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, a great mystery remains.
Why has this strange and thoroughly
implausible story exercised such immense impact?
It is because each life is a tragedy tainted by malevolence.
It is because life is suffering as we all are, each of us vulnerable and ignorant,
made all too frequently bitter, resentful, and angry because of just that and more
than willing to make things worse in that anger.
But we all admire courage and the accompanying willingness to abide
by the truth, no matter how terrible in the face of that suffering.
We all recognize in such courage and truth, at least by our admiration
of it, an antidote to the catastrophe of life.
We all know that in the absence of such
courage and truth, mere catastrophe degenerates all too frequently into hell.
Imagine that acceptance of vulnerability
and ignorance is the precondition for growth.
Imagine that confrontation
with the terrible unknown, with its paralyzing manifestations
of tragedy and malevolence, is necessary to catalyze both wisdom and maturity.
Imagine finally, that human consciousness plays some central and as of yet poorly
understood role in the reality of the Cosmos, at least as necessary observer.
Imagine all of that.
Then ask yourself:
What is the absolute hypothetical limit
of human attainment when vulnerability and ignorance are fully and completely
accepted, when the unknown is squarely confronted, and when consciousness is
given its due at the very center of the world?
That's Christ's acceptance of the crucifix.
That's his willingness to be betrayed subject to the evil of his closest
companions and the state and his embrace of brokenness and death.
It is pure truth that even a small leaving
of humility and courage engenders resilience progress and growth.
It is pure truth that resentful rejection
of the price of finite being multiplies suffering endlessly and unnecessarily.
What is the ultimate expression of those truths taken to their final conclusion?
Who is to say who we are and what we might be capable of achieving if we develop
the courage to accept our terrible fates, live in truth, and stumble uphill?
This is the question posed by Christianity in its very essence.
Would you put everything you have and everything you are on the line so
that you could learn to conduct yourself in the best possible manner?
Would you be willing to allow who you
might be to continually and painfully triumph over who you currently are?
In the most ancient religious language,
would you sacrifice what you love most to God to find out who and what you are?
We are in the final analysis, neither structure nor chaos.
Each of us is instead best understood as
a process, as a living, dynamic process, as the very process by which what
we know so insufficiently is transformed into what could yet be.
That is, the process by which our
continued forward movement through life is constantly and inevitably dependent.
To understand that and to welcome it, that is voluntary acceptance
of the necessity of eternal transformation as an alternative to nihilistic despair or
desperate and fatal identification with the state.
This is the idea enacted during the ceremony of the Christian Eucharist.
Incorporation of the body of Christ is
the symbolic transformation of the participant,
not into a believer of a set of facts, religious though those facts may appear,
but into the active imitator of Christ, into the person willing to undergo
whatever death is necessary to bring about the next and better state of being.
Into the person willing to embrace his or her confrontation with the tragedy
and malevolence of life, to learn from that process of embrace,
and to move one step closer in consequence to the eternally receiving city of God.
The idea of the dying and resurrecting God is one of the oldest ideas of mankind,
widespread and exceptionally variant in its forms.
It forms part of the set
of presuppositions that underlie the most ancient shamanic rituals,
carried over perhaps from the Stone Age itself.
It is echoed in the foundational stories of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece.
It manifests itself in allegorical forms,
in the figure of the Phoenix, for example, which emulates itself,
regains its youthful form, and rises in triumph from the ashes.
It recurs repeatedly in the tropes of popular culture as well,
bringing even those entirely devoid of religious education under the spell.
Marvel's iconic Iron Man plummets like
Icarus from sky to ground after saving the world from demonic
serpentine otherworld forces, and then arises from his death.
The child wizard Harry Potter must
ultimately die and be reborn to defeat Voldemort, a very thinly disguised Satan.
All of that creative variation on a theme speaks of a deep ineradicable
and eternally reemergent psychological reality.
We all see this in our day to day lives, and we all know it because we see it.
A small failure, a small disappointment,
frustration, or disenchantment engenders within us, a small death,
a small descent into the underworld, a small requirement for rebirth.
A large failure produces a proportionately large catastrophe and transformation.
When you are compelled to talk to someone
because you face divorce or the failure of a treasured ambition,
or the illness or death of someone close, you are walking yourself through
the eternal narrative, stability, crisis, death, transformation, rebirth.
That's the story of our lives.
That's the fall in the reestablishment of paradise.
The idea that the savior is the figure
who dies and resurrects is a representation, in dramatic or narrative
form of the brute fact that psychological progress indeed, learning itself requires
continual death and rebirth of lesser and greater magnitude.
If you are engaged in a serious
interpersonal conflict or argument, or facing a true crisis in your life,
the new information confronting you cannot be incorporated without the "oh so painful"
demise of your previous conceptions and all of the resistance
comprehension of that pain necessarily entails.
That's part and parcel of the process so famously described as assimilation
and accommodation by the great developmental psychologist Jean Piaget.
We each confront the world with a set
of preconceptualizations whose function is simultaneously to delimit and render
pragmatic our very perceptions, thoughts, and actions.
In the absence of this a priority, we simply cannot function.
Nonetheless, it is still insufficient.
No one ever knows enough, and what we each do not yet know will,
at some moment of crisis, become of vital importance.
When something new and hydra-like confronts us and shakes us to our core,
What is old and anachronistic within must therefore immolate itself and die.
It is very rare indeed to learn something profound without suffering the terrible
pain of dashed dreams and the soul shaking terror of uncertainty and doubt.
This means that none of us should identify in the most fundamental sense with what we
currently know and presume,
means as well that we should all come
to understand that, so that we do not remain confused about who we are.
This means that it is never sufficient to be conservative,
or to identify with the past, or to become ideologically or dogmatically
committed, or to remain stubbornly anachronistic and unchanged.
The environment transforms headlong around us, and we all must run as fast as we can.
As Ellis, Red Queen, well knew, just to stay in the same place.
It is not sufficient either to abandon
tradition and structure entirely in a headlong and irresponsible rush
towards the anomalous and revolutionary.
Structure is insufficient,
but it is still necessary, and the ethical requirement for respecting
and maintaining it is still of paramount import.
We each must, as well similarly avoid
falling prey to the temptation of identifying with the chaotic,
depressing, anxietyridden, and nihilism inducing state of affairs
engendered by the terrible confrontation with the genuinely unknown.
Even when thrust into the underworld by the dreaded events of our life,
we must not characterize ourselves as permanent inhabitants of that dark
and dread place lest we lose hope, despair, and seek revenge.
To progress, psychologically,
you must let go, sacrifice, time and again in the face of successive obstacles.
You must abandon those things
that and often those people who are impeding your progress,
despite the fact that you may have held them very close to your heart.
When you're wrong, when you've missed the mark,
when you've sinned, because that is the meaning of sin,
you must let the part of you that is wrong and aiming improperly die.
Then you must allow the new spirit manifesting itself within,
to spring to life.
That new spirit that's the terrible information contained
in whatever error you committed in live in conjunction with the now transformed
structures you originally employed to frame the situation.
That new spirit,
it's a manifestation as well, and, in other words, of the potential within
you that had not yet been called forth by the previous travails of your life.
Christ is symbolically the way
and the truth of life, and no one comes to the Father except through Him.
Embracing the process of voluntary death
and rebirth that is identical with psychological development, means
determining to move forward and upward despite the horrors of life.
It means as well, symbolically speaking, rejuvenating the dead Father or rescuing
Him from stagnation and deterioration in the eternal underworld.
Forthright individual confrontation
with the unknown renews the individual but also catalyzes cultural revitalization.
This is the essence of Christian ritual
and belief, articulated as a psychological principle.
We must identify with that part of ourselves that is always stretching
beyond what we currently know and has the faith to let go of old certainties so
that new patterns of being can be brought into place.
It is through identification with the process symbolized by Easter,
that we are each redeemed and our culture revivified and salvaged.
We are all the slaves of pharisees
and lawyers, of those who place dogma above spirit at the cost of spirit.
We are all subject to betrayal
by ourselves and by all those who surround us.
We are all facing extinction in the most tortuous of manners.
But there is a spirit within us with sufficient courage to confront
the true horrors of existence forthrightly to allow the transformation, even death,
that such confrontation catalyzes to occur and to leap forward renewed.
How is it that life might prevail
in the face of death and hell, with arms open, embracing its fate?
We are all fallen creatures, and we all know it.
We are all separated from what should be
and thrown into the world of death and despair.
We are all brutally crucified on the cross,
that is the reality of life itself.
To rebel against that fate merely worsens it,
transforming what could be mere tragedy
into something indistinguishable from hell.
To argue bitterly and despair around
the deathbed of a loved one, to take a single example,
is to turn all the pain of death and loss into something far worse.
To accept, instead,
is that simultaneously to transcend?
It's certainly courage and truth
and perhaps even love and these three forces are something to behold.
Are they more powerful than despair and the desire for vengeance?
That is the Christian suggestion. And the Christian command?
To act out the proposition that courage and truth and love are more powerful than
death and despair and to accept what transpires as a consequence.
That is Easter and the death and resurrection of Christ.