Jesus: A View
from the Earth
Much of my early childhood was spent in Madrid. Far from the colorful vibrant city of today, the capital I knew was cowered, dusty, and grey, tight in Franco’s dictatorial grip, its face still shrouded with the guilt and recriminations that lingered like a smog of the civil war. It was there that first I came across Jesus.
The name was as common as John is in English. Everywhere you turned there was a Jesus (He-soos): amongst my classmates, the neighborhood kids, adults in their adult worlds, and perhaps as a result the stories told to me didn’t seem to refer to anyone special. However, one Sunday at the Protestant church my parents attended now and then, a guest minister came to speak. He was a travelling evangelical who spat thunder and rage with his words, slamming his fist down on the pulpit again and again, and I remember staring up at him realizing that, perhaps, I had got it badly wrong: one of these many Jesus fellows was clearly an exceedingly tricky and dangerous character. The memories of that Sunday morning remained as a nausea in my belly for many weeks, until once more the comfort of his insignificance returned.
The second moment that his presence hit me was in my pubescence. With my sexuality emerging, I found myself in some vast cathedral transfixed by the beauty of his thighs: raised life-size above me upon the cross, head bowed, and naked but for the tatters of his sparse loincloth, the smooth curves of those polished muscular thighs shone in the candlelight, velvet in the dark richness of the wood from which he’d been carved. I don’t mean to offend by admitting such an experience, but it was unforgettable. I have no doubt that other girls and boys have felt the same.
A third memory I would share here is quite a different one but equally pertinent amongst my encounters with Jesus. My son and I were being shown around the little church where a friend lived in the rural Cotswolds. An intelligent home-educated lad of around ten at the time, he wandered off to explore by himself, sneaking behind the curtains into the bell tower. When we asked what he’d found, he shrugged and told us about the bells and various odds and ends, adding, “oh, and the usual dead bloke.” Unusually for an Anglican church, tucked away for special occasions there was indeed a large crucifix. His dismissive irreverence shocked me, revealing just how I had brought him up, not to be rude about others’ faiths, but not to diminish the value of stories with superstition.
Brought up within an animistic Druidic family saturated in folktales and mythologies, he had read the Bible’s stories, along with those of many other cultures, from our own British to the Maori, Hindu, Japanese, and Native American. He had noted that, although a small proportion of Jesus’s tales were about his death, churches seemed fixatedly to focus upon it, and as a result, Christianity appeared to him to be a death cult. While it did seem to me wrapped up in the primal notion of sacrifice, concerned that I had left a gap in his education I spent time showing him what I could of the broader aspects of the faith, but nothing shifted his impression: as so often our children do, he had shown me a mirror within which I saw my own impressions and what had formed them.
Pondering words for this essay, I sat in the meadows, watching the swallows and sky larks diving as they caught tiny flies, playing in the breeze, the whispers of clouds high above moving upon invisible currents, the sunshine softly warm on my skin, a perfect English summer’s day, and I was filled with the exquisite gratitude that comes when I pause to acknowledge the presence of my gods and ancestors. The ridge and furrow of earlier farmers’ ploughs still visible beneath the grass, the hay just cut in adjoining fields, I could hear through the humming of the bees, the fiddles playing, the laughter, of lives lived upon that land before me. I knew the breath that filled me had been breathed before. I knew the stories of love and loss, struggle and success had all been lived before. And I closed my eyes, lying back in the long grass.
In Druidry, as in many old traditions, there is no necessity to separate fact from fiction, indeed the distinction itself is considered irrelevant, for life is crafted instead wholly of stories: individuals are able only to perceive and experience their own lives, and as we each walk in our own shoes we each relate tales from our own perspective. This was how I was brought up, and in part why Druidry made so much sense to me. The Biblical Jesus was, consequently, to me only ever a character (or a series of characters) in a scattering of stories written by a scattering of people. Perhaps most influential to me, none of those stories had him leaving footsteps in the landscape where I lived. His breath was not breath that I was now breathing. That didn’t make his tales irrelevant to me, for we share a human nature, but it made him a stranger: the songs he sang were in another tongue.
Of course, human literature from all over the world—fairytales, plays, movies, news reports, even some product advertising—are all based upon the same foundational yarns: the adventures of a hero who, facing overwhelming odds, somehow wins though. The stories that persist, those told generation to generation, are fascinating to explore, for the qualities they possess that inspire are somehow more profound. Some would say that they survive because they are based upon truth, meaning historical fact: indeed, many need the stories of Jesus to be true—to be proved to be historical truth—because by being true the stories make sense of one’s own life and of one’s own death. Such truths take away the fear of death, replacing it with the promise of eternal life, the welcoming ease that is “heaven.” Yet from a Druidic perspective, all that is ever really true is that a tale’s words have touched the strings of the human soul: hearing such music, we pause to listen to the songs of human nature, those ancient songs of our ancestors we too can’t help but sing.
Some heroes are giants or magicians, or people of political power, an uncle we wish we had who would always protect us, such as Bran in the British tradition, Myrddin, Arthur, Gwyddion, and so on. In many, however, it is only in facing adversity that the character discovers he has extraordinary powers, given him by the gods (or God), the ancestors, spirits of nature, or some brewer of mysterious potions; here we find Batman, Asterix and other comic book superheroes, the global superstar that is Harry Potter, and Jesus.
Tales of the ordinary person, forced by some extraordinary circumstance to find resources within himself that it is hard to imagine having the courage to find within our own soul, are richly inspiring. But it is that lack of belief that we would indeed manage to overcome; the odds that makes the superhero so very appealing. His resources are magical, mysterious, miraculous, perhaps given by the gods (or God), allowing him an advantage that makes the tale so thrilling. Of course, being now above the level of ordinary society, a part of the tale is also tragic, for the price of being so special is the necessity to make an extraordinary sacrifice. He pays, with the anguish of loneliness, so often misunderstood, and targeted as a trouble-maker; he may even need to forfeit his sanity or his life.
From the tales of Jesus I was told or read as a child the impression I gained was of a young man, indeed a number of different young men, some portrayed as Gandhi-type figures, exquisitely peaceful, ascetic, and altruistic, others more radically political. In my teens and early adulthood, as I sought out and read spiritual and philosophical texts, I found Gnostic Gospels, texts discarded by those creating the definitive, “authorized” Christian scriptures, within which Jesus was a character more fundamentally influenced by Near-Eastern thought. I read books that spoke of him as a resistance fighter, inspiring my adolescent and ill-informed idealism about other populist heroes like Che Guevara, images fuelled by those beautiful sculpted thighs revealed in his ultimate sacrificial pose.
As I grew in my spiritual exploration, it was clear to me that there was no single man, no one historical or mythical Jesus. Yet the value of his tales is far from diminished by that plurality, as long as each tale is taken as a story in its own right, a tale of an ancient hero facing adversities that we ourselves would likely fail to face as honorably. So can he teach us of courage, grace, and wisdom as human beings.
For myself, however, as my spirituality became thoroughly rooted within Britain, its heritage and ancestry, Jesus’s stories continued to feel foreign to me. At the same time, though the English church in some ways adapted to these lands and their people, it lost the potency of any spiritual teachings by becoming a political and economic power, asserting authority together with a claim on universal truth. Christianity and its many faces of Jesus has certainly been a part of British history over the last thousand years and more, but for me it has never been a British religion.
The heroes which I feel most powerfully are those whose stories take place within these islands of Britain, islands that are my home, that were the home of my ancestors. For we share not simply common humanity, but the experience of the honeysuckle breaking into leaf in the late winter woodland, the scent of the elderflowers blooming in the hedgerows, the push of Lammas growth in the ancient oaks, the song of the sky larks and the humming of the bees: lying in the green meadows as the hay is brought in.
In presenting this perspective, asked as I was to express my personal experience of Jesus rather than an academic or theological survey, I am acutely aware of just how wide is the gap between my Druidic view and that of a practicing or cultural Christian. To someone for whom Jesus is divine, his teachings sacrosanct, my words may seem an incomprehensible attempt to normalize that which is beyond human influence. That gap is an important one to reveal, however, for I do indeed perceive a single level of life, with no transcendent or supernatural force or deity: human beings are an integral part of nature as are our gods—and our heroes. So may it be.
About the Author
Emma Restall Orr is an animist, philosopher, poet, and priest within the British Druid tradition. Joint Chief of The British Druid Order for nine years, she left to found The Druid Network in 2002, her focus now being mainly on the work of Honoring the Ancient Dead, an advocacy group for the remains of ancient British human remains, and the natural burial ground and nature reserve she runs in Warwickshire. Her recently published books include Kissing the Hag: The Dark Goddess and the Unacceptable Nature of Being (O-Books, 2008), Living with Honour: A Pagan Ethics (O-Books, 2008), The Apple and the Thorn (Thoth, 2007), and Living Druidry: Magical Spirituality for the Wild Soul (Piatkus, 2004).