Reclaiming Jesus Christ
Instead of thinking that wisdom is unique to the Messiah, we should take Jesus literally when he says, “You are the light of the world.” Jesus is describing our destiny as equal to his own. God-consciousness is offering to open a path for us.
—Deepak Chopra 84
So does this de-Christed Jesus now mean we must dispense with the theological and symbolic stories that surround him because they are historically unreliable? Must we read only the handful of New Testament passages that have passed the biblical scholars’ criteria of historicity? Must we ignore the creedal statements about being born of a virgin and purge from our minds the weighty concepts of incarnation, atonement, and resurrection? Can we never again enjoy our children’s school Christmas nativity plays or literalistic films like Ben Hur or Jesus of Nazareth?
The answer is of course we can continue to enjoy and find meaning in all the above. We do not need to avoid the one called Jesus Christ just because his life has been clothed with so much mythology. Rather, we
simply need to remythologize those aspects of his story that were literalised and upon which some of the more exclusive religious traditions have been allowed to develop. Eastern mystics often say that once a person recognises an illusion, it loses its negative power. Psychologists hold that once the reality of the shadow is acknowledged, it loosens its grip on a person’s life. The same is true for literalised myth. Once it has been recognised as mythology, it loses its narrowness and becomes a far more positive and life-affirming force.
With Jesus Christ, once we recognise the difference between what the quest scholars term the Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith, he becomes a totally different reality—he moves from the position of being a privatised god-man of a single religion to a mythic figure of universal significance and relevance. Some of the Pagans I interviewed for this book see Christ as another mythic deity in a long line of Christ-type figures from various cultures. Others see him as the Astral or Cosmic Christ—the spark of deity in all things. They have therefore been able to gain spiritual meaning from Christ without having to join or be part the religion named after him.
The fact that the story of Jesus Christ (though based on a historical figure) is layered with theological interpretation added during the gospel writing in no way means that it is untrue or valueless—far from it. Indeed even the ancient Creeds are perfectly acceptable as long as we see them for what they are: early stages of development in Christian theological understanding. They are primarily metaphorical. I suggested in an earlier chapter that the reason why the creedal or orthodox Jesus Christ has been so problematic is that the Church has by and large viewed this Jesus Christ in purely literal terms. The metaphor has been literalized, resulting in the scenario that means most Christians see the Jesus Christ of the Creeds as the same as the historical Jesus. In fact, we have seen that even the Jesus of parts of the New Testament is not the same as the historical Jesus!
Therefore we will now take another look at a few of the characteristics within the story of this creedal Christ (the Church’s Jesus Christ) and see what metaphorical gold it offers to the people of the Pagan world. Trust me when I say that there are treasure troves full. “Life, death, and re-birth” is a commonly heard phrase within modern Pagan gatherings. Indeed the cyclical nature of the eight seasonal festivals takes the Pagan community on a constant spiral-like journey through each year, which in itself celebrates the life, death, and re-birth of the natural world and cosmos. Clearly the story of Jesus Christ, along with the celebrations and customs that mark that story, also follows this pattern. The three most central themes within the story of Jesus Christ are his miraculous birth, his sacrificial death, and his rising to new life. These three events also have theological terms attached to them—Incarnation, Atonement (or Redemption), and Resurrection—and they are marked by the Christian festivals of Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter. The three natural stages of life, death, and rebirth form a perfect pattern on which to place the Jesus Christ story as we draw Pagan meaning from these oft-exclusive Christian theological beliefs.
Birth/Incarnation
When Christians believe in a literal Jesus Christ and see his Incarnation as the only Begotten Son of God in totally historical terms, there is little hope of fruitful dialogue with Pagans, or any non-Christian for that matter. However when seen as metaphor, a whole new world of possibility opens up. We’ve already seen how the historical Jesus was so filled with his own God-awareness as a spirit person that he naturally enabled those he encountered to find it (spirit) within themselves. As we saw earlier, he was ever pointing away from himself to others. Thus the language of Incarnation was eventually attributed to him because people began to see him as a gateway to divine experience. In fact, I will take this a step further. I am quite happy to use terms like “God Incarnate” and “Son of God” for Jesus Christ because I am happy to use such terms for the human family as a whole. We will look more closely as this when we come to the notion of Cosmic Christ, but what we celebrate when we speak of Jesus Christ being Incarnate—true God and true man—we celebrate about each and every one of us. In The Meaning of Jesus, Marcus Borg explains how he feels perfectly able to see Jesus as a real human being who was limited by all the usual human characteristics, and yet also as “the embodiment or incarnation of God.”85 He explains that there are basically two different ways of understanding God and His relationship to the world. On the one hand is supernatural theism, which has always been popular through the Church’s life span wherein it views the creedal statements quite literally. Within this framework God is seen as “out there” and usually absent. Thus when God sends Jesus, He (God) is present among us literally but only for as long as the life of the incarnate God Jesus.86 In contrast to this is panentheism or “dialectic theism,” which sees God (Deity) as not just “out there” but “right here” and “more than right here, both immanent and transcendent.”87 Jesus, as a man totally open to this immanent and transcendent God, becomes the spirit person we’ve already mentioned and thus an embodiment of the God who is already here, rather than the human-God who is not usually here. So in Jesus the human we can also see God, and more than that, we can see the God who is also in us. This is a metaphorical way of using the terms embodiment or incarnation, but that is not to say it is not real. Borg goes on to list the special (Christological) titles given to Jesus in the New Testament: door, vine, Son of God, Word of God, and so on. He explains that they are clearly metaphors. Jesus was not literally a door or a vine, but his followers are helped in their understanding of him if they see him that way. To see Jesus as God Incarnate is also a metaphor and a symbol of what’s potentially true for the whole human family. God (deity) and humanity are symbolically one through this metaphor of the god-man Jesus Christ.
It may come as a surprise to learn that is quite acceptable within the more academic Christian traditions to view the Incarnation of God in Jesus as a metaphor or myth. Indeed, I even passed an “orthodoxy test” by talking about Jesus Christ in this way. Two decades ago, while attending theological college, I was introduced to a book by the Christian theologian John Hick called The Metaphor of God Incarnate. Hick wanted to find a way of holding to the truth of the Incarnation but in a way that was reasonable and believable. He considered it a mistake to think of the term Incarnation as something that could be proved as a scientific proposition, but thought it could still be seen as truth metaphorically or symbolically.
One of the most beautiful experiences I ever enjoyed as a Christian parish priest was baptising babies. Even though in the early Church (as well as in certain current Protestant denominations) adult baptisms were the norm, most modern baptisms are performed for babies or toddlers. They are thus as much celebrations of birth as they are celebrations of entry to the Church. I never saw them in magical terms, as if somehow the water literally washed away a dark stain upon a baby’s soul or made them children of God as if they were not before. They were always, for me, opportunities to emphasise what is true for all human beings—that we have divine origins, sacred DNA. This sounds Pagan and corresponds to the Wiccan statement “thou art god/thou art goddess.” Yet it’s the authentic Judeo-Christian tradition too, even if most Christians seem to have forgotten it. The very first book of the Hebrew Scriptures tells us that God created men and women in God’s image and likeness (the Imago Dei). Baptism became a way that I could claim this more universal understanding of Incarnation and apply it to those who brought their children to me for the rite of passage. The birth of Jesus Christ as an Incarnation—a becoming flesh of God—thus points to each of our Incarnations as manifested deity. Every human birthday is yet another expression of the Incarnate God/dess who lives within human clothing.
I find it quite synchronistic that I am writing these very words in the late fall, the “season of good will” being just around the corner. For some reason I’ve always been obsessed by Christmas. As far back as I can remember, the winter season and the period running up to and including Christmas Day had an almost magical ability to shift my usual boredom with life into an intensely magical experience. It has never left me.
For those of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere, Christmas is always a celebration of light during the darkest period of the year. It is one of the great festivals of light (like the Hindu Diwali and the Jewish Chanukah). Its roots go back to a period before the one whose name (or more properly, title) it is identified with, Christ. For centuries the human family has celebrated the solstices, those mysterious cosmic moments when the sun seems to stand still on its eternal back-and-forth journey across the horizon. The summer solstice marks the longest day, where there is the most daylight within a twenty-four-hour period, and the winter solstice marks the opposite, the shortest day. The winter solstice occurs around December 22, so the symbolic birthday of Jesus Christ (December 25) occurs at the point when the light is just beginning to refill the dark sky again. There was thus a symbolic reason for his birthday being fixed at that date as well as a political reason. The biggest competitor to Jesus Christ in the earliest period of the Church’s history was the Persian sun god and lord of light, Mithras, whose birthday was celebrated at the winter solstice and who had become a major god image for the Roman world.
There have been dozens of popular and academic books written on the fascinating phenomena of ancient Near Eastern Pagan deities that clearly have parallels to the story of Jesus Christ. An excellent summary of this can be found in chapter 4 of ChristoPaganism by Joyce and River Higginbotham. There are two extremes of opinion concerning the Jesus story and how much of it has its roots in the deities of various Pagan mystery religions. On the one hand are those who take a totally non-historical view, seeing the whole Jesus Christ story as an invented mythos based largely on Pagan (and Jewish) mythology. To these people, Jesus never existed. On the other hand are the far more conservative groupings that see this as preposterous fantasy and hold that no such copycat plagiarism went on. One of the problems the non-historical group has to face is that some of the more popular books that represent this theory have been accused of basing much of their scholarship on outdated or even dubious works, such as James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Kersey Graves’s The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviours. Consequently one needs to tread carefully and not get carried away with it all without checking and balancing the detail. On top of this it has to be recognised that the vast majority of critical scholars and historians do believe that Jesus existed as a first-century Jewish figure.
My own belief is that Jesus did exist, but (while being cautious with regard to where I look for the evidence) I also accept the rather obvious fact that large parts of the narrative of Jesus Christ and later Christian ritual and belief do have striking similarities and parallels with earlier Near Eastern and classical Paganism. Therefore I do see the figure of Jesus Christ as, at least in part, influenced by Pagan religions. As you will see from the collection of essays and interviews with modern Pagan writers and teachers in parts two and three of this book, today’s Pagans are very clued up about these connections. However, Christians, on the whole, are not.
This is not the place to go too deeply into the whole question of the similarities between Jesus Christ and his Pagan counterparts; suffice to say that many of the major ingredients/details within the story of Jesus Christ can also be found within earlier Near Eastern and Mediterranean god-man epics. So similar are some of these Pagan myths that early Christian apologists found themselves having to explain their existence and did so by suggesting that the devil has prepared them ahead of time in order to confuse and ensnare possible latter day Christians who might read them. Possibly the most renowned Church father and Christian apologist who employs this means of explanation was Justin Martyr (CE 100–165). Justin was a gentile ex-Pagan of Samaria who’d become a Christian. In chapters 14 and 15 of his First Apology he sets out many arguments concerning the Pagan “imitations” of Christianity:
Be well assured, then, Trypho, that I am established in the knowledge of and faith in the Scriptures by those counterfeits which he who is called the Devil is said to have performed among the Greeks; just as some were wrought by the Magi in Egypt, and others by the false prophets in Elijah’s days. For when they tell that Bacchus, son of Jupiter, was begotten by [Jupiter’s] intercourse with Semele, and that he was the discoverer of the vine; and when they relate, that being torn in pieces, and having died, he rose again, and ascended to heaven; and when they introduce wine into his mysteries, do I not perceive that [the devil] has imitated the prophecy announced by the patriarch Jacob, and recorded by Moses? … And when he [the devil] brings forward Aesculapius as the raiser of the dead and healer of all diseases, may I not say in this matter likewise he has imitated the prophecies about Christ? … And when I hear that Perseus was begotten of a virgin, I understand that the deceiving serpent counterfeited this also.
—Justin Martyr 88
Many of the Pagan writers who’ve either submitted their own essays or been interviewed for this book will allude to this parallel between Jesus Christ and ancient Pagan deities in a latter part of the book.
Death/Atonement
As I sit hunched up at the bottom of my staircase in a house that is cold, small, and could soon be taken away from me, I feel the pressure of living in such a precarious, wounded, and at times hostile world. Sometimes life—daily life—feels like death. Sometimes one reaches the very end of his or her resources and literally crashes in a broken heap. I alluded to some of the darker aspects of my own journey within the chapter on the Hanged Man. It has not been an easy ride of late and, because of certain devastating events of the last few months, I’ve already missed the deadline for handing in the first draft of this very book. (The publishers were extremely generous and understanding.)
Now each time I come back to writing, something else seems to drag me away from my makeshift work surface, or I simply feel too tired or uninspired to write. Yet within the darkness of the open wounds is a flame, a little spark of light. Beautifully symbolised by the final personification that crept out of Pandora’s terrifying box, hope can always be found in the dark gaping chasms of life. And this image of hope within excruciating pain, trauma, and brokenness is the central reason why the literal/mythic story of Jesus Christ still makes sense to me.
The most recognisable symbol for Jesus Christ is an instrument of torture—a huge, ugly wooden tool used in ancient Rome to publicly execute enemies of the state and criminals. Sometimes the symbol is simply a plain empty cross, but in many churches it also carries a naked bleeding human figure—a crucifix. I have to say that I personally know a number of Pagans who are thoroughly repulsed by this image. However this is usually quite simply because the most popular theological understanding of the cross is what might be termed substitutionary atonement, where Jesus as the Son of God somehow pays the price for human sin in blood. This means that humans can be forgiven their own divine punishment if they apply that blood sacrifice to themselves through faith. I admit it’s a horrific belief, but it is not the only way Christians understand the cross. Indeed, throughout my ten years as a parish priest I never preached about Jesus Christ as a blood sacrifice in this way. For many, far from being a symbol of God’s wrath and punishment, it is a declaration of divine love. The following is an extract from a short Easter talk I gave about ten years ago as a Church of England vicar:
Holy Week is perhaps the most poignant eight days of the entire church year. In Lent we faced our own inner shadows and compulsions, just as Jesus faced his in that hot and barren wilderness. But now in Holy Week we face our human tendency to get things so badly wrong.
Two thousand years ago a man rode into the Holy City and, only days later, was made a scapegoat by the masses. In fact he was scapegoated by both the religious and secular authorities—church and state. They were the very ones that ordinary folk ought to have been able to look up to, yet they got it so badly wrong.
It was a dark day—a dark, dark day that saw the death of the Son of God. And, contrary to what so many folk still teach, he was not a sacrifice to an angry God who needed appeasing, but a gut-wrenching symbol of God’s sacrificial love poured out for an angry humankind. It was not God’s mind about humanity that needed changing, but our mind about God. The Cross is God saying, “Go ahead, kill me if you like; I still won’t stop loving you.”
Then, oh yes then we can fully understand the power of Easter, for Easter cries out with bells and chimes and a thousand tons of spiritual gelignite, that God’s love cannot be locked away in a tomb, or a box, or a book, or an angry heart, or anything else. Those first-century religio-secular authorities got it so badly wrong, but even their terrifying mistake was turned into life for the whole world.
While I wouldn’t use all of the above language now, I am still moved by the image of a God who loves us enough to die. And in a sense, part of God did die with Jesus on the cross, just as part of God dies with every death, and is born again with every birth. God (Source) is constantly dying and being re-born. Taking the idea from the previous section on Incarnation—that Jesus somehow embodied God metaphorically—the cross can be seen as a symbol of a God who mysteriously suffers with us.
I’ve always argued that the cross should be seen as the death of a toxic view of God. God does not punish Jesus for our sins. The cross is a symbol of a God who allows himself to experience the very darkest, most broken and most abandoned reality of what being human can involve. It is an image of a God who would literally love us to death. Though this may not be something that Pagans find helpful, I used to enjoy talking about the cross of Jesus as something that changes humanity’s view of the Divine rather than (as the older substitutionary theories go) changing the Divine’s view about humanity. In other words, it replaces a God of judgement and wrath with a God of compassion and love. In my book The Path of the Blue Raven, I put it this way:
Christ comes to show humans who they are, not what they are not. The sacrificial love displayed on the cross does not change God’s mind about us (as the so-called objective views of the Atonement states). The spectacle of the cross changes us, not God! How? By displaying costly love rather than brutal judgment. If we see Jesus as a literal, perfect offering, a human blood sacrifice, then we have no choice but to view God as wrathful, and who needs his mind changing by having Jesus pay the price for our sins. He dies; we get let off the hook! But if we see the symbol of the god-man Jesus hanging on a tree as a selfless act of love, joining humankind at its ugliest, lowest, shittiest place, and not retaliating with any sense of hatred or revenge, then there is more chance of our own view of God being changed. We might even fall in love with such a loving God rather than being terrified of Him. Thus the Jesus-Tree can either perpetuate a toxic view of God or it can heal it.89
Forgiveness is also a key element here, and while one might argue that forgiveness in not a Pagan concept, I have come across some Pagans who’ve found themselves deeply moved by notions of forgiveness. For example, I have many Pagan personal friends who hold that their ideal is to always bless and never to curse, even when wronged by others. I know there are just as many who would not subscribe to this, but I do feel that the former group have a powerful teaching here deriving from the notion of the threefold law of return, a quasi-karmic belief that is found within many modern forms of Pagan practice. In a nutshell, the threefold law says that whatever one sends out eventually returns to the sender with a stronger force. Jesus’s teaching “bless your enemies and do good to those who hate you” holds within it a similar idea. It has to do with self-protection as much as it is about compassion. When you hold on to resentment and send out negative energy in revenge, it can seriously damage your own quality of life. Love breeds love, hate breeds hate.
In his book Psychic Protection, magician and spiritual teacher William Bloom highlights forgiveness as a way of actually removing the karmic connections between you and someone who has wronged you. He offers a healing technique from the Hawaiian spiritual tradition known as kahuna, which he sees as having close connections to Christian forgiveness and Buddhist compassion.90
In the story of the final hours of Jesus Christ (which is made up of both fact and interpretation), we see him forgiving the men who’d sanctioned his execution and even the ones who drove in the nails. In the book Pagans and Christians: The Personal Spiritual Experience, Gus DiZerega refers to an illuminating experience that happened to him when he climbed the Colorado Rockies and caught a glimpse of the usually hidden Mount of the Holy Cross. He tells of how he then climbed further up the track to get an even better view and when settling to gaze upon the place, how this prompted a genuine spiritual experience that (while a Wiccan) gave him a deep appreciation of the person of Jesus and his message:
Christianity’s message, I realized, focused on love and forgiveness, but not so much on God’s forgiveness of us as on our own capacity to forgive one another. God’s son had walked, taught, and healed among men and women, and had been cruelly murdered. Even so, God’s love for humankind had not weakened. “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do,” is perhaps the most famous account of Jesus’s last words, words He had spoken while in agony on the cross. The entire Christian message seemed to be summed up in the insight that as God could forgive the murder of His innocent son, so we were called upon to forgive the wrongs done to us. And if we truly forgave, we would be freed form the poisons of resentment and malice. Our hearts would be opened more fully to love and compassion, and so more fully to God. The central lesson of Christianity was a lesson about unconditional love. I finally understood that the Christian message was a true gospel, a genuine good news for human kind.91
With regard to Pagans is another connection to the cross and the image it presents of a wounded, suffering god. After all, it is a striking image and (I would hold) universal. As Carl Jung was reported to have said, “the naked man nailed to a cross is perhaps the deepest archetypal symbol in the Western psyche.”
The death of Jesus Christ symbolically points to an experience that is worldwide, and has ever been so for members of the human family—that life always involves death, physically as well as spiritually/symbolically, and that woundedness is simply part of what it means to be human. Two of the most powerful spiritual experiences I’ve ever had were within the context of nature-based rituals that involved a certain amount of symbolic and emotional wounding and pain. I spoke about them both in an interview for a Pagan magazine I gave a few years ago. This is how I put it:
The sword’s sharp end dug into my shoulder blade and jagged stones pierced my knees. The discomfort was intense and my heart pounded as I awaited the next instructions. I’d been warned that such rituals were demanding! But as I knelt in the dark wet cave I felt like I’d been plugged into an electric socket, such was the energy of the place.
All was silent, save for the occasional droplets of water that fell from above, splashing into the pool below. I raised my head and caught a few drops in my mouth. I wasn’t thirsty; I just wanted to taste the enchantment of the moment. I wanted to suck the magic marrow out of the very “bones” of Gaia.
“You’ve entered the womb of the earth Mother,” the Druid Chief whispered, “now prepare to be re-born into a magical new universe.”
He gave a few more instructions and then left me.
I stayed for some time, knees sore and back aching, but it didn’t matter. The pain was worth the experience. The Druids had prepared the place earlier, while I’d been sitting in solitude a little way down the hill. As I absorbed the breath-taking beauty of the Welsh mountain valley, so they transformed the cave into an exquisite grotto with candles, symbolic objects, and incense.
There I knelt, gazing at the animal skull, left as a symbol of the death of my old life, and illuminated by orange flickering light. Were it not for the physical discomfort I think I could have stayed there forever. I felt safe, held, loved, and at one with the heartbeat of the universe. But now I had to make my way out.
As I approached the light, the Druid Priestess greeted me and gave me symbolic gifts of the rite of passage. Her words were comforting and she seemed to personify the Goddess herself.92
It was an awesome experience, my initiation into the Druid Order, and the more I think about it, the deeper the parallels become between it and other ceremonies of my past—of my Christian past.
Almost a decade earlier, while still working as a Priest of the Church of England, I underwent a magical and, at times, gruelling Vision Quest in the New Mexican desert. It was a male rite of passage, modelled on the tribal initiation rites of the world’s various native cultures. It was Catholic yet Pagan and, like my Druidic Initiation it, was also a ritual of death and re-birth. Lasting for five long days and forcing me to dig deep into the hidden resources of my own soul, this process challenged body, mind, and spirit. Only recently have I begun to realise what it did for me.
The indigenous people of the world always have practised initiation rites, and, more often than not, they involve ritual wounding (usually real, sometimes symbolic). Anthropologists who’ve studied these rites suggest that they were designed to show pubescent adolescents (usually boys) that life always involved death and that the sooner they learned that lesson and surrendered to it, the sooner the fear of pain and death would lose its grip on them. It was like dying ahead of time. The fact that we in the modern West have no teenage puberty rites has left us poorer and often psychologically ill prepared for the enormous feelings of death and loss of childhood and the ambitions of youth that occur around midlife for many of us.
While studying the Bardic course material of the order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids (called Gwers, after the Welsh for “lesson”) I learned that many modern-day Druids also practise these rites and certainly believe that their ancient Celtic forebears did. As is says in Gwers 14 of the course material: “In the old days, the mourning for the loss of childhood occurred at this time of transition [puberty], not twenty years later. And rather than the fear of old age and death being repressed, it was dramatised and set within a worldview which affirmed the value of elders, and the existence of the ancestors and life after death. All this was enacted at puberty, not at middle age—avoiding its manifestation in mid-life depression.”93
But this amazing indigenous phenomenon not only points to the healthy psychology of those cultures who accept suffering and death, it also offers an insight into the meaning of the next stage in this mythic god-man Jesus Christ’s story—his resurrection.
Rebirth/Resurrection
We naturally want to avoid suffering, so it can seem crazy to suggest that the path to enlightenment involves becoming more aware of our woundedness. But the fact that most traditional initiation ceremonies involve some sort of wounding, symbolic or actual, and the fact that mythology is full of stories about sacred wounding, suggests an acknowledgment of wounding as essential for our maturity and spiritual development.94
The above words come from the Bardic Gwers 14 and I have found this emphasis on the sacred wound to be the single most exciting link between the mythologies of the Pagan and the Christian worlds. As I said above, the “image of hope within excruciating pain, trauma, and brokenness is the central reason why the literal/mythic story of Jesus Christ still makes sense to me.” And his story, like the many Pagan insights into sacred woundedness, does not remain in brokenness. He does not remain on the cross, or in the tomb. There is a resurrection. There is a rising back to life, but not life like it was before, a new life that is different, a glorified life. The story of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is thus another metaphor for all of our lives. It says “life is hard, death will always be part of life, and we will not escape the wounds—but the wounds are where the gold lies.”
My first book was completely based on this truth that brokenness is often a more direct way to discover gold than any attempts at so-called perfection. In one chapter I use an object lesson which, in the book, is simply a series of photographs of a clay pot. In my retreats and quiet days when I use this chapter as a visual meditation, I use an actual pot. The pot I use contains a lit candle, but no one can see it. There is a big crack in the back of the pot, but that is concealed from the audience’s viewpoint. Then I hold the pot up and use these words:
“So, let me now show you the great mystery and miracle of The Gospel of Falling Down. We are beautifully and intricately designed clay jars, fashioned lovingly by a wonderful Creator. Yet, we are also fragile and poor. And from time to time life causes us to splinter and crack.
“Life may dish out something totally beyond our control, something we would have never asked for, something ‘out of the blue.’ Or it may be that we have walked for a while the road of the Pharisee and tried to make ourselves into little icons of religious perfection. Maybe we have fallen flat on our faces after the painful discovery that such a goal is impossible. Maybe our failure to achieve a goal has triggered a humiliating fall leading to the recognition of our limitations and weaknesses. This falling of the clay jar has wounded us and we have started to crack and splinter.
“These cracks and splinters—whichever way they came—are painful, horribly painful; even like death. Yet if only we knew how close we were in this state to the discovery of our lifetime.
“For when we fall and splinter and crack, we see our ego, our false self, our little-me for what it is, and sometimes—just sometimes—we are able to let go of it for a while. Then the most profound experience is waiting to hit us. You see, the crack, the fault, the brokenness exposes THE INNER TREASURE AT LAST!
[At this point I slowly turn round the clay jar to reveal a huge crack in the other side. And due to the fact that there is a hidden large burning candle inside the jar the light pours out through the crack for all to see.]
“And then we can truly say that we have met God, and have met Him not out there at the end of some great quest but within our very selves. The treasure that we were searching for out there is finally re-discovered.
“And know this; the treasure is not something that has been suddenly added to ourselves, for it was always there. Rather it is our perception that has changed, our ‘inner eyesight.’ That’s why people often say spirituality is about ‘seeing.’
“Of course this doesn’t happen automatically. It may be months or even years after our fall that we see ourselves in our own God-given-glory. We may be so hurt by our fall that we grow bitter, and again close ourselves to our inner beauty and treasure.
“But make no mistake, such falls, and the cracks they produce, can indeed give us the sacred opportunity to catch a golden glimpse of the God-self.”95
When it comes to the actual events of Jesus’s death upon the cross and his burial in a tomb, I happen to think that something remarkable did happen, and it happened to the early followers of Jesus. For some reason they were turned from terrified hunted outlaws into fearless heralds of a new message. It’s interesting that most of the (even very liberal) modern biblical scholars hold that the resurrection experience is likely to be authentic history.96 This does not mean they believe that Jesus literally rose from the dead, but certainly that something of the spirit and energy of Jesus lived on and motivated others. So I cannot say whether the disciples’ experience involved them literally seeing Jesus again, but I do believe it involved them sensing something powerful and new around and within them. This now leads us to the Cosmic Christ.