A sermon for Easter by F. Jay Deacon

Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton & Florence

March 27, 2005

The Easter story is a movement

from betrayal
through a dying
to resurrection.

Whatever it looks like in the outward affairs of our lives, the inward experience of it is a movement of consciousness in two stages. The first is a quickened awareness of how things really are, with brutal truthfulness, that looks directly into the face of all the betrayal, and dreadfulness, and sorrow and anguish. And then there may come, to those willing to see and feel the stark reality of things, the second movement of the experience: the imagination to see, palpable and whole, the world we want to inhabit and might create. When we can really see that new world, that fuller and deeper life — that vision — the gift of human imagination — has the potency to draw the great energies of life to focus, to make that vision real. Out of the ashes, new life.

Nothing much good happens without those two movements.

We do this in the present, where we are.

The traditional Christian faith about Easter hopes for a better world on the other side of physical death. Easter brings to mind a sight I saw in Connecticut, walking down a New Haven street on summer day and coming upon a great old cemetery. Great stone walls surrounded it, but what caught my attention was the wrought iron on top of the wall. In great Victorian lettering, it said: "The dead shall be raised." When you buy a plot there, do you get that in writing?

That faith has been called "the blessed hope." The yearning for a better world to come beyond the grave.

Oddly, all the religious sorts who seem most certain of this future life seemed arrayed this past week and in a night session of the Congress to prevent a woman who has been dying for 15 years from getting to that better world they say they believe in.

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Now — Christianity says our lives have no ending in time. It's different from most world religions because the others say our lives have neither ending nor beginning in time. The other world religions mostly say we are expressions of the divine life and as such have been around pretty much forever, gradually evolving from one dimension to another. Not just life without end: life with neither beginning nor end!

Look, I hate to tell you, but I have no idea what we were before we were born or will be after we die. I can't tell you anything about that. I can only talk about this life. I know that this life is not static, but a flow, with dyings and risings with the promise, inherent in them, of something more.

Christians often focus on individual afterlife, me and my salvation, me and my eternal life. But speaking from more of a Hindu mentality, Sri Aurobindo describes something that doesn't have to involve individual identities at all. He speaks of a great movement from unconscious matter to conscious mind and, beyond that, beyond what we are now, something he calls superconsciousness or spirit. In Aurobino's words,

Nature develops from stage to stage and in each stage takes up its past and transforms it into stuff of its new development. We see too that human nature is of the same make; all the earth-past is there in it. It has an element of matter taken up by life, an element of life taken up by mind, an element of mind which is being taken up by spirit.

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However you conceive of it, however you may feel it, there persists a yearning to go farther, to a better place, a higher dimension of being.

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There are times when we feel that we are just where we need to be, that we are fulfilling our human calling and living our lives fully. There are times when we feel some urge toward another level of being, a higher dimension of life; feel stifled and stuck in the present order of life. There are times when we feel in transition. There are times when we haven't got a clue, don't even know where to start, and when the signs all seem to read, "You Can't Get There From Here."

v

The human hope that is awakened at Easter says there is something more. It testifies to the capacity of life itself to unravel into a kind of death and then reorganize itself into something more. Easter is named after an Anglo-Saxon spring goddess — spring, when life comes from the death of winter — but it speaks of more than the mere repetition of the same old cycle, around and around. Its dyings and risings lead to something more.

The belief in this "something more" is much more widespread than just Christianity. It's been called the Perennial Philosophy, and it's been, as Huston Smith once put it, "the dominant official philosophy of the larger part of civilized humankind through most of its history.¹" Whether living today or six thousand years ago, whether in New Mexico or Japan or the Mediterranean, men and women of all times and places have spoken of a Great Chain of Being in which reality is not one-dimensional but holds within it many continuous dimensions.

At one end of the spectrum, it says, there is matter, but I must put "matter" in quotes, because now we know that matter isn't as simple and solid and real as it looks. On the other end of the spectrum there is spirit or godhead or the superconscious. So where does that get us? Oh —

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So there was that surrealist poet Desnos in the Nazi camp, in his mind simply stepping outside the world as it was created by the SS, and, by an act of astonishing imagination, creating a different reality in the present. It was a passage through death, an ending, the existence of a concentration camp that annihilates all hope — through that, with its brutal despair, into a rising from that death, because of the promise, inherent in the human mind, of something more. And he brings that "something more" into the most desperate of present circumstances.

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This great movement of life, the dying and rising through which we move to something more — are not matters for another world, somewhere on the other side of physical death, galaxies away on a spacecraft. It all happens here and now — except that space and time are pretty spooky things, and have a whole lot to do with your perceptions. It's a here and now hope.

v

Often, too often, that hope has been expressed in myths and beliefs that have no meaning for us. The faith of the first or fifth or fifteenth century has passed away. We recognize only a ghost in its faded features. Its fire and brimstone terrors don't scare us much, nor do its hopes much inspire us.

Norman O. Brown² has said that religions that are not prophetic simply try, like fundamentalists (whether Christian or Islamic or whatever), to return to some former golden age or impose some rigid and outworn standard or solution, all tragically in vain. And he writes:

To start a new civilization is . . . to change the imagination of the masses . . . . The evolution of humanity inevitably begins with prophecy."

So we come here expectantly. Look at us. In larger numbers than at any time except Christmas, here we are celebrating Easter and a story most of us don't believe ever happened. We bring our hurts and our hopes.

There's something about the story that cheers us. Silence the story of Easter entirely and, as Theodore Parker once said, more or less, possibly stretching the quote a little, "gone is that sweet music which has kept in awe the exalted and the powerful, which cheers the poorest peasant in a war-torn village periled by meaningless violence, which comes like light through the windows of the morning where folks sit broken and cowering and with hungering hearts. Take away that music and there is only the cold, bleak world left before us."

If the idea of a larger Life of which we are a part didn't resonate with something in you in some way, you wouldn't be so affected by the crocuses that will soon break through the soil.

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It speaks of a higher level of existence, beyond the horror and hurt and heartbreak.

Religious history is littered with the remains of those who have read these stories with as little subtlety, in as literal a way as those who once composed these myths — as if it were a physical distance you could somehow travel, and dream of a far-off heaven; and those who think of the spiritual realm in material terms as a place, out there in the sky some place that you could get to in a spacecraft, like Cincinnati only better and farther away. Some have tried, we know. It might be nice to think that you could get there by shucking your body and fast-forwarding yourself to the Next Level.

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Nice is we could believe it. But it's harder than that. Norman O. Brown says this:

[Great and visionary religious literature like the Koran or William Blake or Finnegans Wake] shows us preexistent traditions, Jewish, Christian, Hellenistic, pulverized into condensed atoms . . . of meaning: . . . Out of this dust the world is to be made new."³

Those old religious conceptions are pulverized. And more than that — so that out of the dust the world can be made new.

I am thinking of the disappointments we suffer, and the disappointments we are, at times, to ourselves and to each other. In our careers and life-work, in our calling as parents or partners or friends or participants in the common life: We want to feel the pride of accomplishment, and there are times when, instead, we feel a sense of failure, and the pangs of disappointment, and there are times when we feel shame.

There is an ancient hunger in us that wants to be more. We are becoming more. The yearning to be more is an ancient hunger woven into the web of life:

It was there when we were no more than inorganic matter spewn out by the stars, gathering into a mass of hot elements becoming the round Earth. It was there when the Earth turned green with life. It was there when this all-creative Universe brought forth from species of plants and animals the human presence and the magnificent achievement of consciousness.

There will be a higher order of being, a finer consciousness, and we, as we are now, are not the end of evolution.Those who drink of the glory of Life know the meaning of resurrection.

But we don't get there in any other way than by being here.

In this life are dyings and risings. And we have to acknowledge them and undergo them. Dying and rising again is a part of living and it comes to us as it will. This day is about the rising, celebrates the rising.

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There's a line attributed to Jesus, which he probably didn't say, because he wasn't setting himself up as a savior or God or anything, but it's pretty good, if you apply it to yourself and not to some savior. The line is, "I am the resurrection and the life." The statement goes on, very un-Jesusly, to say that the only way to get to heaven is through him, and then he goes on to raise somebody's brother from the dead. But like I said, scholars don't find anything in this entire Gospel of John that the historical Jesus probably said in the first place, and so not to worry about the context in the 11th chapter. I just want to focus on that one line, "I am the resurrection and the life."

You are, you know. From so many losses and disappointments, the passing away of what was and can be no more, the letting go of so much — from out of all this, you are the new life, the resurrection and the life. You are newness reborn, raised up, trailing clouds of glory as the new life flows into to you and through you.

The Great Energy of Life Itself, the Life of this Universe, is the life that pulses in you. And among its paradoxically counterpoised qualities are tranquil peace, and convulsive, churning, transforming unrest.

You can think back across the tracks of your own lifetime to times of dying transformed to something more, a larger life. What was it like? What qualities would such a life have?

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My mind is drawn to the biblical Easter story. Think about the stone in Matthew's gospel, the one they rolled up to seal the tomb shut. When Jesus leaves the tomb, it says he has to break the seal.

Now in this context, "seal" does not mean that the stone fits the mouth of the cave so tightly that you can speak of it as being "sealed." Sealed so tightly that there's a vacuum inside to preserve the body or something and the cave becomes like the old airtight Volkswagen Beetle that rolls off a bridge and never sinks.

That's not what it means, not at all. The seal here is like an official seal of authority, the Great Seal of the State of Judaea, Department of Mortuary Services. You don't break it, you just don't. Nobody does that. If you do, you break the law.

Resurrection stories always break some law or convention. Violate some alleged authority that knows better, knows it's all over. The heart says, "do this," and the intellect says that's ridiculous, can't figure out how. Or the hope in the heart says "Yes!" but the despair in the heart says "No!" Or maybe the heart and mind agree, but it's contrary to some authority. Resurrection is learning to follow an inner principle and not having our lives directed as if from an outer rim of ourselves. It's daring to break the seal on an entombed, imprisoned situation.

Now this isn't easy. And in our dyings and risings and transitions we're often drawn inward, and tired, and in struggle. And I am preaching to myself, and you have been there, may be there now.

Suffering does not always necessarily lead to new life. It could as well embitter us as open up new splendors in us. We don't just automatically rise from our dyings. There is a choice involved. Not a choice not to suffer. We suffer. But we get to choose whether to let that darkness and hurt be darkness and hurt for awhile, and trust it, and in its depths find a new quality of life; — to give us the wisdom, or the will, or the longing, or the energizing that is now required. To trust Life Itself, to release imagination and let a new today and a new tomorrow rise from the ruins — first, in our imagination.

And then the dark tomb becomes a womb out of which we are thrust in a new quality of life.

We cannot know what new tombs or rebirths, what crucibles of transformation, you and I and this world must yet pass through. The question is, will we, you and I, dare to rise from our hurt and mobilize the energies we have received there — to live lives that are new — new, and strong in an unfamiliar way?

Can this happen in a person's life? Can this happen in the life of a congregation that has undergone a major transition and has a budget deficit? Can this happen for a nation?

First you've got to really see and feel the truth of the situation as it is, and face that darkness; — and then you've got to see with the imagination, really see it, — see the life you would live, see the congregation that will express your vision, see the world we want to create: — see it so vividly, see it so palpable and whole, that the vision is great enough and vivid enough that it has the potency to gather an energy greater than anything in our memory of the past for which we may still long.

And you and I: we can factor in the roaring engine of creativity that is the Life within us.

You are the resurrection and the life. From so many losses and disappointments, so much dying, the passing away of what was and can be no more, the letting go of so much — from out of all this, you are the new life, the resurrection and the life.

Copyright © 2005 F. Jay Deacon. All rights reserved.

¹ Arthur Lovejoy, quoted in Ken Wilbur, The Eye of Spirit (Boston: Shambhala, 1997), p. 38.
² Norman O. Brown. Apocalypsse and/or Metamorphosis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 199.
³ Norman O. Brown, 199.

Parting

Thomas Wolfe:

The leaf, the blade, the flower, the wind that cries and sleeps and wakes again, the trees, whose stiff arms clash and tremble in the dark, and the dust of lovers long since buried in the earth—

All things belonging to the earth will never change.

The tarantula, the adder, and the asp will also never change.

Pain and death will always be the same.

But under the pavements trembling like a cry, under the waste of time, under the hoof of the beast above the broken bones of cities, there will be something growing like a flower—

Something bursting from the earth again, forever deathless, faithful, coming into life again like April.

Meditate

Spring morning:

awakening Nature: awaken these minds
strengthen these hands
Strengthening Sun, strengthen these hands

Spring morning, awaken the eyes of our eyes

to see what lies around us and what must be done
to see visions and dream dreams

Turn slush-bound minds to Spirit:
Spirit reaching beyond and through the thin reach of our daring

Divine Wind, freeing us from the shallows of our small aims

Turn all the dark and cold to insight and vision
Melt the numbed dullness into a Tide more strong than fear
Hold gently the wounds and the vulnerabilities

Bring from all these


Beauty overcoming all brokenness
New and greater life

In this silence.

Readings

Susan Griffin:

I am thinking of a story I heard a few years ago from . . . a writer and a survivor of the holocaust. Along with many others who crowd the bed of a large truck, she tells me, the surrealist poet Robert Desnos is being taken away from the barracks of the concentration camp where he has been held prisoner. As the truck leaves the barracks, the mood is somber; everyone knows the truck is headed for the gas chambers. And when the truck arrives no one can speak at all; even the guards fall silent. But this silence is soon interrupted by an energetic man who jumps into the line and grabs one of the condemned. Improbable as it is, Desnos reads the man's palm.

Oh, he says, I see you have a very long lifeline. And you are going to have three children. He is exuberant. . . . First one man, then another, offers up his hand, and the prediction is for longevity, more children, abundant joy.

As Desnos reads more palms, not only does the mood of the prisoners change but that of the guards too. Perhaps the element of surprise has planted a shadow of doubt in their minds. If they told themselves these deaths were inevitable, this no longer seems inarguable. They are in any case so disoriented by this sudden change of mood among those they are about to kill that they are unable to go through with the executions. so all the men, along with Desnos, are packed back onto the truck and taken back to the barracks. Desnos has saved his own life and the lives of others by using his imagination.

Robert Desnos was famous for his belief in the imagination. . . . In his mind he simply stepped outside the world as it was created by the SS.

In the interest of realism, this story must be accompanied by another. Desnos . . . died of typhus a few days after the liberation. His death was one among millions, men, women, and children who died despite countless creative acts of survival and the deepest longings to live. . . . The New Age idea that one can wish oneself out of any circumstance, disease, or bad fortune is not only sadly disrespectful toward suffering, it is also, in the end, dangerous if escape replaces awareness.

But there are other dangers. What is called "realism" can lead to a kind of paralysis of action and a state of mind that has relinquished desire altogether. Especially now, when the political terrain seems so unnavigable, the impulse is toward cynicism. . . .

Such a moment does not require less but rather more imagination. For to imagine is not simply to see what does not yet exist or what one wants to exist. It is also a profound act of creativity to see what is. . . .

Every important social movement reconfigures the world in the imagination. What was obscure comes forward, lies are revealed, memory shaken, new delineations drawn over the old maps. It is from this new way of seeing the present that hope for the future emerges. . . . No one can stop us from imagining another kind of future . . . Let us begin to imagine the worlds we would like to inhabit, the long lives we will share, and the many futures in our hands.

Excerpted from "To Love the Marigold"
From Paul Rogat Loeb, Ed., The Impossible Will Take a Little While. New York: Perseus/Basic, 2004, 134ff.

Antonio Machado, as translated by Robert Bly:

Last night as I was sleeping,

Last night as I was sleeping,

—From Paul Rogat Loeb, Ed., The Impossible Will Take a Little While. New York: Perseus/Basic, 2004, 93.