Some Reflections On Good Friday
Maybe around 7 years old, I had a set of beliefs that this syllogism sums up:
-Jesus died for my sins
-I'm responsible for my sins
-I'm responsible for Jesus having died
And because if there was one thing I knew about Jesus, it was that Jesus was everybody's favorite, I felt just unbelievably bad for what I did. To everybody.
Today, I don't really know how much I've evolved, but it's like there's a neural bypass I'm blessed with that goes "sin=missing the mark." Seems like I've heard that as the original translation, and it helps me to see things differently. Without all that caked on shame that I didn't know I had before.
And today I've gotten to learn a little bit about the human brain. It has something like 125 trillion synapses. 100 billion or so neurons have thousands of synaptic connections each. It's just wonderfully, staggeringly unfathomable to me that I have that between my ears. It's to me justifiably compared to galaxies of stars.
And the idea that I made the choice to miss the mark is like me being on one of those stars, and choosing to steer that galaxy, or all those galaxies, the wrong way. Which seems, to me, insane. If a whole cluster in the universe did somehow zoom off its course, it was as part of an almost infinitely complex system of factors that was definitely not set up by any one or billion human beings.
And I don't know if a historical Jesus literally was God incarnated in human form, literally taking on the sins of all while being crucified. I'm not even clear on which grocery store I'm going to today. Attempts to validate and verify that as literal miss what for me is the point. The story has a spiritual truth that my faith connects me to sometimes, and that's a gift.
Is it possible? Absolutely, in my opinion. A comedian I was watching one time was talking about this idea that there's no God, and saying "well, have you looked everywhere?" Any one person has access to so little of the truths represented by this entire universe that I don't believe anyone can confidently rule out anything. Even the galaxies between our ears don't hold more than a fraction of the information in the universe, do they?
But knowing isn't the same as faith anyway, is it? For me, there's an awareness about things that I see as faith, that extends to the material plane but isn't limited to it. My synapses are not the last word; they simply (amazingly) tell it. Joseph Campbell talked about how a common theme among religions is that the material rests on the spiritual. That's what I happen to believe, based on a strong awareness of it sometimes, as well as other experiences.
Christ is one of the characters in world religions who crossed from the spiritual into the material plane, while retaining the full awareness of the spiritual. I have no idea how many of those characters are partly represented as sacrifically killed, or able to perform miracles. But that interpenetration, or interpolation, as if the spiritual has punched through the material (or come through a tear in its veil)--that seems like a common, cosmic theme.
And while it seems absolutely understandable to take Jesus Christ's "I am the way" to mean that Christianity is the true religion and none others are, I don't hear that in those words. Leaving aside how divine love could possibly be manifested as divisive, as fighting words, as condemnation of thousands of years of innocently followed faith paths, I go back again to that spark of awareness. "Christ" names something in me that is my one way to the divine, to the spiritual plane and possibly a Creator present in it but not encompassed by it. It's where the material and spiritual meet, and nearly are one, but stay separated by an almost infinitely small space, like the one crossed by a synapse. What better symbol for that than a cross?
A dear friend told me a few years ago that Jesus's actual name was probably something like Yeshua Ben Yusef. After that, I saw one of the pictures of what the historical Jesus, or Yeshua, might have looked like: dark-complected, dark hair, dark beard, both trimmed fairly short but not neatly. What I got out of those new views: a sense of empathy. This was someone who probably suffered like me. Suddenly, that fact replaced the search for historical evidence or lack of it. He didn't need to take the bad things I did in order for me to get right with God. Both of us had missed the mark, and missing the mark suddenly became okay.
There are stories in maybe multiple religions about divine beings taking on humble human forms, and interacting with people who either treat them well or don't. Ovid wrote about that in the Metamorphosis. There can seem to be a coldly practical social purpose for those stories: if we treat other people well so we don't get it in the afterlife, everyone is more likely to get along. But for me there's another, better message: that the divine lives in the human all the time. And there's an access to it at the point of humility, of vulnerability, of suffering, even of small hurts. And that I believe to be heart.
Heart, for me, is that spark of Christ in me. It's the capacity for empathy that doesn't originate in the physical (nothing does), but has to and gets to travel through it, dance in it, play in it, surrender to its grit and finity in order to love. It's why Jesus cries out "my God, why have You forsaken me," and suddenly I feel something. It's what runs between me and Him, whether that event actually happened or not, and makes it a wonder of its own. I've been there; I get it; I know the feeling; and I have this mysterious trust that everybody else does too. It might or might not be true, but without that part of me, I don't believe I would ever try to love anyone, even me.
Maybe there's no division between people, or between entities of any kind, on the spiritual plane. Maybe the pain-driven leap of consciousness toward another suffering being jolts me toward that unity in this plane. Different religions' metaphors for an afterlife seem to me to convey a sense of "it's like this life, but not, and definitely better" in different ways. And that there's divinity, immediate, not separate, not hidden anymore. Maybe my recognizing myself in the suffering of another, however many of the trillions of synapses carry out that act, points my awareness toward that shared being. I don't know.
But I believe that the power of the crucified Christ, Jesus, Yeshua Ben Yusef, and whatever other names might describe that being in that event, is in how I can feel for Him, empathize with Him, wish He wasn't going through it, then extend the same love to others, and then even to me.
-Jesus died for my sins
-I'm responsible for my sins
-I'm responsible for Jesus having died
And because if there was one thing I knew about Jesus, it was that Jesus was everybody's favorite, I felt just unbelievably bad for what I did. To everybody.
Today, I don't really know how much I've evolved, but it's like there's a neural bypass I'm blessed with that goes "sin=missing the mark." Seems like I've heard that as the original translation, and it helps me to see things differently. Without all that caked on shame that I didn't know I had before.
And today I've gotten to learn a little bit about the human brain. It has something like 125 trillion synapses. 100 billion or so neurons have thousands of synaptic connections each. It's just wonderfully, staggeringly unfathomable to me that I have that between my ears. It's to me justifiably compared to galaxies of stars.
And the idea that I made the choice to miss the mark is like me being on one of those stars, and choosing to steer that galaxy, or all those galaxies, the wrong way. Which seems, to me, insane. If a whole cluster in the universe did somehow zoom off its course, it was as part of an almost infinitely complex system of factors that was definitely not set up by any one or billion human beings.
And I don't know if a historical Jesus literally was God incarnated in human form, literally taking on the sins of all while being crucified. I'm not even clear on which grocery store I'm going to today. Attempts to validate and verify that as literal miss what for me is the point. The story has a spiritual truth that my faith connects me to sometimes, and that's a gift.
Is it possible? Absolutely, in my opinion. A comedian I was watching one time was talking about this idea that there's no God, and saying "well, have you looked everywhere?" Any one person has access to so little of the truths represented by this entire universe that I don't believe anyone can confidently rule out anything. Even the galaxies between our ears don't hold more than a fraction of the information in the universe, do they?
But knowing isn't the same as faith anyway, is it? For me, there's an awareness about things that I see as faith, that extends to the material plane but isn't limited to it. My synapses are not the last word; they simply (amazingly) tell it. Joseph Campbell talked about how a common theme among religions is that the material rests on the spiritual. That's what I happen to believe, based on a strong awareness of it sometimes, as well as other experiences.
Christ is one of the characters in world religions who crossed from the spiritual into the material plane, while retaining the full awareness of the spiritual. I have no idea how many of those characters are partly represented as sacrifically killed, or able to perform miracles. But that interpenetration, or interpolation, as if the spiritual has punched through the material (or come through a tear in its veil)--that seems like a common, cosmic theme.
And while it seems absolutely understandable to take Jesus Christ's "I am the way" to mean that Christianity is the true religion and none others are, I don't hear that in those words. Leaving aside how divine love could possibly be manifested as divisive, as fighting words, as condemnation of thousands of years of innocently followed faith paths, I go back again to that spark of awareness. "Christ" names something in me that is my one way to the divine, to the spiritual plane and possibly a Creator present in it but not encompassed by it. It's where the material and spiritual meet, and nearly are one, but stay separated by an almost infinitely small space, like the one crossed by a synapse. What better symbol for that than a cross?
A dear friend told me a few years ago that Jesus's actual name was probably something like Yeshua Ben Yusef. After that, I saw one of the pictures of what the historical Jesus, or Yeshua, might have looked like: dark-complected, dark hair, dark beard, both trimmed fairly short but not neatly. What I got out of those new views: a sense of empathy. This was someone who probably suffered like me. Suddenly, that fact replaced the search for historical evidence or lack of it. He didn't need to take the bad things I did in order for me to get right with God. Both of us had missed the mark, and missing the mark suddenly became okay.
There are stories in maybe multiple religions about divine beings taking on humble human forms, and interacting with people who either treat them well or don't. Ovid wrote about that in the Metamorphosis. There can seem to be a coldly practical social purpose for those stories: if we treat other people well so we don't get it in the afterlife, everyone is more likely to get along. But for me there's another, better message: that the divine lives in the human all the time. And there's an access to it at the point of humility, of vulnerability, of suffering, even of small hurts. And that I believe to be heart.
Heart, for me, is that spark of Christ in me. It's the capacity for empathy that doesn't originate in the physical (nothing does), but has to and gets to travel through it, dance in it, play in it, surrender to its grit and finity in order to love. It's why Jesus cries out "my God, why have You forsaken me," and suddenly I feel something. It's what runs between me and Him, whether that event actually happened or not, and makes it a wonder of its own. I've been there; I get it; I know the feeling; and I have this mysterious trust that everybody else does too. It might or might not be true, but without that part of me, I don't believe I would ever try to love anyone, even me.
Maybe there's no division between people, or between entities of any kind, on the spiritual plane. Maybe the pain-driven leap of consciousness toward another suffering being jolts me toward that unity in this plane. Different religions' metaphors for an afterlife seem to me to convey a sense of "it's like this life, but not, and definitely better" in different ways. And that there's divinity, immediate, not separate, not hidden anymore. Maybe my recognizing myself in the suffering of another, however many of the trillions of synapses carry out that act, points my awareness toward that shared being. I don't know.
But I believe that the power of the crucified Christ, Jesus, Yeshua Ben Yusef, and whatever other names might describe that being in that event, is in how I can feel for Him, empathize with Him, wish He wasn't going through it, then extend the same love to others, and then even to me.
posted by Chad Parmenter at 1:34 PM
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