The Unitarian Fellowship of Peterborough

Music by Resonance

What can Unitarian Universalists – and Christians – learn from re-visiting Christianity’s central story?

Religious Exploration: A world religions and experience of nature day, on the pagan origins of Easter.

Opening Words

Octavio Paz        

Story for All Ages

Reading

Message

Happy Easter! Happy spring! I’m grateful to have this opportunity to stand at the pulpit on what was traditionally one of the most important days of the year in our faith. I hope this holiday weekend has been, or will be, full of family, good food, and the sense of rebirth and renewal that’s everywhere in spring.

So, what do Unitarians do at Easter? That sounds like the set-up for a great punch line, but I haven’t really got one. I suppose I could capture some of our uncertainty about the Christian holidays we mark together by telling the story about the Unitarian child, asked to explain Easter, who said:

“Jesus was a great teacher who was arrested and sentenced to death by the Romans. They nailed his hands and feet to a wooden cross, and made him wear a crown of thorns. They stood up the cross until he died, and his followers buried his body in a cave and closed it with a big rock.”

“On Easter, they roll away the rock, and Jesus comes back out. And if he sees his shadow, we have six more weeks of winter.”

The truth is, we as adults may have lost almost that much touch with our own core stories.

One of our answers to what to do on days like this — and a pretty reasonable one in lots of ways — is to look past our denomination’s centuries of Christian roots to older traditions. That’s what our kids are doing downstairs today: they’re having a very special class prepared by Kathleen Stephenson-Fields and Angel Fields, two of our practicing pagans, on the pagan origins of Easter. If you read my "R.E.-mail" this week, you’ll know that Easter may get its name from Ëostre, a pagan goddess of the dawn, and our kids will be able to tell you after the class about the rather odd connection between bunnies and eggs.

And that’s great; but I also felt inspired this year to approach the question more directly, because, though I’ve never been and don’t feel very likely to become a Christian, the Easter story, of willing sacrifice, death and rebirth, has come to have unexpected meaning for me.

I don’t mean the magical version of the story, the fairy tale version, in which a man is born of a virgin, and is literally the son of a sky god, and whose unjust blood sacrifice (for which all of us bear the blame) somehow redeems the failings of all people — even 2000 years later — who accept that this story is true; and grants them an infinite amount of time in a perfect place after they die.

I mean something much deeper and more alive: the story as myth, and metaphor, and even as a kind of map.

In psychology, the course of our lives, especially our early lives, is often modelled as a series of stages of development. We are born, we develop an identity separate from our mothers, we crawl and walk, we become capable of basic self-care. We learn the language and culture that surround us, we find our place in our families, our communities. At each stage we step into a new and more inclusive world view. The process, to quote the Penguin Dictionary of Psychology, “is one of positive progress, increases in effectiveness of function, maturity, sophistication, richness and complexity.”

At every stage we face new challenges and contradictions, that make our behaviours and world view partial and inadequate. We fuse with each new stage, separate from it, and then turn around and pick up what we need to keep from it to carry on.

In a sense it’s a whole series of deaths and rebirths; but we contain all the selves that have gone before. The turning points are sometimes called fulcrums of development. Some of the transitions come with pride, excitement and relief, and some come with a lot of confusion and pain.

I titled my remarks today “Easter, 2.0.” I wonder if Unitarians might have passed through a long, necessary stage of differentiation from Christianity as accurate history, or relevant cosmology, and be ready for an equally challenging and equally rich stage of reintegrating Christianity as myth.

Perhaps we can be like the teenager in the famous quotation often attributed to Mark Twain: “When I was a boy of fourteen,” he is supposed to have said, “my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished by how much he'd learned.”

I wonder if we might be ready to meet our denominational parents, despite their imperfections, and cautiously try listening again to what they had to say.

So, where would that lead? What would it look like? What is this “Easter 2.0?”

“A myth,” writes the American philosopher Jean Houston, “is something that never was, but is always happening.” It’s not less than the truth, in other words, but more. Houston calls myths “the coded DNA of the human psyche.” Myths are a door to an interior landscape in which we keep and explore our core beliefs, our highest dreams, our deepest hopes, our most secret fears.

My encounter with Easter themes that had never really been a part of my life began with what I thought was walking even further away. I started coming across the crucifixion story in the Sufi literature, where it was presented as a high goal, a life passage, a gateway, something to be desired and achieved. “Die before you die,” is one of the core messages of Sufism.

“The real meaning of crucifixion,” writes the Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan, “is to crucify the false self, that the true self may rise. As long as the false self is not crucified, the true self is not realized.”^[1]

The Sufis are the mystics of Islam, and the most famous Sufi to North Americans is the poet Rumi, whose work, rather remarkably, outsells Shakespeare these days. Sufi poetry is full of this image of willing facing into death and rebirth, in a thousand forms, a process called Fana…:

Or, more characteristically and less gently:

The process of surrender to this necessary suffering and death is like Jesus’ anguish and doubt in Gethsemene, an image that also occurs frequently in Sufi poetry. The advice is:

In a few weeks, the daytime UU book club will be reading one piece of this alternate history in Elaine Pagels’ book The Gnostic Gospels. These gospels are texts banned by the early church as heresy, buried in the Egyptian desert in the hope they would survive, and rediscovered in 1945. The Gnostics saw their Christianity as an interior process of self-discovery, self-development and self-transformation, deeply similar to Sufism and Buddhism. Before Gnosticism was banned as heresy, a Gnostic teacher, Valentinus, nearly became Bishop of Rome, the position we now call Pope.

The best-known Gnostic text is the Gospel of Thomas, a gospel in which Jesus makes no claim to be a Messiah, no promise of an afterlife in paradise, and there is no reference to the crucifixion or resurrection. The kingdom of heaven, he says, is laid out before you, on this earth, but you do not know how to see it.

The alternate history is also the history of the Christian mystics, like St. Teresa of Avila, whose Interior Castle maps out in detail the torturous stages of transcending the suffering of the ego and merging, finally, with the divine. Or St. John of the Cross, whose Dark Night of the Soul is surely the threshold of this experience.

It’s the Christianity described as one form of “the hero’s journey” by another “J.C.” beloved by many Unitarians: Joseph Campbell.

There are corners of the contemporary church that are perfectly comfortable with all this. A year and a half or so ago, for example, I had the chance to go with Rev. Julie and hear The Right Reverend John Shelby Spong, retired Episcopal Bishop of Newark, N.J., speak at George St. United Church. Spong, from within the church — a lifetime within the church — doesn’t believe in sky gods, virgin births, original sin, or living a 21st century life based on 1st century cosmology or morality. He sees Jesus as representing high human capacities in every one of us. “The task of the church,” he says, ought to be

“less that of indoctrinating or relating people to an external divine power and more that of providing opportunities for people to touch the infinite center of all things and to grow into all that they are destined to be.”^[2]

At the beginning of his bestselling book The Pagan Christ, Tom Harpur, a former Anglican priest and Professor of New Testament theology at the University of Toronto quotes the Catholic theologian John Dominic Crossan, as follows:

“My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally. They knew what they were doing. We don’t.”^[3]

If, like me, you’re shaky on some of your Christian basics, you might need to be reminded that today doesn’t mark the crucifixion, it marks the resurrection.

The resurrection is what matters about the story. 

In the small amount of time I have left, I want to touch, much too briefly, on one of the ways a personal resurrection comes about.

It’s sometimes said that if you had to sum up Christianity in one word, the word would be “forgiveness.” “Love your enemies,” is one of the few things all texts seem to agree Jesus is supposed to have taught and said.

Forgiveness means doing the hard, even impossible-seeming work of letting go of your story, your blame, your suffering, and accepting your life — including whatever part of your life has you caused you the most pain — just as it is.

In a real sense, it means willingly dying to a version of your own story and self-identity that has sustained and defined you.

Forgiveness means, as an unknown wise observer said (the quotation gets attributed to many different people), giving up all hope of a better past. It means fully recognizing the shared humanity of whoever has wronged you. It means recognizing that, just as each of us is imperfect, their actions are not identical to who they are.

That doesn’t mean that the past is justified, that life should have been like this, or had to be like this, or that each of us didn't richly deserve and earn something better, probably with our name in sprinkles around the edges — just that this is the way it is.

I had a favourite university professor, a hilariously funny, brilliant lesbian Marxist goddess figure who came to class with equal amounts of dense cultural theory and black leather, who liked to answer students’ demands that the world be a better place by quoting the scene from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane in which Joan Crawford, as a crippled former movie star, starts saying what she would do “if only [she] wasn’t in this [wheel]chair.” And Bette Davis, her sister, says: “But you are, Blanche.”

What has hurt you the most? There are many sources of suffering, but is there any greater one in most of our lives than love, that has been damaged?

Love is our longing for wholeness, for connection, our opening to something larger than ourselves, our readiness to trust and to sacrifice, our letting down of our armour, our opening fully to life.

The Sacred Heart of Jesus, the pierced heart, the heart torn open, has become one of the great icons of the Church.

It represents, in one symbol, the crucifixion and the resurrection — the outpouring of love, the rebirth into wholeness, the discovery of unimagined human capacities, that can result, so paradoxically, from fully faced and fully experienced pain.

Every tradition knows this. There is a Yiddish proverb that says: “There is no heart so whole as a broken heart.” The symbol of the modern Sufi movement is a heart with wings. The Buddhist writer Joanna Macy says: “The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe.”

One of the things I love about our own Unitarian Universalist tradition is that it’s open to constant reevaluation and reinvention. I love that our hymn book is called Singing the Living Tradition, and contains words from many faiths, some nearly as old as human language and some by people younger than me. The holy words in this sacred place are — whatever words we find holy.

But in an odd way, though we pride ourselves on our tolerance, our own core history is our biggest taboo. About a year and a half ago, a writer named Doug Muder tackled this subject in UU World magazine:

“Most of us, I think, live in some kind of tension with Christianity. Some of us miss it. Some are running away from it. Some feel alienated from it or oppressed by it. And some, like me, feel all those things at the same time. But like a dysfunctional family with a secret, we seem to have an unspoken agreement not to bring it up. Say much of anything — positive or negative — about Jesus or the Bible, and many UUs will look at you like you just let out a loud belch.”^[4]

I want to suggest that the alternate history of Christianity, with deep forgiveness at its core, self-transcendence as its goal, and — mixed in among all the errors, the violence, and, in John Shelby Spong’s words, the “childlike, fearful, defensive prattle” — nearly 2000 years of maps of how to get there, is not just worthy of our rediscovery, but is full of promises we have forgotten.

I want to close with these words from Kahlil Gibran, a possibly over-quoted and under-appreciated Lebanese American poet and author, immersed in both Christian myth and metaphor and the wisdom of the Sufi masters. On this Easter Sunday, the day of resurrection, they’re a sort of prayer of gratitude for transformation by suffering.

So may it be.

Spoken Response

The Rev. Julie Stoneberg

It is often said that Unitarians tend to define themselves in negative terms...that is, to say what we’re not rather than what we are. This is also a developmental stage, a characteristic of children, from age two through to adolescence...the process of self-differentiation. Ben is pushing us a bit today toward growing up, toward being able to see our ‘parents’ as actually having some wisdom and intelligence, to choose integration rather than disassociation.

One way to grow up, and positively state Unitarianism, is to say that we begin with our lived experience, and we build our beliefs out of that. We start with what we can perceive and know and feel, and from that we construct meaning. The reason we reject dogma is that its prescribed belief doesn’t allow us to shape our personal theologies based on what we have each found to be true. 

Another way to positively state Unitarianism is to say that we continually challenge ourselves to be open to ongoing and re-discovered revelation. We accept that what we know is always a partial-truth and that the opportunity to grow and learn is unending. Perhaps where we have failed is in re-working, re-claiming, and honouring those parts of tradition that continue to hold wisdom, truth, and power.

The Easter story, a story in which crucifixion, sacrifice, and bodily resurrection play central roles, is a difficult one for us to embrace. The notion of rising from the dead is scientifically impossible, the crucifixion is simply violence at the hands of power, and sacrifice, like guilt, is a concept we see very little need to propagate.   Indeed, a few years ago, Rebecca Parker co-wrote a book with Rita Brock entitled, Proverbs of Ashes. In it, Parker tells the story of counselling a woman who was living with an abusive husband, and whose minister had told her that staying with her husband was the will of God, and that she should drink that cup of suffering just as Jesus had. Parker makes the point that the Easter story has been used to normalize sacrifice, as a ritual in which some human beings are made to bear loss and others are protected from accountability. 

But hers is not a critique of the story as much as it is a critique of how it has been used. This is also true of suffering...it can be both oppressive and liberating...it depends on how it is used.  To endorse suffering and sacrifice as necessary is quite a different thing than saying that loving deeply opens us to the risk of equally deep loss and pain. Ben has today used the Easter story as myth, as a vehicle for understanding was is most true...that the more we love the more loss is carved into our souls....that the greatest tragedies can produce the greatest meaning...and that, as we open ourselves to what is most difficult...to the forgiveness of ourselves and of others...this letting go, this melting, moves us through suffering to salvation, here and now.   

If we allow ourselves to see it, the Easter story is full of powerful truths that evoke sensibilities at the depths of our humanity. May we be willing to open ourselves to the possibility that beyond and through pain lies peace, that by letting go of self we can most beautifully be. 

Closing Words