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Easter - the Line in the Sand

4/21/2019

Easter is the centerpiece of the Christian faith. Especially in western cultures, it is the line in the sand between belief and unbelief.

Either

Jesus was a good man and wise teacher who was seen as a threat by the political and religious leaders of his time, was executed and died like anyone else, but whose teachings on charity and the value of all human beings, the poor as well as the powerful, went on to transform the world and are responsible for much of what can be considered good in human civilization.

Or

Jesus was the anointed one of God, sent to save us from ourselves, the creator assuming the weaknesses of the created, in an eternal act of love and forgiveness which went on to transform the world and is responsible for much what can be considered good in human civilization, with his resurrection from the dead validating his divine status and the sanctity of his message.

Take your pick. Or as somebody once said “There is no neutral ground”.

Or is there?

It is my belief that the line in the sand between these two positions is not as deep as it appears. I intend to erase it. That will obviously take more time than a blog, but Easter Sunday seemed like a good day to start.

   Just to get started, “Easter” isn’t a word Jesus ever heard. It’s derived from an ancient German word for the goddess of Spring, which transitioned over to an old English name for the same goddess and from that to our own use of the term. As opposed to cheapening the Christian idea in any way, this derivation links the Easter celebration with the celebrations of the arrival of spring that occur in virtually all the original human religions, especially those in the northern hemisphere. The annual reemergence of life after the long, dark winter reverberates naturally with the idea of resurrection. This connection also links Jesus' resurrection with what is sometimes called the “universal drive toward religion in the human species”. This is a concept that has fallen under a lot of fire lately, a fire that’s been fueled by the extremes practiced by current “believers”, but it’s not an idea we can easily do without.

The idea of human transcendence, that we are meant to be more than our biology, is central to our sense of human identity. It’s all that separates us from wolves. Pretending that the survival value of cooperating within the tribe is the actual, real, scientific reason for human morality goes against the evidence both in human history and in the heart and mind of every human who has ever lived. And what does that have to do with the resurrection of Jesus? Everything. The simple, absolutely historical fact is that if anybody in history didn’t stay dead, it was Jesus of Nazareth. His ethnic brother Mohammed acknowledged him and so does most of the world. Mohammed was more successful during his lifetime and his influence has been equally far reaching and long lasting. There are some bad reasons why both of their ideas have lasted – power games on a large scale played by the same kinds of people who crucified Jesus. Finding and embracing the good reasons why these ideas have lasted may be the best shot we have given the divided world we live in. Some form of Secular Christianity/Islam/Humanism may be our only way out of this mess.

   Jesus may save us yet.

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Notre Dame on Fire - Why it Matters

4/16/2019

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It seems as if the whole world took a deep breath yesterday when Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral caught fire. It didn’t matter if you weren’t French. It didn’t matter if you’d never actually been to the Cathedral in “real life” (I have – more on that in a moment). It didn’t matter if you were or weren't a believer – in the Catholic Church that built it 850 years ago, in the Virgin Mary for whom it is named, or in any God at all. French or not, believers or not, we all felt something important was being lost, or at least threatened. In an increasingly divided world, I think we need to take a good look at anything that brings us together.

An evangelical atheist might be quick to point out that the building is a living symbol of the union of Church and State that oppressed millions for centuries and that the modern world might be better off without it. The raw fact is that it was built with funds extorted from the sweat of the working people by a Church and Nobility who were glorifying themselves as much as they were honoring Jesus’s mother. This was not lost on the crowds during the French Revolution, who beheaded the Cathedral’s statues of Kings (but spared it’s Pieta). All true. In this case, however, the truth is beside the point.

I visited Notre Dame many years after leaving the Catholic Faith I was raised in. It made no difference. In that looming hall, lit by its gigantic stain glass windows, in all that echoing silence, I knelt. I couldn’t just be a tourist. The question of what I was kneeling to has been placed on the table by fire.

Notre Dame means many things symbolically. First of all – Paris. Paris is more steeped in mythology that any spot in the Western Hemisphere and Notre Dame is central to that mythology. Second perhaps only to the Eifel Tower, Notre Dame is Paris. And Paris is love, romance, illusion – the city of light. To have so massive a light go out would be unthinkable. It would shake our world. It did. Why?

The answer is painfully simple. Human beings don’t live by the sweat of our brows. That’s how we eat. We live by the strength of our symbols. Notre Dame is a symbol not only of Paris, but, perhaps more importantly, of immortality. If it had been built in the 1990’s, the fire would have grabbed the headlines but nobody would have held their breath. This Cathedral has lasted. It has survived wars, neglect and time itself. Adolph Hitler ordered it burned with the city around it and his own general refused, the mythology of beauty being stronger than the mythology of war, even for a warrior.

These days, I’m enjoying a sojourn among the Red Rock mountains of Sedona, Arizona. The fact that Sedona is a center for New Age activities is, I believe, entirely due to its surroundings. Walking a trail among these massive stone monuments, I find myself having the same feelings I did when I knelt in Notre Dame – a sense of humility before the beautiful, the immortal. The fact that the mountains are no more immortal than Notre Dame’s flammable wooden ceiling is, as I mentioned before, beside the point.

To the human observer, both the mountains and the church are, ultimately, works of art. And art is art because of how it speaks to us. The argument about whether the Red Rock Mountains are the work of a chance geological upheaval a few million years ago or the work of a Divine Artist I leave for another discussion. The impact is the same.

Mountains are called “cathedrals in stone”. The reality is that churches are mountains in brick and wood. From the beginnings of human religious thought, the gods came down from the mountains. Art of any sort is our attempt to make our own mountains, our own immortality.

A thousand artists took 300 years to build Notre Dame. The kings and bishops didn’t lift a finger. Beauty that endures says something to all of us. It’s what keeps us going. It’s what keeps us human. We need it now more than ever. Parts of Notre Dame are made of wood. Other parts are made of stone, stone from the mountains of France. The wood is gone as all things go in their cycle. The stone remains. New artists will rebuild the rest.

Long live Notre Dame!

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Notes on Palm Sunday

4/14/2019

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Although I have not been a practicing Catholic for many years the powerful symbolism and messages contained in the stories that fueled my belief still affect me deeply. Although I’m not in church, I know very well what day it is.

In the Christian tradition, Palm Sunday is seen as the first step on the final path of Jesus of Nazareth’s ministry – steps that would lead him to the Temple, the Last Supper, Gethsemane, the Cross and finally to Resurrection. The event is reported in all four gospels and is described as the first time in his ministry that Jesus, the itinerant preacher, entered Jerusalem, the center of the Jewish faith. He had initially built up a following in Galilee, his home district, and his influence had steadily grown despite, or perhaps because of, his ongoing criticism of the official religious leadership. His entrance into the city in so public a manner was an overt challenge to that leadership and set in motion all the events that followed. Whether or not any or all of this took place exactly as reported is beside the point. In matters of religion, as with most serious events in human life, the significance of the event is more important than the details.

In Jewish religious tradition, Jesus arriving riding on a donkey was significant in that it invoked the prophecy from the prophet Zechariah, "See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey". The combination of arrogance and humility in this act is worth looking at. Riding in at the head of a procession of cheering supporters was a dramatic statement that “I am important” and a clear challenge to the existing order. The fact that the mount was a beast of labor and servitude, as opposed to a horse, a beast of combat and military authority, sends a message that is central to the Christian Idea: your “King” is one of you.

In the Roman world, a victorious general would enter Rome the head of his army in a horse drawn chariot, in an orchestrated display to the public of the power of the existing order. The irony of this Passover in Jerusalem was that the Jewish people were celebrating their deliverance by God from oppression in a situation that found them once again under the control of an oppressive power, with no Moses in sight. There is little doubt that to many of Jesus’ followers, he was seen as the one who would drive out their most recent political oppressor along with the religious leaders who were cooperating with them. The poor, the vast majority of the population, paid taxes to both Caesar and the Temple. How times have changed.

The twist, or, given its massive historical impact, the “swerve” in the Christian message is that the “King” did not oppose his enemies by force of arms or thunderbolts from heaven, as in all previous mythologies, Jewish or Roman, but by his total and utter humiliation and surrender – not by the sword but by the cross. The only crown he would win was a crown of thorns.

Palm Sunday sets that dynamic in motion. Its implications continue to be celebrated, revered and for the most part misunderstood. On Palm Sunday, Jesus was riding not to a celebration but to his death. The burning of today’s palms to be used as next Ash Wednesday’s ashes acknowledges this. Given the continuing similarities between his world and ours, It’s not a message we can afford to miss.

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Easter - the Line in the Sand

Notre Dame on Fire - Why it Matters

Notes on Palm Sunday

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