A Tale of Two Kingdoms | Part 4 | The Easter Edition
“This is what you shall do: love the earth and the sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labour to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people. Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, to any man or number of men. Go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and with the mothers of families. Re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.” ”
In 2017, I was on a silent retreat at a monastery deep in the heart of the Blue Mountains. I had booked it to coincide with the end of a conference I had been on for work, so I was tired, overwhelmed and peopled out when I arrived.
I have always felt strangely at home in monasteries, as if I had always lived there, and they always spark a deep hope in my weird and daydreamy soul that maybe I could find a hidey hole to make my own, and stay there forever – never leaving the sanctuary of peace and solitude. There was a very particular kind of soul medicine I knew I needed at that point in my life, but I did not know how to name it.
The structure of the day was rise, breakfast in silence and solitude, prayer and meditation until lunch, lunch in solitude and silence, afternoon nap and journaling followed by a walk on the extensive property, again all in silence and solitude. After the evening meal, which I took with the monks, there would be a session in the meeting space at the retreat centre. The speaker for the retreat was a revered elderly Christian Brother, a man who had earned his PhD in theology, and written and published Catholic academic spirituality his whole career. I forget his name now, but back in the day when I used to know who was who in the zoo of theology, I remember being very impressed by him, even before I had met him.
The first night, I sat crossed legged at the back, the only person under 70 years old in the room. I remember drinking in the solemnity and gravitas wrought by the shared energy of a group of retreatants who had survived World War II, and who had sought out the path of non-violent spirituality to ground and centre their lives.
As the speaker made his way quietly to the lectern to begin his evening address, I was drawn in by his self-effacing humility. There is a kind of quietness in spirit which the truly enlightened walk in, which makes them both entirely unassuming and easy to miss in a crowd, but also gives them a kind of unmistakable authority when they are called on to speak. His white collared shirt was open at the neck, the customary silver crucifix hung low over his navy woollen v-neck. He stood at an angle to his audience, looking with us at a slide he had projected onto the screen, showing a brilliant orange and purple sunset with a black hill in the foreground, upon which the three crosses stood in their foreboding Easter tableau.
“The idea that a loving God would deliberately send his own son to die in order to justify the sins of the world is one of the most dangerous, damaging and violent heresies the church ever dreamed up, and that is saying something.” He began with a chagrined chuckle, almost in an offhand manner.
My mouth hung open, astonishment and shock rolled through me as all the grey and white heads in the room nodded gently, some answering chuckles and murmurs of agreement.
“They are agreeing with him!” I thought to myself. “How are they just sitting there agreeing with him? This is the most outrageous thing I’ve ever heard!”
“I suppose being so violent ourselves for so much of human history,” he went on diplomatically, almost apologetically “we needed a god to look like us, so we made him in our own image. Violent, wrathful, needing atonement for sin. As if a loving and just god needs some sort of blood sacrifice for sin, what an absurd idea. To be sure, for the first couple thousand years of humanity this idea made sense, helped people understand justice and love, but we outgrew that need as a species a long while ago, and most of our theologies haven’t caught up yet.”
His tone was quiet, measured, sincere. He had said things like this a thousand times before, I could tell. This was not new material, this was his bread and butter I realised then. He spoke the way I’ve seen ranchers touch a horse they had owned for twenty years. With surety, knowing where all the lumps and bumps are, where the sensitivities are, how to work with the energy and power of something beautiful and true.
I was mesmerized.
I opened my heart and mind consciously, to test and taste and experiment with what he was saying. I weighed it up deep in my soul, sought out revelation and resonance in equal measure. I will never forget what happened next, because the only other time I have experienced something like this, I was completely alone, flat on my back outside on a deck under the stars, with no idea what was going on; in an encounter with Divine which would forever change my life. I felt a fault line crack all the way down into my body, like Aslan’s table in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Like something brittle that had been hurting me deep down had just lost its hold. As it broke, so did my heart. I began to weep, quietly, uncontrollably. Feeling deeply glad I had chosen a seat far away from everyone else, right at the back where no one could see me, I began using my sleeve to mop up the tears that were streaming down my face as the speaker continued his treatise on non-sacrificial atonement theory, the doctrine of grace and goodness and original blessing. The tears just wouldn’t stop. Eventually I was folding up the whole bottom half of my shirt and covering my whole face with it, my soft belly cold in the retreat meeting room. I was silently howling like a wounded animal, with grief and relief and the sorrows of a thousand lifetimes surfacing to finally be named and seen and held. I bent over double, held my chest to my knees and rocked. I rocked and wept and rocked and wept until it was over. As soon as the final prayer began, I got up silently and slid out the back door like a she-wolf into the dark night air, gasping it deep into my lungs, tasting hibiscus flowers and fresh-cut grass and the river silt mingled with the blue gum grove standing ghostly in the moonlight.
Collapsing into my narrow cot bed, skin against the rough cotton sheets, mind whirling, breaking open, expanding, collapsing.
I wanted to write it off, to call it too good to be true or delusional or heretical. I did. It would have made my life so much easier. I had just turned my part time adjunct lecturing gig teaching pastoral and spiritual care at the Seminary into a proper job. I was trying very hard to be a good Baptist with ordinances to uphold and lines to toe, some pastors to teach and others to submit to. But my soul wasn’t having any of it. She knew what was up and she had taken the wheel and I just had to submit to the river washing over me, the same way I had submitted to it when I was twelve and I had begun to speak in the tongues of angels.
Since that time, I have been on a deconstruction journey, slowly reshaping and reworking my own cosmological container. For the first few years of that journey, I had the privilege of working in a field where I had access to the best and brightest minds who spent their days unravelling mystery, decoding history and tradition and textual transmission in the Christian tradition. I spent those years popping up and down the hallway in the Seminary office building, meeting with this person and that one. Over time and the minutiae of a hundred shared lunches and cups of coffee, bowls of porridge and afternoon hot -chip runs, lived experiences and academic learning we mined each others’ minds for all the richness they had to offer. During that time, I remember sitting in my office reading something beautifully subversive, written by someone who I deeply admire and respect. I remember thinking that if I was going to go where he was inviting me to through his writing and his own imagination, I was going to have to buckle in or start free-falling and flailing.
When I was working at the Ranch, in Canada, sometimes we would take kids on climbing out-trips, and let them abseil off a cliff face. One of us would anchor in first, at the top of the cliff, and drive a stake into the ground from which others could also anchor into. We would brace our feet against a likely rock, and slowly give the nervous abseiling kid enough tension in the rope and harness to come to the precipice where they would jump backwards, repelling off the rock face holding on tight to the rope. During this time, I used this metaphor as a template, and imagined that I was about to abseil off a cliff like this. I consciously anchored into what New Testament scholars call a ‘Christological Hymn’, describing Jesus, found in Paul’s letter to the Colossians:
“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.
For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities – all things were created through him and for him. And He is before all things and in him all things hold together.
He is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.”
It might seem counterintuitive to write about non-sacrificial atonement theory during Holy Week and quote scripture about blood on the cross, but this week is a week where we are invited deeply into paradox and mystery, and the method must always match the message.
As the years went by, and I realised my kids needed a more robust narrative than a sickly parroting of John 3:16 to anchor their own faith container, especially around Easter, I began experimenting with different ways to tell the ancient story. Its not been one big moment, to be honest, its been a slow drip of subversive, life-giving re-storying of the Easter narrative. I started out with geo-political context of the Ancient Near East, to set the scene. I started where we all must, if we are going to take Scripture seriously at any level - with the violence narrated in the Old Testament.
“Do you really think God would tell those people to go and kill all those other people? Does that sound like something Jesus would do?”
“No, mum, but why is it in there then?”
“Because my darling, ancient people believed it was the right thing to do, to attribute their military conquests to their god. They believed it was arrogant of them to take the credit for their acts of genocide and military strength, so when they wrote the stories down, they always made sure to say that it was god’s idea, and therefore god’s victory.”
“But isn’t that kind of lying?”
“Great question. Not really. Its kind of like being very respectful. Its hard for us to understand the way people’s minds worked 8000 years ago, it was a completely different world then. But no, they weren’t lying, they were just telling their story the way it made sense to them at that time.”
Many conversations like this about scripture, story, narrative, context, intent, culture, spirituality laid down over a number of years took place. And then one day this:
“Why did Jesus die, mum?”
“That’s a great question. What do you think?”
“Because he loved us, and because he had to.”
“Do you really think he had to? You don’t think he maybe could have gotten out of it?”
“Maybe, do you think he could have gotten out of it if he wanted to mum?”
“I don’t know, that’s a great question. There is a lot of mystery around God and about death and dying, isn’t there.”
Never with the false platitudes. Never with the rhetoric. Always with the mystery and the unknown and the engagement of the sorrow of the solitary night in the garden of Gethsemane. Never with the hiding behind neat theological constructs. Never with the violence of our sins being so great they demanded a blood sacrifice. Never since that night on the retreat with the wise old man in the navy woolen sweater with his heavy silver crucifix and the hibiscus scented evening air and my shirt soaked with my own tears.
Never.
Personal revelation, shared reality, collective experiences, pain cracked open to possibility.
Always with the possibility.
Last week as we were driving to school, it came up again. Because we were making plans for Easter. I was sowing deep fields in their souls against the inevitable colonialization which would happen in their classrooms at a Christian school.
“What do you think Easter is about?” I asked them. Always with the question, with the opportunity for another look at something that comes around every year.
“About Jesus dying, and chocolate eggs, and the Easter bunny. Mum, Easter is super weird. What do any of those things have in common?”
Always with the laughing and the absurdity of it all, and the using humour to get up in and behind ego defenses.
“Remember how we talked about how violent the world was when Jesus was alive?”
“Yeah.”
“How do you reckon the people in charge felt about him? Going around flipping tables in the temple and healing people on days he wasn’t supposed to, and speaking truth to power? How do you think he was received by the priests who were in charge of making sure everyone was making their proper sacrifices and giving the right amount of money and livestock to the temple? How do you think someone like Jesus came across to the people in charge of making sure that things stayed the same?”
Eyes widened, the teacher in me nerds out to the look of illumination on their faces in the rear-view mirror as the penny drops. I’ve been teaching them about who Jesus is since before they could speak. They know full well what a revolutionary he was, how he was the first feminist in a world which rated animals as having more value than women and girls, how he called out dangerous and toxic systems, and touched and healed people he wasn’t even supposed to be acknowledging.
“Wow, yeah, they would have hated him.”
“Spot on. And in those days, what do you think happened if the people in charge hated you?”
“Oh they would have for sure killed him.”
“Bingo. And what was God’s answer to this? Did God decide to fight and struggle and start a war when they arrested Jesus and started to crucify him, because he could have! Why didn’t he at that moment! Just overthrow them all, take back the power?”
“Because that’s not who God is. God is like Jesus, and Jesus doesn’t go around showing off about being God.”
“Spot on. So when Jesus decided to die, the power of that decision, of going willingly even though he could have fought it, turned that death into the most powerful death there ever had been. The power in his body given to him by God flowed through him and stayed with him even after his body had died, and it was so powerful that it flowed into all the dark places in the cosmos. It flowed into all of time and space and rescued anyone who needed rescuing, and then when it was done rescuing everyone else, it brought him back to life, and now he is alive and living in the dimension we can’t always see and touch and experience. The one we go to when we sleep and dream and vision, the place we will return to when we die. The cross is a metaphor about what we do to each other, and what we do to God. And resurrection is God’s answer to it.”
I pulled that statement right out of Richard Rohr’s work, by the way. Over time, I’ve started to talk about this with my clever friends, and we’ve swapped stories and tips and strategies for the careful de-colonisation of our children’s theologies. One of my besties, Nika Hiraeth, explains Easter to her five year old like this:
“Friday, the first day, is about death. The pain of death.
Saturday, the second day, is about sitting in the space of loss and grief. Honouring the pain of death.
Sunday, the third day, is about celebrating the new life that comes from death. We celebrate with chocolate eggs because eggs symbolise new life.
Easter is about remembering the cyclical nature of life.
The old dies, so that the new can live. Because the dinosaurs died, we are able to live. One day we will die, and something else will live. Life, death, new life. All of life follows this pattern and we see it reflected in the seasons each year.
Nothing ever really dies, it just changes into something else. We’re all a part of this big beautiful universe.
Everything in the universe, including us, is made of teeny tiny little building blocks called “matter-energy.” All the matter-energy that was there at the beginning of the universe is still here now. No more, no less. So, in a sense, are MADE of the dinosaurs, the mountains and stardust.
Everything is always being rearranged in a beautiful dance that’s both too small and too big for us to see.
Everything that lives also dies and that’s what makes life special and important. Death is part of life. Pretending it isn’t real, or refusing to think or talk about it, makes it feel scary. But we don’t need to be afraid. Our body will likely go into the ground, and give new life to something else. And, as for our mind / memory / spirit / soul, nobody knows what happens when we die.
The fact that life has always felt its way forward toward greater complexity and beauty might give us reason to hope that we might become part of something much bigger and even more beautiful.”
I wanted to write something about Easter this year, because teaching kids how to enter into the sacred moments without scarring their souls has become front and centre for so many of us who are comfortable in the wild unknown of the Void Lands, but still want to construct a container for our kiddos to develop a cosmology. I wanted to share with you some strategies that Nika and I are using together to nurture a deeply embodied and integrated spiritual meaning-making matrix for our own kiddos.
And for you beloved, you who are sat here reading this wherever the sun shines on you, or the moon.
For you, let me say this.
There is only one revelation I’ve had about Easter this year, but its a good one:
“God risked embodiment, risked loving and losing, risked pain and suffering and betrayal and abandonment and exile. God risked meeting God’s own limitations and God did it anyway. God may or may not have known that her own death would result in resurrection, or maybe God was just participating in a bigger story that God was compelled to enact, something that only the God-Imagination can know and understand. God ventured into the forbidden place, into the place of exile and taboo and darkness, to dispel it once and for all, to call all the lost found, all the disgraced redeemed and all the unloved, beloved.
And thats what Easter means to me.”
