Advent Journal: When the Light Passes Through

Yesterday was funny. I bought four pretty little glass mugs at a tag sale for two dollars. All four together fit in the palm of my hand. I love colored glass and anything else that becomes even more beautiful when the light passes through it. How easy it is sometimes to be happy!

In the morning, out back doing chores, just past the blackberries, I remembered this sentence in Gerd Theissen’s The Religion of the Earliest Churches: Creating a Symbolic World: “The historical Jesus revitalized Jewish religion” (41).

Everything I understand to be true or at least correct about Jesus crystallizes in that sentence. Its light is blinding.

I thought about it for a few minutes, standing still in the cold, each breath a gust of snowy air. You can let go of Jesus; Abhishiktananda makes pretty clear at some point you have to. I worked on this over the summer but didn’t get far – that cross is no joke. But Theissen – by reducing perfectly Jesus to a sign – shows the way. Jesus reflects – points to – a certain cultural religious understanding of right use of power. If that resonates, great! But don’t linger at the sign – go directly into that to which the sign points. Follow the instructions, follow the directions, and see what happens. That’s what Jesus did.

Does that make sense?

For me, the thing about becoming serious about Jesus – about being in actual relationship with him – is that he’s not in A Course in Miracles (which, paradoxically, is how I was finally able to see him). A Course in Miracles makes ontological claims that the historical Jesus did not make. It’s okay to make a different ontological claim than Jesus made! It’s less okay to make one he did not and pretend that he did. That’s just garden-variety projection, and there’s a better way.

In my experience (under the rubric of Marianne Sawicki more than anything else) it is possible to get very close to Jesus. But doing so doesn’t place us in the sphere of oneness in which ACIM operates and about which so many of us fantasize. Its emphasis on unconditional love is not theoretical but applied. Anybody can do it, and everybody does do it from time to time. It’s a different kind of practice arising from a different kind of study.

But if you do follow that path – have that relationship, accept that discipleship – then you will remember oneness and you will remember the Love of God and share it with all of creation. You’re just getting there on a different path. There is no separation anywhere.

Back of all of this wool-gathering is David Carse, who cheerfully indulges U.G. Krishnamurti’s “monstrous nihilism,” though he prefers more poetic expressions, like this from Nisargadatta Maharaj.

When you are very quiet, you have arrived at the basis of everything.
That is the deep, dark blue state
in which there are millions of stars and planets.
When you are in that state, you have no awareness of your existence.

Carse will not let you bypass nihilism. “Being and Nothing are the last concepts, and the last experiences, available to us,” he writes in Perfect Brilliant Stillness (386). You cannot possess or know or hold – you cannot keep – anything, not even awareness. Not even love. And certainly not Jesus.

Which, great. That’s absolutely a way to look at it.

But later, at the coop and the library, I ran into all these signs of Zen Buddhism, leftover decorations and so forth from Bodhi Day. The library even had an anniversary edition of Philip Kapleau’s The Three Pillars of Zen on display. I read that cover to cover seven times in my early twenties and didn’t learn a thing. Clearly the cosmos was signaling me, all but beating me over the head. Do you want to begin again? Even Carse had to laugh.

Now it’s Sunday, a day of rest. I’m writing while pea soup simmers. The Christmas tree lights are on, and the house is very quiet. I’m happy in a shy way; I know how much can be taken from us, often without warning. But also, there is a great love in the cosmos, and from time to time it remembers itself in my heart. How grateful I am to sip from this cup, hold it to the light, and bathe in its rays of blessing and grace.