After Easter: What Did You See?

Early on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb while it was still dark and saw that the stone had been taken away. She ran to Simon Peter and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and cried, “They have taken my Lord from the tomb, and I do not know where they have put Him” (John 20:1-2).

Mary’s cry is not merely an Easter morning cry. We are all seeking an encounter with Jesus. We are all trying to find the one whose proximity to God can compensate for our own separation . . .

So did you see him? On Easter? Did you – as Mariannne Sawicki would put it – see the Lord?

Sometimes, looking obscures the very thing it aims to see. Sometimes, looking is a distraction – a way of not seeing what is obvious and present.

And sometimes seeking – sincere, well-intentioned, even disciplined and informed – reveals nothing. It’s like fishing, maybe. Sometimes you catch something, and sometimes you don’t.

Abhiskhiktananda, who lived without compromise in a torment nexus between Christianity and Advaita, and whose record of his passage there is so beautifully vulnerable, says that recognition of Jesus as a living presence requires us to “pass into” the other.

Jesus is perceived existentially in the call of the other in the greatest depth of my being; whether this other is the final mystery or my personal mystery which is drawing me into the desert, or the brother who outside calls me to God in himself (Ascent to the Depth of the Heart 265).

Abhi understood the dissolution of the self as relational – it involved the other because we can only know ourselves as separate by virtue of the other. It takes two to forget – and thus remember – they are one. He called on folks to practice “the social crystallization of the Love that Jesus had come to spread, intended to transform the whole, like yeast in the dough” (254).

Who loves? Who loves totally? And as long as Love is not total, it is not Love. Who does not seek himself instead of God and the other? (254)

These were not rhetorical questions for Abhi! He considered Jesus to have failed in his mission of Love, largely because we – yes, you and I but also Abhi himself – were not ready to hear and be transformed by what we heard, i.e., to love totally by seeking not our own self but God and the other.

Easter is hard sometimes. For me it can be. It was busy this year; we traveled further than usual. I had hoped to do a small retreat between Good Friday and Easter, but there was a death in the family, one of the kids had to work, et cetera.

Life happens, and goes on happening, no matter what I do or don’t do. It’s okay. It’s more than okay.

Jesus’s presence is typically experienced first as desire – as a longing to see the invisible or partake of the supernatural. Jesus is considered a kind of super-human whose transcendence of time and space evokes in us a combination of naive mysticism and magical thinking. I spent decades in that space.

It is good to penetrate that longing, and to reach the deeper currents of loneliness, anger, guilt and fear which give rise to the longing for big solutions, one-and-done fixes, like Jesus on clouds or some other ascended master taking a personal interest in our day-to-day lives. Those deep-down currents are personal but they also open out into family and community, culture and world. They’re not secret but cosmic.

At some point in that interior seeking, that opening out, there may be a flash of insight: Jesus did this, too, once upon a time. And Buddha. And Anandamayi Ma and Ramana and Eckhart Tolle and all the rest of them. They came up hard against the interior darkness – the emptiness, the sinfulness, the demons and the ghosts – and discovered something about love and freedom.

I know, I know. They were spiritual geniuses and we’re a couple rungs down the ladder.

But honestly? Sometimes – sitting with coffee in the dark or watching crows or listening to snow fall – I see in a clear and direct way that it is my very humanness, its frailty and creativity, that is my connection to God. What else do I have? The clarity and peace in those moments are outside time and cannot be forgotten.

So the question is not really did you see Jesus. See him or don’t see him. There’s a reason Buddhists say that if you meet the Buddha, you should kill him. The better question is – the more helpful question is – do you see the other? Hear their cry? Mary Magdalyn is speaking to you now. That cry, said Abhi, is Jesus. Or, better, our response to that cry is Jesus – Jesus acting through us and the other, rendering them one. In our relationship – our sharing – especially when we pass through the appearance of separation and difference – we remember that together we are Christ.

This is why A Course in Miracles teaches us that “a journey from yourself does not exist” (T-31.IV.10:5).

For this – and so much more – alleluia.