Easter is about our relationship with Jesus, who is risen from the dead. It is about our participation in resurrection, which began but does not end with Jesus.
Thus, Easter is also about the potential for all our relationships to be transformed from egocentric, survival-based relationships to holy relationships, whose premise is ensuring that all our brothers and sisters can participate in shared freedom, creativity and joy.
Resurrection can be theorized, and the theory can guide our seeking, but it is fundamentally an experience that occurs prior to language. We are not its author. It’s important to remember that.
Most of us are okay with resurrection if it’s a matter of theory (e.g., “your resurrection is your reawakening” (T-6.I.2:7) or symbolic value (e.g., “the resurrection is the symbol of sharing” (T-6.I.12:1). As long as everyone agrees resurrection is not meant to be taken literally, we’re cool.
And yet.
Marianne Sawicki says that resurrection is a human competence for “recognizing what God has done with Jesus” and, also, “the competence for allowing God to have done it and to persist in doing it.”
That is, resurrection is about a recognition of our potential for ongoing and sustainable collaboration with Love, which cannot be constrained by time or space, and of which death is not – despite appearances to the contrary – master.
After all, it’s death that limits the time that we have with one another, and death that closes the door on experience. I’m not walking my dog Jake up Mount Ascutney anymore. One day I won’t walk it anymore either.
But to know resurrection (to practice resurrection), suggests Sawicki, is to gracefully release that kind of thinking in favor of something orders of magnitude more accepting and nurturing. But we are not its author! Resurrection is not a thing we do or make or interpret or explain but a process already underway that we can recognize and cooperate with.
The resurrection of Jesus is a bodily competence that is still happening to us and still making us make it happen . . . the resurrection isn’t over yet, and the Risen Lord still walks through locked doors (Seeing the Lord viii-ix).
Sawicki invites us to consider resurrection not as a historical event that happened to Jesus, one and one, but rather as a collective transformation of fear into love, which God does – is doing – through us now.
A Course in Miracles is equally clear.
I am your resurrection and your life. You live in me because you live in God. And everyone lives in you, as you live in everyone (T-11.VI.4:1-3).
That my not yet be true for us but it can be. Or rather, we have not yet recognized this truth, and been transformed by the recognition into Christ.
But we can be.
That is the promise of Easter, and it is not limited to an annual holiday any more than it was limited to one man long ago.
Resurrection is both personal and communal. The personal is the flash of recognition – he lives! – which enables us to intentionally enter into an actual personal relationship with Jesus because he lives.
And that relationship informs and sustains our relationship with one another, across the whole earth, including the earth and the cosmos, thus enabling the creation of communities (hardly limited to human beings) collectively devoted to love, peace, nonviolence and sharing.
Therefore, be still and grateful today. Give attention to everything: subtle inflections in tones of voice, sunlight streaming through tree limbs, the smell of fresh-cooked bread or casserole, the way lilies feel when you trail your fingers across them.
Feel your happiness and the loneliness to which it is an antidote. Recognize the happiness and loneliness of others. Feel the tidal sway of your desire for Love; feel your confusion and shame in the face of that desire.
Exclude nothing from the gift of your attention. Bear witness that there is no separation anywhere.
In all of this, the welter of all this experience, look for the one whose “part in the Atonement is not complete until you join it and give it away” (T-5.IV.6:3), the one who welcomes even Judas the betrayer as a brother (T-6.I.15:8), and the one forever reminding you of God’s “open arms” and “open Mind” (T-9.VI.7:2).
He is here, awaiting recognition. Can you notice him?
He lives in you, and in me, and in us, as a real presence we can presently recognize and relate to.
Our recognition of Jesus is our recognition of our own self, as we are in Creation. And when we remember what we are, then we remember what all our brothers and sisters are as well.
The answer to all prayers lies in them. You will be answered as you hear the answer in everyone (T-9.II.7:6-7).
But remember: recognizing Jesus is an experience, just like those other experiences – hearing others, seeing sunlight, smelling food, touching grass. Resurrection is reality presently-experienced, without the egoic judgment that it be something other than what it is. Resurrection is a form of honesty; it is a form of our willingness to be honest and to exclude nothing.
Today, in Easter, as Easter, let us open our own arms and mind. Let us welcome the one who makes clear the way to happiness and peace. No more idle fantasies! No more half-assed bargaining. Half measures avail us nothing. We know this.
Let us see Him then, our brother and, in Him, the light that makes all seeing possible, unto the end of darkness and death.
Alleluia, alleluia.
Good Friday – Holy Saturday – Easter
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