Resurrecting Easter
A letter we shared with our Guild members on Easter morning.
This morning Brad woke up with no memory of what he had been dreaming, but felt energized with these surprising questions reverberating in his mind: “What is the body of the risen Christ? Is it made of earthy flesh or heavenly light? What happened to the body of Jesus on Easter day?” Brad then felt the middle wobble as he envisioned flying back to the tomb that was long ago opened on this celebrated date. It was reported that the body of Jesus was gone, nowhere to be found. That historically epic disappearing act became the fulcrum, crossroads, and crux of the Christian faith—Jesus conquered death with a resurrection show featuring the unexplainable vanishing of his flesh.
Brad’s morning question came back to him, this time radically altered: why is the experience of magical illusion so often required to prompt belief in the ineffable? What really happened to the body of Jesus, a man made of flesh whose suffering on the cross was real enough for him to cry out that he felt that his divine father had forsaken him? Something smelled fishy and in need of a cleaning to remove former historical scales.
Any deception or illusion of permanence, whether made of flesh or carved in stone, is delivered by trickster’s stage magic. Furthermore, any dependence on such sleight of hand or smoke and mirrors only leads to more encapsulation inside trickster’s small parlor trick room that is missing a fireplace. Beware when truth and evidence are defined only as that which is material and solid, and when the visual is regarded as the longest running singular sensation. Under this ontological spell, double worlds collapse to the ground and are buried in a soul forsaken grave. The tomb is the room that insists that the real is only material and never ethereal.
The alternative big room with an open-hearted door puts more empirical stock in mystical radiance—the ethereal light that shines when the fire of n/om is ecstatically felt in the body. Here the luminous Jesus is the numinous Christ, personally met and felt by many broken-hearted souls after the crucifixion, beginning with the closest members of his wandering apostle tribe. The mystical Jesus eschewed an emphasis on the material, regarding it as superficial. Rather than connote the material and ethereal as dichotomy, this master of non-illusion revealed them as a contrarian marriage of heaven and earth where hell is the scapegoated and triangulated third outsider invented by a fight between thought and matter, performed by an artificially separated mind and body.
A Zen roshi with one hand clapping and two worlds dancing might more wisely rearrange the Easter tomb to have the body remains left intact, stench and all. Amidst the maggots would also be found the nuggets of spiritual gold. For in death is found the reappearance of life, held inside the transient productions whose containers range from small cup to vast sea. First Creation cares not whether material is present or absent, for the dots, lines, circles, and Ouroborean patterns equally organize the visible and invisible sides of double, multiple worlds. In the boundary-less vastness, light, song, dance, and emotion prevail over any freeze-framed belief.
First Creation’s Passover night is accompanied by a Makeover day. Today we join the overlapping circle dances of the Bushman n/om-kxaosi, the Gnostic Jesus fish fry tribe, the outskirt whirling dervishes, the ecstatic rabbis, the egg-and-bunny loving pagans of Europe, and the later Native American Ghost dancers. Our altering, alternating histories and futures are situated in First Creation where new creation and New Jerusalem arise after every Second Creation downfall. This is when the big room tomb transforms into the holy womb. Resurrection is not about any singular body—it is about the whole room. Kaboom! In the resurrection room, all lives are reborn as suffering becomes joy and death leads to another round of the living vibration.
Bede[1], the English Benedictine monk, known as “the father of English history,” provided the only presumed documented source for the etymology of the word, Easter: Ēosturmōnaþ (Old English ‘Month of Ēostre’). This referred to the English month corresponding to April, which he claimed was named after a goddess named Eostre who was celebrated by feasts during that time of year. However, his account is now debated as very suspicious and intellectually wobbly. Some scholars wonder whether this goddess was an invention of Bede (like Eliade’s invention of the inflated importance of shamanic journeying). Perhaps he did more than resurrect this springtime goddess—he may have created her. Maybe he unconsciously knew this would help prepare him to enter the gates of First Creation heaven where improvised invention cooks better than memorized convention—that is, it’s easier to discard and let go of.
During the Last Supper in the upper room, Jesus prepared himself and his gathered spiritual outlaws for his big transition. He identified the matzah as his flesh and a cup of wine as his blood that would soon be shed for the good of the cause. Paul turns this prophecy into an instruction for the future: “Get rid of the old yeast that you may be a new batch without yeast—as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed,” referring to the Passover requirement to have no yeast in the house and to Jesus, the Paschal lamb, who now mystically functions as the yeast giving rise to a newborn room.
Rather than debate whether the body of Jesus was stolen by grave robbers, moved by the disciples, eaten by wild animals (common back then), or disappeared due to a magi’s stage magic, change the tomb room to see the mystical yeast that gives rise to illumined holy bread—a feast for the mystic rather than grist for the critical and noncritical sides of the trickster mill.
When you hunt for hidden Easter eggs today, whether outside your house or inside your body temple garden, we hope you notice the Kalahari ostrich egg that is already cracked wide open. Inside it is found the luminous yeast that transforms the least of you, the little me within, into an abundant soul feast. Do not forget that your luminous double holds the nails that convey n/om’s songs, dances, and emotion. Your inner spiritual body is found amidst the changing forms, embellished fireside tales, and sweetly seasoned water pails of First Creation.
What prevails and never changes today and in every day is the highest emotion of divine love. Rather than get stuck in proving the materiality of flesh or spirit, seek the electricity of higher emotion that spreads the fire, wind, earth, and rain. Seek not to run away from the body—neither its joys nor sufferings, appearances or disappearances. Embrace the ups and downs of your earthly somatics as the twin of your always-ready-to-be-felt-higher ecstatics. The body hosts your ongoing earthly transitions from wellbeing to illness and back again, the oscillations of pleasure and pain, the written and erased spiritual sentences, and the diverse punctuations of breath, death, and resuscitation.
Make the eternal vibration more primary than any passing materialization or dematerialization. Forget being impressed with claims of “going rainbow body” or any other kind of disappearing act when its hardened meaning evokes no surge of n/om or flood of redemptive love. Get amongst it all, including the trench and stench of sickness and death. Sweep away your old yeast collection and make room for the mystical carpenter’s birthing n/om nails, resurrection yeast, ecstatic baking, discerning lamb chops, sacred singing, holy ghost dancing, and Sacred Ecstatics fire setting that transforms your fixation on passing things to reorient the twoness of you toward the eternal light and everlasting delight.
Happy Easter!
– The Keeneys, April 12, 2020
[1] Bede is responsible for our knowing the story of Cædmon, the farmhand who mystically received his singing voice from a piebald cow. See Climbing the Rope to God, Volume 1 p. 206