We had hoped . . .

As Spring struggles to arrive, and while a good part of our congregation is at Acadia trying to remind the Spring that it's time, I thought a little bit of ancient heresy about rebirth might help it, or help us, anyway. It comes from the ancient Gnostics, whom the official church did so much to silence!

In the early centuries of the Common Era, the triumphant composite of Roman Empire and Church folded in together pinned your hope of salvation on a resuscitated cadaver, which was also the conquest of death.

According to that version of the story, Jesus the teacher had become Christ the God and had ascended into heaven, leaving no other direct witnesses, or interpreters, or representatives on earth, than the Church itself, and its special Apostles, appointed by the risen Christ on his way up and out. And to many people, if the body of that Galilean teacher turned God was not so resuscitated, then the bridge is out, it's all over, everything unravels.

But of course you know that there have always been other ways to look at this, without the need for a resuscitated body! It's just that all the others were declared heresy by this religio-political complex, and its official councils. It's to this heretical vision of the Gnostics that I now turn.

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You want to do something about death, which is problem for us, inasmuch as, in this world, none of us gets out of here alive. You want to do something about disappointment and sorrow and hurt.

Life's limitations. The Is-That-All-There-Is feeling.

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Death itself. Ever since Raymond Moody's book Life After Life people seem freer to talk about a desperation for immortality, to ask what death is like. There are accounts of near-death experiences, which generally imply not dying at all. Near death, after all, is not death.

Harold Bloom had one at 60, a medical emergency, had lost 60 percent of his blood. He reports that he, too, saw a bright light and he says he was wandering around lost, without feeling concerned about it. And then there came a grand religious revelation unveiling the secrets of Eternity and he exulted in this revelation, only to wake up and be quite unable to remember any of it.

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Oh well. The point is, he hadn't died, however close he came. Some of the earliest followers of Jesus saw resurrection that way. Resurrection wasn't supposed to come after death, but before. And the Resurrection didn't have anything to do with dead bodies coming to life.

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Consider that strange little story at the end of Luke's Gospel. Now this is Luke's own story; nowhere else is there anything like it. In his two books, Luke and Acts, you find this story about Jesus, after his resurrection, hanging around with his friends for forty days.

And here are two of his disciples, on their way to Emmaus. Which means on their way out of Jerusalem.

What the followers of Jesus felt after his execution cannot be far different than the despair expressed in these words of Thomas Carlyle, and known, in some form, with varying degrees of intensity, to every one of us. Here's how Carlyle put it:

"Are not the gates of this world's Happiness inexorably shut about thee; hast thou a hope that is not mad?"

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Utter hopelessness, crushing disappointment. They were heading out of Jerusalem, scene of trauma and disillusion. And fear, and danger, and sorrow, and a memory of horror. Of course they were on their way out of Jerusalem, headed for the quiet sanctuary of Emmaus.

Please note. They find a third person walking with them and what he says inspires them and their hearts burn within them — but they don't recognize him.

This is no bodily resurrection.

In so many of these ancient resurrection stories, they don't recognize him. What, had he shaved off his beard? Got new glasses? No. These little pieces of ancient tradition don't come from people who wanted you to think they'd seen him in the flesh.

Now, other, later stories, in these same Gospels, are indeed speaking of the resuscitated body of a man turned God. These don't interest me.

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So — uh, well, did they see him, or not? was he really there, or not? But this ancient fable doesn't have to add up: It is, after all, a fable. Did they see him? What you love will live in your eyes. They recognized no physical presence but they recognized his presence. And filled up with that recognition, they turn around. They head back to Jerusalem to face whatever must be faced there.

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And look at what happens in the Gospel of Thomas — the oldest of the Gospels, rejected by the Church. In the Gospel of Thomas, this Jesus, a wisdom teacher, doesn't require any resurrection, because resurrection is all around us. Listen to what he says: the Kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don't see it.

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We had hoped. Well, they had really hoped. Hoped with every fiber of their being, that's how hard they had hoped. A love had aroused hope.

Never mind that what they had hoped was little more than a reconstruction of long-learned habits of thought and expectation, seasonal re-runs of the old national myth, another tired return to the inadequate hopes | everybody had | that had already failed, only this time they wouldn't, would they, this time it would be better. That's what we always say.

Did you ever live that way? We will try the same thing only this time it will work. Like a revolving restaurant except the entree never comes. It is a psychological fact that we seem bent on going around and around again, in the same dismal merry-go-round, hoping that this time it will come out right.

This is the quandary and challenge of life. What it takes to stop the cycle, to open our minds and hearts to a wider domain of possibility. We don't go there easily. Everything we know is the past. It is hard, so hard, to step off the conveyer belt, which does it all for us, and set out on our own journey to destiny, who knows where.

Frances Wickes put it so well:

The victim who is nailed to his own dead past is crucified on the tree of death, which will never flower into a tree of new life, and the victim is a useless sacrifice to an ancient unchanging image of an untransformed and untransforming god, who has lost the power of creation and re-creation."¹

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There is death, and there is resurrection. What has to die?

The primitive mind had its answers to that.

In primitive ages, at the dawn of consciousness, the gods required victims. There was a nasty kind of relationship between the god and the victim. In the dark of fear, the unwilling and impotent victim was slain | to feed the savage blood lust of the gods | and to win their favor. Only when the wrath of god was appeased by the offering up of the human sacrifice, could favor be bestowed upon the tribe. Cruel rites, dark mysteries distorted the early human's concept of the god image and of the relation of human and god. And the god was something out-there, something to be feared.

Over time, human consciousness evolved. And now the god-image was transformed in the human heart, the drama moved inward. Primeval fear and superstition fell away and, in the growing human consciousness, god and human met. The energy of the god became an inner energy, an inner life never fully known, but more and more understood as a transforming process. Humans slowly became conscious, and God found human form. The fear and dread felt toward the gods was replaced by a different kind of relationship: love. And love is the source of hope.

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Oh.

Well, I mean by all this.

The Commonwealth of God is within. So is the dying and rising. And that would be terrible news if it were all up to you. But that is to leave a critical factor out.

This divine commonwealth or Kingdom-of-God within is an energy and a power that is one with the power that ignites the stars and gives you life and makes the earth awaken in spring. It is that great and fiery force sparkling in everything that lives.

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Hope is a spiritual force. When it solidifies into something specific for which you hope, a kingdom or an accomplishment maybe, it is no longer hope, but a goal, a plan. Goals and plans are good working maps for living. They are not the spiritual force I mean by hope. They are subject to being smashed to fine dust without notice.

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We are so sure of what it is we yearn for, and so sure when our hopes are disappointed.

And the powers and forces of life do not play out on a small and placid stage, and sometimes everything we can see seems disjointed and in motion. Or, to shift the imagery a little, the times come when we must enter the tides and surf of a great sea with the knowledge that we can swim, because we are made of the same stuff as the sea that tosses us about.

Inherent in the storms, and the great contests, and the tumult of change, is great energy. These are powerful moments and places. There is more to us than we know, and these moments demand the strength of the gods, and these reside in us.

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I don't think I mean by this that, because the powers that lay within us and within the dramas and situations of life are so great, that we should, therefore, never weep, never experience fear or sorrow.

The person who is fully alive feels things — feels the magnitude and depth and breadth of things — we don't get the painless distance of the mere observer, which is also the ecstasy-less distance of the observer. You feel it, feel the whole force of it, and you know something more. You know there is another dimension to it. You know there are energies at work that you can't see, and an intelligence is moving all this great roaring maelstrom along toward something you haven't imagined, something that is more deeply, more truly, what you hoped than any plan or goal you could fashion, any image you could visualize.

The idea of rising from the dead, and the stories about it, took many forms, from orthodox to gnostic, in a host of gospels the church fathers didn't care to publish. That itself is a lesson for us. This death and resurrection stuff is not a predictable solid, but the powers of the gods.

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The death part: We understand about the loss; it is real enough to us. You already know about loss.

There are those things we thought were so essential, and they are wrenched away; and there are others that we have to find the will to let go ourselves. You may have spent quite a bit of your life getting rid of things you don't love — part of your history, stories about aches and struggles, resentments and hurt and paths taken and then, upon coming to your senses, abandoned. Baggage we've carried. This is useful work. But it only brings us back up to zero. All the poets and mystics and saints say a human life can go higher than zero.

And the star we choose to follow upward is the star of what we love. But we don't always recognize it.

What opens your heart, excites your spirit, lights up your imagination, ignites your passion and curiosity? The same draws us toward some place of great destiny.

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But the days of our lives are theatres for transformation, where death and rebirth always awaits, where our cries of "We had hoped" must give way to a deeper sight, a more penetrating vision that can see beyond our plans and goals to something more. That takes a different kind of consciousness. It's more than an intellectual idea.

Here is something else the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas says:

"I am not your teacher. Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated from the bubbling spring that I have tended."

This saying has only a little to do with grasping a concept, and nothing at all to do with obedience to a Messiah or lordly Deity. It is about a state of consciousness; it is about being in love. "You have become intoxicated from the bubbling spring that I have tended."

And Resurrection is not something that happens after death! A Sufi writer found this statement in a novella by Balzac²:

Resurrection is accomplished by the wind of heaven that sweeps the worlds. The Angel carried by the wind does not say: Arise ye dead! He says: Let the living arise!

Last week I read another marvelous passage, this from the second century, the Valentinian Gospel According to Philip:

Those who say that the lord first died and then arose are mistaken, for he first arose and then died. . . . People who say they will first die and then arise are mistaken. If they do not first receive resurrection while they are alive, once they have died they will receive nothing.

What happened on that Emmaus road, on their bitter flight from Jerusalem, the scene of their disillusion? But it is a fable, about you and me, about how we see. Our despair cries out, "We had hoped," but we might want to listen to how we finish our sentence. Hoped?

Hope is the response of the soul to something from beyond that draws us forward. If you already know what's there, it isn't hope.

But hope, divinely-intoxicated hope, has the capacity, with quiet listening, gentle reflection, patient attentiveness, to discern in unexpected places the deeper object of its yearning, the many-formed One with whom we are in love.

In this story, a love had been aroused.

What we love, we become. And we may be amazed as the beauty of its real nature is revealed.

You will recognize what you love. You will discern it in the passing caravan of things and persons and events. What we love will live in our eyes, like the dog I once had who could always see, anywhere, in any conditions, certain small animals or edibles. I knew of a potter who loved yellow glaze, which he made from a certain yellow sand, which his eyes could spot where no one else would see it. What you love will guide you. After all our losses and beyond them, this is the way up from zero.

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What we love, we become. There is no other possible destiny.

That is why we must hew close to our bliss.

There is hope as long as there is love. While love remains, so does hope. Sometimes our efforts seem to be futile. When we see our works carried away like sandcastles in the surf, we might remember that the Buddha speaks about right understanding and right mindfulness and right effort and right work and right action, but the Buddha never speaks of right result.

What will happen to our effort, to the gift we bring?

We think our loving is in vain, lost to the ether. When I feel that way, I turn, you will not be surprised to learn, to Emerson, who writes:

It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. . . . Thou art enlarged by thy own shining. . . . It is thought a disgrace to love unrequited. But the great will see that true love cannot be unrequited. True love transcends [its] object, and dwells and broods on the eternal . . .

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We had hoped. And real hope is a spiritual power whose source is divine. But it is a transformative power that leads us, sometimes painfully, beyond the goals were once thought adequate. Leads us to the breaking of lesser goals, and in the breaking, to the opening up of ourselves, and there is more to us than we know, more than has yet been made visible, and the gods dwell at the core of our Selves. Let the living arise!

¹ Frances G. Wickes. The Inner World of Choice. Boston: Sego Press, 1988, p. 148.

² Louis Lambert, cited by Henry Corin.

³ Frances G. Wickes. The Inner World of Choice. Boston: Sego Press, 1988, p. 147f.

⁴ Harold Bloom. Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection. New York: Riverhead/Berkley, 1996.

⁵ Thomas Carlyle. Sartor Resartus. II:vi. In A Carlyle Reader, ed. G.B. Tennyson. Cambridge University Press, 1984, p. 230f.

R E A D I N G S

I'm reading first an odd little story tucked away in the 24th chapter of the Gospel of Luke

[Luke 24.13ff ]

Now, that same day two of them were traveling to a village named Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem. They were engaged in conversation about all that had taken place. And it so happened, during the course of their discussion, that Jesus himself approached and began to walk along with them. But they couldn't recognize him.

He said to them, "What are you discussing as you walked along?"

Then they paused, looking depressed. One of them, named Cleopas, said to him in reply, "Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who doesn't know what's happened there these last few days?"

And he said to them, "What are you talking about?"

And they said to him, "About Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet powerful in word and deed in the eyes of God and all the people, and about how our ranking priests and rulers turned him in to be sentenced to death, and crucified him. We were hoping that he would be the one who was going to ransom Israel."

They had gotten close to the village to which they were going, and he acted as if he were going on. But they entreated him, saying, "Stay with us; it's almost evening, the day is practically over." So he went in to stay with them.

And so, as soon as he took his place at table with them, he took a loaf, and gave a blessing, broke it, and started passing it out to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. They said to each other, "Weren't our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road?" And they got up at once and returned to Jerusalem.

From the Gospel of Thomas, chapter 113:

His disciples said to him, "When will Kingdom come?"

"It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, 'Look, here!' or 'Look, there!' Rather, the Kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don't see it."