best yet to be

musings on what is really real

recent posts

about

  • A Vision True and Mighty Yet

    the best is yet to be 

    To be afraid of death is only another form of thinking that one is wise when one is not; it is to think that one knows what one does not know. No one knows with regard to death whether it is not really the greatest blessing that can happen to a man, but people dread it as though they were certain that it is the greatest evil.     –Socrates, 399 B.C. (Apology) 

    I have long imagined, as may have many, that leaving this world is like waking from a dream. The first impression is utter confusion, as the “waking” world begins to intrude on the familiar world of the dream. In an instant, this is reversed, and the intruding world is familiar again, while the clarity of the dream rapidly fades.  

    Dying might be something like that, perhaps in slow motion. The title “Buddha” means the “Enlightened One”, or the “Awakened One”. In his chapter on Buddhism in The World’s Religions, Huston Smith writes: “While the rest of the world was wrapped in the womb of sleep, dreaming a dream known as the waking state of human life, one of their number roused himself. Buddhism begins with a man who….woke up.” 

    In 1872, at the age of nine, Black Elk, a Lakota of the Oglala Sioux, became ill and lost consciousness for several days, and his family had just about concluded he had left them for good. He returned to his family and the Oglala people changed by a vision he would not convey in full to another human being until John G. Neihardt came to visit him in 1930. (And even then there were aspects of his vision he could not put into words.) Their collaboration produced Black Elk Speaks, a religious classic. Here are three excerpts:  

    If the vision was true and mighty, as I know, it is true and mighty yet; for such things are of the spirit, and it is in the darkness of their eyes that men get lost. 

    [N]othing I have ever seen with my eyes was so clear and bright as what my vision showed me; and no words that I have ever heard with my ears were like the words I heard. I did not have to remember these things; they have remembered themselves all these years….[E]ven now I know that more was shown to me than I can tell. 

    Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together as one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy. 

    When Black Elk was sixteen, he had become quite anxious that he had not been able to fulfill the vision he had received. He had prayed to the Grandfathers of his vision and they had helped him, but, in his words: “I did not know how to do what they wanted me to do.” 

    A terrible time began for me then, and I could not tell anybody, not even my father and mother. I was afraid to see a cloud coming up; and whenever one did, I could hear the thunder beings calling me: “Behold your Grandfathers! Make haste!” I could understand the birds when they sang and they were always saying: “It is time! It is time!” The crows in the day and the coyotes at night all called and called to me: “It is time! It is time! It is time!” 

    Time to do what? I did not know. Whenever I awoke before daybreak and went out of the tepee because I was afraid of the stillness when everyone was sleeping, there were many low voices talking together in the east, and the daybreak star would sing this song in the silence: 

    “In a sacred manner you shall walk! Your nation shall behold you!” 

    His parents sought the help of a medicine man named Black Road. Black Elk related enough of his vision to Black Road that the latter urged him to enact part of it. “You must do your duty and perform this vision for your people upon earth,” he said. You must have the horse dance first for the people to see.” 

    And so, preparations to enact the horse dance of his vision were made. Black Elk spent most of one night in a tepee with Black Road and another elder, Bear Sings, teaching them songs from his vision. “While we were in there singing,” Black Elk related, “we could hear low thunder rumbling all over the village outside, and we knew the thunder beings were glad and had come to help us.” 

    The next day as the enactment was underway, Black Elk recalled, “a strange thing happened:” 

    My bay pricked up his ears and raised his tail and pawed the earth, neighing long and loud, and the whites and the sorrels and the buckskins did the same; and all the other horses in the village neighed, and even those out grazing in the valley and on the hill slopes raised their heads and neighed together. Then suddenly, as I sat there looking at the cloud, I saw my vision yonder once again—the tepee built with cloud and sewed with lightning, the flaming rainbow door and, underneath, the Six Grandfathers sitting, and all the horses thronging in their quarters; and also there was I myself upon my bay before the tepee. I looked about me and could see that what we then were doing was like a shadow cast upon the earth from yonder vision in the heavens, so bright it was and clear. I knew the real was yonder, and the darkened dream of it was here. 

    Decades later, Black Elk told Neihardt that the vision had been given to a man too weak to use it; to a large extent he felt he had failed his people. Perhaps he found some solace in knowing that with Neihardt’s help he had preserved for future generations the part which could be expressed in words. But if God speaks to all peoples in terms familiar to each (Qur’an, 14:4), then Black Elk’s vision might be a portrait, tailored for the Oglala people, of the real world which we all will awake to, as the last excerpt above suggests. Hence, what was true and mighty once may yet be true and mighty, for all time and beyond. 

  • William James, Mysticism, and the Reality of the Unseen 

     

    I knew so well the satisfaction of losing self in a perception of supreme power and love.         

                                                                            –from The Varieties of Religious Experience 

      

    What follows are some truly uplifting passages from William James’ book, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). The brother of novelist Henry James, William studied and wrote in the fields of Philosophy and Psychology. 

                The Varieties of Religious Experience is based on twenty lectures James gave in 1901 and 1902 at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. The passages I have selected are from two chapters, one titled “Mysticism”, based on lectures 16 and 17, and the other titled “The Reality of the Unseen”, based on his third lecture. (The page numbers included are from the Modern Library edition, 1994.

                These passages include testimonies of personal revelations of a realm “beyond” our normal state of consciousness. I put “beyond” in quotation marks because, as you will read, our immortality is not spoken of as something we will finally achieve, but something we have already, unbeknownst to most of us, presumably. 

                With the exception of the next to last selection, these are not accounts by disciplined mystics, people from the various religious traditions who have made it their life-long endeavor to know and “dwell” in the presence of the Power that Be, even as they remain in the flesh and blood. The human race is blessed with plentiful accounts of what the mystics know, even though, as they all report, words cannot do justice to the mystic experience. 

                From these examples of sporadic wanderings into a cosmic or mystic consciousness, as well as the reports of disciplined mystics, our concepts of past, present, and future as separable states of time do not apply; similarly, the self, or ego, disappears or is absorbed by the One. 

    Because we are so accustomed to being in our individual selves, we might suppose this “annihilation” of the self to be impersonal, or lacking in joy as we have known and crave in this life. Alas, if we could only suspend our fear of the unknown, and trust in the Power that Be. The joy to be found in this higher realm, though not quite like we have known, will not disappoint. 

                 

                Our first example comes from a Canadian psychiatrist, Dr. R. M. Bucke. The following experience inspired him to investigate similar experiences by others, from which he produced the book, Cosmic Consciousness: a study in the evolution of the human mind (Philadelphia, 1901). 

                I had spent the evening in a great city, with two friends, reading and discussing poetry and philosophy. We parted at midnight. I had a long drive in a hansom to my lodging. My mind, deeply under the influence of the ideas, images and emotions called up by the reading and talk, was calm and peaceful. I was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment, not actually thinking, but letting ideas, images, and emotions flow of themselves, as it were, through my mind. All at once, without warning of any kind, I found myself wrapped in a flame-colored cloud. For an instant I thought of fire, an immense conflagration somewhere close by in that great city; the next, I knew that the fire was within myself. Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe. Among other things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life. It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life, but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life then; I saw that all  men are immortal; that the cosmic order is such that without any peradventure [doubt] all things work together for the good of each and all; that the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love, and that the happiness of each and all is in the long run absolutely certain. The vision lasted only a few seconds and was gone; but the memory of it and the sense of the reality of what it taught has remained during the quarter of a century that has thus elapsed. I knew that what the vision showed was true. I had attained to a point of view from which I saw that it must be true. That view, that conviction, I may say that consciousness, has never, even during periods of the deepest depression, been lost (p.435). 

                

      

                Our second example comes from the poet Alfred Tennyson: 

      

                [A] kind of waking trance—this for lack of a better word—I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has come upon me through repeating my own name to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state but the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words—where death was an almost laughable impossibility—the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life. I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said the state is utterly beyond words? 

                By God Almighty! There is no delusion in the matter! It is no nebulous ecstasy, but a state of transcendent wonder, associated with absolute clearness of mind (p.418). 

                

                

    Our third example is that of a clergyman: 

      

                I remember the night, and almost the very spot on the hilltop, where my soul opened out, into the Infinite, and there was a rushing together of the two worlds, the inner and the outer. It was deep calling unto deep—the deep that my own struggle had opened up within being answered by the unfathomable deep without, reaching beyond the stars. I stood alone with Him who had made me, and the beauty of the world, and love, and sorrow, and even temptation. I did not seek Him, but felt the perfect unison of my spirit with His. The ordinary sense of things around me faded. For the moment nothing but the ineffable joy and exultation remained. It is impossible fully to describe the experience. It was like the effect of some great orchestra when all the separate notes have melted into one swelling harmony that leaves the listener conscious of nothing save that his soul is being wafted upwards, and almost bursting with its own emotion. The perfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it was unseen. I could not any more have doubted that He was there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the two (p.76). 

      

    Our fourth example is related by a Swiss, translated by James from the French original: 

      

                I was in perfect health; we were on our sixth day of tramping, and in good training….I felt neither fatigue, hunger, nor thirst and my state of mind was equally healthy….I can best describe the condition in which I was by calling it a state of equilibrium. When all at once I experienced a feeling of being raised above myself, I felt the presence of God—I tell of the thing just as I was conscious of it—as if his goodness and his power were penetrating me altogether. The throb of emotion was so violent that I could barely tell the boys to pass on and not wait for me. I then sat down on a stone, unable to stand any longer, and my eyes overflowed with tears. I thanked God that in the course of my life he had taught me to know him, that he sustained my life and took pity both on the insignificant creature and on the sinner that I was. I begged him ardently that my life might be consecrated to the doing of his will. I felt his reply, which was that I should do his will from day to day in humility and poverty….The impression had been so profound that in climbing slowly the slope I asked myself if it were possible that Moses on Sinai could have had a more intimate communication with God. I think it is well to add that in this ecstasy of mine God had neither form, color, odor nor taste; moreover, that the feeling of his presence was accompanied with no determinate localization. It was rather as if my personality had been transformed by the presence of a spiritual spirit. But the more I seek words to express this intimate [communion], the more I feel the impossibility of describing the thing by any of our usual images. At bottom the expression most apt to render what I felt is this: God was present, though invisible; he fell under no one of my senses, yet my consciousness perceived him (pp.77-79). 

                

    William James himself could not report any spontaneous mystical-type experience of his own like those related thus far. But at the risk of raising a few eyebrows, I can relate that he had experimented with nitrous oxide and ether, which he had heard could stimulate a mystical-like state. “Depth beyond depth of truth seems revealed to the inhaler” he wrote. “This truth fades out, however, or escapes, at the moment of coming to; and if any words remain over in which it seemed to clothe itself, they prove to be the verist nonsense. Nevertheless, the sense of a profound meaning having been there persists…” 

    Some years ago I myself made some observations on this aspect of nitrous oxide intoxication, and reported them in print. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question—for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness….Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge towards a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance. The keynote of it is invariably a reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity. Not only do they, as contrasted species, belong to one and the same genus, but one of the species, the nobler and better one, is itself the genus, and so soaks up and absorbs its opposite into itself….(pp.422-23, emphasis original). 

      

                Given his time and place, most of James’ examples naturally involve individuals who identified as Christian, or were most familiar with that tradition. For the sake of variety, it is fitting to include a passage James selected from the autobiography of al-Ghazali (d. 1111 C.E), who is credited with a reconciliation of orthodox Islam and Sufism, the Muslim mystic tradition. William James, reflecting a common shortcoming of Western intellectualism of the time, and which arguably still remains, was noticeably under-informed on the subject of Islam, as was I on September 11, 2001. For instance, James refers to the faith as “Mohammedanism”. Nonetheless, James quotes from al-Ghazali at length, obviously impressed by his intellectual and spiritual achievements: 

                The science of the Sufis aims at detaching the heart from all that is not God, and at giving to it for sole occupation the meditation of the divine being. Theory being more easy for me than practice, I read [certain books] until I understood all that can be learned by study and hearsay. Then I recognized that what pertains most exclusively to their method is just what no study can grasp, but only transport, ecstasy, and the transformation of the soul…. 

                Reflecting on my situation, I found myself tied down by a multitude of bonds—temptations on every side. Considering my teaching, I found it was impure before God. I saw myself struggling with all my might to achieve glory and to spread my name. [Here follows an account of his six months’ hesitation to break away from the conditions of his life at Baghdad, at the end of which he fell ill with a paralysis of the tongue.] Then, feeling my own weakness, and having entirely given up my own will, I repaired to God like a man in distress who has no more resources. He answered, as he answers the wretch who invokes him….So I quitted Baghdad, and reserving from my fortune only what was indispensable for my subsistence, I distributed the rest. I went to Syria, where I remained about two years, with no other occupation than living in retreat and solitude, conquering my desires, combating my passions, training myself to purify my soul, to make my character perfect, to prepare my heart for meditation on God—all according to the methods of the Sufis, as I had read of them. 

                ….During this solitary state things were revealed to me which it is impossible either to describe or to point out. I recognized for certain that the Sufis are assuredly walking in the path of God. Both in their acts and in their inaction, whether internal or external, they are illumined by the light which proceeds from the prophetic source. The first condition for a Sufi is to purge his heart entirely of all that is not God. The next key of the contemplative life consists in the humble prayers which escape from the fervent soul, and in the meditations on God in which the heart is swallowed up entirely. But in reality this is only the beginning of the Sufi life, the end of Sufism being total absorption in God….From the beginning, revelations take place in so flagrant a shape that the Sufis see before them, whilst wide awake, the angels and the souls of the prophets. They hear their voices and obtain their favors. Then the transport rises from the perception of forms and figures to a degree which escapes all expression, and which no man may seek to give an account of without his words involving sin (pp.439-41). 

      

                I conclude with this brief and powerful insight from the German idealist Malwida von Meysenbug, on the occasion of praying on a seashore, “before the illimitable ocean, symbol of the Infinite: 

                

    I prayed as I have never prayed before, and knew now what prayer really is: to return from the solitude of individuation into the consciousness of unity with all that is, to kneel down as one that passes away, and to rise up as one imperishable (p.431). 

  • What Is it About Jesus?

    excerpts from Huston Smith’s chapter on Christianity (in The World’s Religions) 

    Introduction 

    Our earthbound existence seems anything but fair, or just. If life is not simply a cruel joke, more must be in store for us.  

    Mystics of various traditions report that our self-centered “reality” is an illusion, that the foundational principle of the worlds is Love, and a joy incomparable awaits us. 

    I am not a Christian, but some of my best friends are. I was inspired to produce this much condensed version of Huston Smith’s treatment of Christianity in the hope that it might be of help to anyone despairing of life, or simply curious about the Power that Be, especially anyone raised even minimally in a Christian tradition. It is never too early to wonder. 

    The excerpts which follow are from the first 18 pages of Smith’s 45-page chapter. I have used bold type for emphasis (which I see is not easy to distinguish from the rest). Included are passages regarding the Christian concept that Jesus is God incarnate, which many readers may not subscribe to. But I could hardly have done justice to the subject by excluding such passages. And Smith explains very well how the first Christians, experiencing Christ’s remarkable love, came to that conviction. 

    With no further ado, take it away, Huston! 

    The power of the unseen 

    Minimally stated, Jesus was a charismatic wonder-worker who stood in a tradition that stretched back to the beginnings of Hebrew history. The prophets and seers who comprised that tradition mediated between the everyday world, on the one hand, and a Spirit world that enveloped it. From the latter they drew power, which they used both to help people and to challenge their ways (p.318). 

    ….Though Spirit was typically pictured as being above the earth…that was only to stress its distinctness from, and superiority over, the mundane world. The two were not spatially separated, and were in continuous interaction…(p.319). 

    Not only was Spirit not spatially removed; though invisible, it could be known. Often it would take the initiative and announce itself. It did this supremely to Moses on Mount Sinai, but it also spoke in a still small voice to Elijah….Concurrently, human beings could take the initiative in contacting it. Fasting and solitude were means for doing so, and Jews who felt the call would periodically remove themselves from the world’s distractions to commune with the divine through these aids…[W]hen they return to the world they often give evidence of having almost palpably absorbed something: Spirit and its attendant power (pp.319-20). 

    That Jesus stood in the Jewish tradition of Spirit-filled mediators is the most important fact for understanding his historical career. His immediate predecessor in this tradition was John the Baptist; and it is a testament to his spiritual power that it was his initiation (baptism) of Jesus that opened his third or spiritual eye,… causing him to see “the heavens opened and the Spirit descending upon him like a dove.” Having descended, the Spirit “drove” Jesus into the wilderness where, during forty days of prayer and fasting, he consolidated the Spirit which had entered him. Having done so, he reentered the world, empowered.  

    If science no longer discounts invisible realities, it has also grown open to the prospect that they may be powerful, for experiments now suggest that “the energy inherent in one cubic centimeter of empty space is greater than the energy of all the matter in the known universe.”i Whatever the fate of that particular hypothesis, the Jews accepted the supremacy of Spirit over nature without question. The Spirit-filled personages of the Bible have power. To say they were charismatic is to say they had power to attract peoples’ attention, but that is only the beginning of the matter. The reason they attracted notice was the exceptional power they possessed (p.320).  

    What made [Jesus] outlive his time and place was the way he used the Spirit that coursed through him not just to heal individuals but—this was his aspiration—to heal humanity, beginning with his own people (p.321). 

    God’s central attribute 

    Politically, the position of the Jews in Jesus’ time was desperate. They had been in servitude to Rome for the better part of a century, and, along with their loss of freedom, were being taxed almost beyond endurance. Existing responses to their predicament were four. [Here Smith summarizes the positions of the Sadducees, the Essenes, the Pharisees, and the Zealots.] 

    ….Unlike the Sadducees, [Jesus] wanted change. Unlike the Essenes, he stayed in the world. Unlike the advocates of the military option, he extolled peacemakers and urged that even enemies be loved. It was the Pharisees that Jesus stood closest to, for the difference between them was one of emphasis only. The Pharisees stressed Yahweh’s holiness, while Jesus stressed Yahweh’s compassion; but the Pharisees would have been the first to insist that Yahweh was also compassionate, and Jesus that Yahweh was holy. The difference appears at first to be small, but in actuality it proved to be too large for a single religion to accommodate. We must understand why this was the case (pp.321-22). 

    Grounding themselves in the understanding that Yahweh was majestic holiness, the Pharisees went on to affirm the accepted version of Jewish understanding. Being holy himself, Yahweh wanted to hallow the world as well, and to accomplish this aim he selected the Jews to plant for him, as it were, a beachhead of holiness in human history. On Mount Sinai he had prescribed a holiness code, faithful observance of which would make the Hebrews “a nation of priests.”….It was laxity in the observation of the holiness code that had reduced the Jews to their degraded state, and only the whole-hearted return to it would reverse that state. 

    Much of this Jesus subscribed to, but there was an important feature of the holiness program he found unacceptable: the lines that it drew between people. Beginning by characterizing acts and things as clean or unclean (foods and their preparation, for example), the holiness code went on to categorize people according to whether they respected those distinctions. The result was a social structure that was riven with barriers: between people who were clean and unclean, pure and defiled, sacred and profane, Jew and Gentile, righteous and sinner. Having concluded that Yahweh’s central attribute was compassion, Jesus saw social barriers as an affront to that compassion. So he parleyed with tax collectors, dined with outcasts and sinners, socialized with prostitutes, and healed on the sabbath when compassion prompted doing so. This made him a social prophet, challenging the boundaries of the existing order and advocating an alternative vision of the human community (p.322). 

    ….[Jesus’] own encounter with God…led him to the conviction that, as practiced in his time, the purity system had created social divisions that compromised God’s compassion….(p,322-23) 

    It is important to emphasize that the issue was not God’s compassion; it was whether the social system that the holiness code in its outworkings had structured was compassionate. Jesus’ conviction that it was not put him at odds with the Pharisees, but his protest did not prevail. It did, however, attract enough attention to alarm the Roman authorities, which led to Jesus’ arrest and execution on charges of treason. 

    ….Jesus’ mission had been to crack the shell of Judaism in which revelation was encased and release that revelation to a ready and waiting world (p.323). 

    ….Circulating easily…among ordinary people and social misfits, healing them, counseling them, helping them out of chasms of despair, Jesus went about doing good. He did so with such single-mindedness and effectiveness that those who were with him constantly found their estimate of him modulating to a new key. They found themselves thinking that if divine goodness were to manifest itself in human form, this is how it would behave (p.324). 

    ….Instead of telling people what to do or what to believe, he invited them to see things differently, confident that if they did so their behavior would change accordingly. This called for working with peoples’ imaginations more than with their reason or their will….Jesus located the authority for his teachings not in himself or in God-as-removed but in his hearer’s hearts. My teachings are true, he said in effect, not because they come from me, or even God through me, but because (against all conventionality) your own hearts attest to their truth (p.325). 

    ….Everything that came from his lips formed the surface of a burning glass to focus human awareness on the two most important facts about life: God’s overwhelming love of humanity, and the need for people to accept that love and let it flow through them to others….(pp.326-27). 

    The only way to make sense of Jesus’ extraordinary admonitions as to how people should live is to see them as cut from this understanding of the God who loves human beings absolutely, without pausing to calculate their worth or due. We are to give others our cloak as well as our coat if they need it. Why? Because God has given us what we need. We are to go with others the second mile. Why? Because we know deeply, overwhelmingly, that God has borne with us for far longer stretches. Why should we love not only our friends but our enemies, and pray for those who persecute us? “So that you may be children of your Father in heaven….We say this ethic is perfectionistic—a polite word for unrealistic—because it asks that we love unreservedly. But the reason we consider that unrealistic, Jesus would have answered, is because we do not experience the constant, unstinted love that flows from God to us. If we did experience it, problems would still arise. To which of the innumerable needy should limited supplies of coats and cloaks be given? If the target of evil is someone other than myself, should I still not resist it? Jesus offered no rule book to obviate hard choices. What he argued was the stance from which they should be approached. All we can say in advance, as we face the demands of a tangled world, is that we should respond to our neighbors—all of them insofar as we can foresee the consequences of our acts—not in proportion to what we judge to be their due, but in proportion to their need. The cost to us personally should count for nothing (p.327). 

    …His entire life was one of humility, self-giving, and love that sought not its own. The supreme evidence of his humility is that it is impossible to discover precisely what Jesus thought of himself. His concern was what people thought of God…True, by indirection this tells us something about Jesus’ own self-image, but it is the obvious, that he esteemed himself to be less than God. Why do you call me good? Don’t you know that only God is good?” (p.328) 

    ….He liked people and they liked him in turn. They loved him; they loved him intensely and they loved him in numbers….People responded to Jesus , but equally he responded to them. He felt their appeal, whether they were rich or poor, young or old, saints or sinners. We have seen that he ignored the barriers that mores erected between people. He loved children. He hated injustice because of what it did to those he called “the least of these” (Matthew 25:40). Above all he hated hypocrisy, because it hid people from themselves and precluded the authenticity he sought to build into relationships. In the end it seemed to those who knew him best that here was a man in whom the human ego had disappeared, leaving his life so completely under the will of God that it was transparent to that will (pp.328-29). 

    Victorious over death 

    We are given too few details to know exactly what happened after the crucifixion; virtually all that is certain is that his followers were convinced that death had not held him. They reported that beginning on Easter Sunday he “appeared to them” as the same person they had known during his ministry but in a new way….Fidelity to the reports…make clear that he did not simply resume his former physical body; resurrection was not resuscitation. Instead, it was entry into another mode of being, a mode that was sometimes visible but usually was not. What is clear is that Jesus’ followers began to experience him in a new way, namely as having the qualities of God. He could now be known anywhere, not just in physical proximity. 

    Faith in Jesus’ resurrection produced the Church and its Christology. To grasp the power of the belief, we must see that it did not merely concern the fate of a worthy man. Its claim extended ultimately to the status of goodness in the universe, contending that it was all-powerful. If Golgotha’s cross had been the end, the goodness Jesus embodied would have been beautiful, but how significant? A fragile blossom afloat on a torrential stream, soon to be dashed—how relevant is goodness if it has no purchase on reality, no power at its disposal? …Instead of being fragile, the compassion his disciples had encountered in him was powerful; victorious over everything, even the seeming end of everything, death itself. 

    The conviction that Jesus continued to live transformed a dozen or so disconsolate followers of a slain and discredited leader into one of the most dynamic groups in human history. We read that tongues of fire descended upon them. It was a fire destined to set the Mediterranean world aflame. People who were not speakers waxed eloquent. They exploded across the Greco-Roman world, preaching what had come to be called the Gospel, but which, if translated literally, would be called the Good News. Starting in an upper room in Jerusalem, they spread their message with such fervor that in Jesus’ very generation it took root in every major city in the region (p.330). 

    ….The people who first heard Jesus’ disciples proclaiming the Good News were as impressed by what they saw as by what they heard. They saw lives that had been transformed—men and women who were ordinary in every way except for the fact that they seemed to have found the secret of living. They evinced a tranquility, simplicity, and cheerfulness that their hearers had nowhere else encountered…(p.331) 

    Specifically, there seemed to be two qualities in which their lives abounded. The first of these was mutual regard. One of the earliest observations about Christians that we have by an outsider is, “see how these Christians love one another.” Integral to this mutual regard was the total absence of social barriers; it was a “discipleship of equals,” as a New Testament scholar puts it.ii Here were men and women who not only said that everyone was equal in the sight of God but who lived as though they meant it. The conventional barriers of race, gender, and status meant nothing to them, for in Christ there was neither Jew nor Gentile, male nor female, slave nor free…. 

    ….Jesus once told his followers that his teachings were to the end “that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete” (John 15:11)….These scattered Christians were not numerous. They were not wealthy or powerful. If anything, they faced more adversity than the average man or woman. Yet, in the midst of their trials, they had laid hold of an inner peace that found expression in a joy that seemed exuberant….Life for them was no longer a matter of coping. It was glory discerned (p.332). 

    Liberated from fear, guilt, and the ego 

    What produced this love and joy in these early Christians?….The explanation, insofar as we are able to gather from the New Testament record, is that three intolerable burdens had suddenly and dramatically been lifted from their shoulders. The first of these was fear, including the fear of death. We have the word of Carl Jung that he never met a patient over forty whose problems did not root back to fear of approaching death. The reason the Christians could not be intimidated by the lions and even sang as they entered the arena was that Jesus’ counsel, “fear not, for I am with you,” worked for them. 

    The second burden from which they had been released was guilt….Recognized or repressed, guilt of some degree seems built into the human condition, for no one lives up to his or her ideals completely….[W]e also fail ourselves by leaving talents undeveloped and letting opportunities slip….Unrelieved guilt reduces creativity. In its acute form it can rise to a fury of self-condemnation that shuts life down…. 

    The third release the Christians experienced was from the cramping confines of the ego. There is no reason to suppose that prior to their new life these men and women had been any more self-centered than the next person, but this was enough for them to know that their love was radically restricted. They knew that “the human curse is to love and sometimes to love well, but never well enough.”iii Now this curse had been dramatically lifted. 

    It is not difficult to see how release from fear, guilt, and self could feel like rebirth. If someone were to free us from those crippling impediments, we too would call that person savior….(p.333). 

    The only power that can effect transformations of the order we have described is love. It remained for the twentieth century to discover that locked inside the atom is the energy of the sun itself. For this energy to be released, however, the atom must be bombarded from without. So too, locked in every human being is a store of love that partakes of the divine—the imago dei, image of God, it is sometimes called. And it too can be activated only through bombardment, in this case love’s bombardment….Love is an answering phenomenon. It is literally a response. 

    ….If we too felt loved, not abstractly or in principle but vividly and personally, by one who unites all power and perfection, the experience could melt our fear, guilt, and self-concern permanently…. 

    God’s love is precisely what the first Christians did feel. They had experienced Jesus’ love and had become convinced that Jesus was God incarnate. Once that love reached them it could not be stopped. Melting the barriers of fear, guilt, and self, it poured through them as if they were sluice gates, augmenting the love they had hitherto felt for others until the difference in degree became a difference in kind and a new quality….Conventional love is evoked by lovable qualities in the beloved, but the love people encountered from Christ embraced sinners and outcasts, Samaritans and enemies. It gave, not prudently in order to receive, but because giving was its nature…. 

    H.G. Wells was evidently right: Either there was something mad about this man, or our hearts are still too small for his message (p.326).