I like retelling Bible stories for a modern audience for two main reasons. A) I feel that these are some of the most misunderstood and misinterpreted collective tales of our time, and B) most of the writings, teachings, and opinions about these stories seem to be a bit polarizing. Often these stories have been hijacked by parties that aim to concretize the Mystery, and thus either understand these stories literally, or to discount them as such, and subsequently reject their relevance or interpret them only symbolically.
The assumption, of course, is that those two views are mutually exclusive and we need to pick a side in the debate. It’s like our current political system: Either, or. Right, wrong. Black, white. If it’s this, it can’t be that. Stalemate! My argument is that perhaps both perspectives are only inadequate in their exclusion of the Other. What wants to be whole is fragmented, and the original invitation becomes a message of profound alienation.
For example, consider the miracle of the Virgin Birth in the Christian tradition. What if it doesn't matter if it happened exactly the way it was written down, but that it does matter that it happened to be written down exactly the way it was? I know that I took that story literally for many decades, then rejected it completely for several years, and finally circled back around to it one day with renewed reverence. I felt it had finally yielded it's essential teaching to me: when the Holiness of Spirit is made manifest inside of a consciously receptive human being, Christ consciousness is born. Or, in other words, willing Spirit + receptive body = a being that is both fully human and fully divine.
A paradox. The Mystery.
So, what then does this Being who is fully human and fully divine do with their time on earth according to these same teachings? Love and be loved, heal the sick, feed the hungry, be in community, and tell stories that help people remember the Mystery. I believe that Jesus literally and symbolically did what we needed him to do in order to get our collective attention, shift the cultural-religious paradigm, and then invite us all to access our unique connection to Indwelling Divinity. That was a radical message! And it seems that Jesus would have to demonstrate his own divinity + humanity first.
The resurrection from death was a literal happening awesome enough that we would be able to hear its sounds reverberating for thousands of generations afterwards. I believe that Jesus, the master storyteller, used his own life in order to create a kind of master Story that might reach us on a symbolic level no matter how many people and systems tried to translate and edit it according to their own agenda.
Perhaps "the gospel message" is both concealed and revealed by the gospel message itself.
Another paradox. More of the same Mystery.
I imagine that this is often the hardest teaching for us to accept about ourselves: the reality of being fully human and fully divine simultaneously. The dis-ease in the Hebrew culture at the time was a belief in separateness from God. The dis-ease in our time might be a belief that there is no God. I'm saying that both of those are a mistake, and that the literal-symbolic Virgin Birth, Crucifixion, Death, and Resurrection calls us into a radically different story.
No comments:
Post a Comment