Friday Night at 8: Personal Savior

Here’s a little Stevie Wonder — “If It’s Magic”:

Good Friday.  Jesus was crucified and then on Easter was resurrected, a miracle!

The story interests me, whether it is true or not.  The Bible interests me, as it seems to be, in many ways, one of the first human histories.

And I do love stories, have to admit that right from the start.

What interests me about the story of Jesus in the week that he came to Jerusalem until he was crucified, was the swing of good fortune and misfortune.

Imagine coming to town and the red carpet is rolled out for you, people cheering, you’re pretty much given the keys to the city, can do no wrong!  Must be a heady feeling.

And then imagine that by the end of the week everyone despises you and gathers around laughing and cheering while you are nailed to a cross and in a great deal of pain and naked and such.

That’s a lot of moods to go through in such a short period of time.

A couple of years ago I heard someone in a diner talking about Easter and he said to his friends that Jesus was cheered when he came to Jerusalem because folks thought he’d come to wage a revolution against the Roman occupiers.  And when they found out that was not his mission, they got pissed off at him.

Imagine you had disciples, folks who swore up and down they would follow you anywhere!  Anywhere!  And then when misfortune strikes, you find one of your loyal disciples had turned you in, ratted you out, and another, when asked if he knew you, denied it not once but three times.  That has to hurt.

As a matter of fact, my feeling about the story was that Jesus would have been most hurt by the turning away of those who loved him, more than the crucifixion by those who didn’t understand him in the first place.

And at the end he forgives everyone, he sees they are ignorant, and he forgives them all.

He must have had a very wide view of life and humanity to have felt that way, to have shed all anger and thoughts of revenge.

The words “personal savior” are often used by Christians.  It’s an interesting concept, I think.

I’m not a Christian.  But I did turn to a church once when I was in need, and did experience a sense of grace that I will never forget.  The experience did not lead me to become a Christian, but it did give me some respect for the power of both the architecture of churches themselves and a feeling of affection towards the sanctuary one feels in a house of worship, that one can lay one’s burden down for a brief moment and not feel alone.

There’s been a lot written here at Docudharma about interdependence and the notion that we are all connected, all part of the universe, of existence.  I tend to believe that, too, and it makes sense to me.  So a “personal savior,” to me, is getting in touch with whatever is in our consciousness that from birth to death knows we are a part of everything else and not separate.

The events of our lives muddies that perception, of course, and the distractions are endless.  We fall into traps of our own making when we attach ourselves to what we think at the moment is permanent and true and then find out later that is not the case at all.  The fact that existence is constantly changing and never static is difficult to grasp when we are always seeking stability and sensibility.

But there is always something inside our own consciousness, I believe, that isn’t fooled by any of this, that knows life and death to be not separate at all but part of a vast continuum, and I believe that when we have moments of connection with that part of our consciousness it is much like experiencing a miracle and feeling the presence of a personal savior, a consciousness that will help us, that loves us, that is good.

Easter, Passover … both of those holidays are very much mixed up with pagan rituals of spring and renewal.  There’s endless lessons to be learned from the seasons, seeing the leaves drop from the trees and reveal their naked branches and yet come spring new leaves appear, and the cycle continues.  There is spiritual wisdom, I think, in paying attention to these kinds of things and knowing we are a part of them as well.

All of us here at Docudharma are committed to a battle that may not and probably will not end during our lifetimes.  We all produce tons of words to describe that battle, but to me it boils down to that consciousness inside us that instinctively can differentiate between what is our real connection to the universe, to existence, and what is just bogus bullshit dreamed up by fearful minds who want nothing other than to believe they can control everything with enough money and guns and power.

Existence is a never-ending play of light and dark and so I don’t believe anyone is entirely “good” or entirely “evil.”  But to me, the one constant force in an ever-changing existence is that apprehension, that consciousness that we are indeed interconnected, that the notion of separateness is an illusion, and that we all hold our own saviors right inside us.

I wish all Dharmaniacs a happy spring, a groovy Full Moon and for those who celebrate religion, a happy celebration of new life and new hope.