Birth, Death,
Rebirth
by Rev. Dr.
Tom Thresher
One of the fundamental truths of Easter is that new
birth cannot happen without death. So a powerful
question to ask at Easter is: what is dying, and what is
being born?
As I
observe our culture and our society I have the sense
that something powerful is being born. Mystics have
spoken of this as the birth of a new consciousness.
“New Agers”
often speak of a paradigm shift. The
Mayan calendar even offers a road map of this change
which, it predicts, will culminate in 2011. Whatever is
happening, most people I talk with perceive a profound
shift.
What is Dying?
If, as
Easter suggests, rebirth demands death, we must ask:
what is dying?
To
begin, whatever is emerging in our world does not demand
our physical death (though that could also be a part of
it). In many ways it demands a more difficult death.
This may sound paradoxical, for what could be more
difficult than physical death?
What is
more demanding than our physical death is our
psychological death, the death of the ego, the death of
the false self, our sense of our separate self. What is
deeply terrifying for us is not physical death (that is
no more difficult than falling asleep), but the prospect
of becoming
no-self.
Holy week is, I believe, an allegory of Jesus as he
struggles to fully accept the final and complete death
of this egoic self; the complete surrender of his
identification with the small self. In the garden of
Gethsemane Jesus struggles with this profound surrender.
“My Father,” he says, “if it is possible, let this cup
pass from me.…” This is a hugely difficult time. In
the intensity of Jesus’ struggles, the disciples keep
falling asleep, that is, becoming unconscious. Jesus
says to them “Stay awake and pray that you may not come
into the time of trial.” In other words, pray that you
don’t have to go through this, for “the spirit indeed is
willing, but the flesh is weak.” While Jesus is willing
to die fully and completely to the limited sense of self
(“the spirit is willing"), he simultaneous acknowledges
that everything about him wants to resist (“the flesh is
weak”). Still, he surrenders once again: “My Father, if
this cannot pass unless I drink it, Your will be done.”
It is my impression that what Jesus
exemplified was not only individual process, but
universal. Easter -- death and rebirth -- points to a
fundamental dimension of human change. And we, as a
society, are in a time of profound cultural, social, and
personal change. We are, in a sense, in the Lent of our
era; we may even be beginning Holy Week. The
fundamental stories that have given our lives meaning
are being challenged to the core. To the
traditionalists, modernity has so eroded their
understanding of the world that it is perceived as Satan
incarnate and they have been struggling for decades to
defeat it (George W. Bush is the savior of their
worldview).
But modernity itself -- the worldview
that says we can escape from pain and sorrow through
rationally reconstructing our world to provide more
goods and srvices, more wealth -- is itself collapsing.
The God of science, which has served us seemingly so
well for over 300 years, is reaching the limits of its
capacity. The worldview that says we are rational,
pleasure-seeking machines in an uncaring universe no
longer satisfies.
Not surprisingly, many in this country
retreat to “safe havens” of fundamentalist Christianity,
reactionary political views, restrictive law and order,
and even fascism. For many of us, the cultural stories
that have supported our individual worldviews, through
which we construct our sense of self, are fraying so
badly that they are on the verge of collapsing
completely. The separate sense of self perceives this
as death, and is willing to fight to the death.
What is Being Born?
What is
being born? I don’t know; nobody knows. And it is this
not knowing that makes it so terribly frightening. The
very nature of new birth is that it is new, it is a
surprise, it is without precedent. In a simple analogy
from physics: who could have ever predicted that mixing
two parts oxygen with one part hydrogen would create
something we experience as wetness? No one could
have predicted it. It was an emergent event, something
totally new.
Similarly, in the Western Enlightenment, no one could
have imagined the wealth and fundamental transformations
of our planet that have occurred; nor could they have
anticipated the damage and destruction we have caused.
Similarly today, we have no real idea of what will
emerge, for that is the nature of emergence. We will
tell ourselves stories to ease the pain of not knowing
what is coming, but the truth is: we don’t know what is
coming.
Nevertheless, we do have teachers, like Jesus, who have
gone deeply into the unknown, who have willingly died to
the separate sense of self, who have stepped off into
the abyss of unknowing and returned to tell us some very
important things.
There
is, of course, a huge paradox associated with the
information they bring back: we cannot fully comprehend
it unless we die the death they have died. How can a
caterpillar fully comprehend what it means to be a
butterfly? We are always constrained by the lenses
through which we view the world.
Nonetheless, we can get important hints from those who
have made the journey and returned to tell their story.
And the great story they reveal is that what we perceive
as the death of the self is, in fact, the end of a bad
dream. The great promise of Easter is that every death
is itself a rebirth, a rebirth into something more
expansive, more inclusive, something more awesome, and
something entirely unknown to us now.
So Happy
death.
Happy rebirth.
Happy Easter
Bless you all... Tom
