Does your religious practice assist you to transcend your culture? Do we even want such a religious practice? Do we know that Christianity in its early centuries understood membership is the Kingdom of God to mean washing the Kingdom of Rome out of your hair, your thinking, your loyalties?
These first Christians understood themselves to be “called out” of this world in order to be send back to this same world as transformers of this world. At first their focus was on transforming individual lives, but as soon as their numbers were great enough, they also took on transforming the social structures of this world as well.
Some current forms of Christian practice have been nothing more than support groups for living within the status quo of the existing culture. True religion, Christian or otherwise, assists us to leave our culture and move into our deep awareness—not just our minds, but into some essential realizations about being human. In order for this to happen we inwardly wash away our culture, sit a while in Eternity, and then come back to our same location in the history of human culture, as a transformer of culture. Such an inward trip is somewhat like taking an outward trip from Kansas to India and then returning to Kansas. Such trips have living consequences.
The cultural transformations we do are only temporal changes we decide to support. Culture is a temporal reality and all cultural transformations are temporal. But the trip I am describing is about leaving the temporal, going to the Eternal, and then returning to the temporal after have been to the Eternal. All this takes place while our temporal body remains right here in the exact same temporal flow.
So, let me tell you more about this trip.
If you have ever experienced death, either its sure future for you or in its brushing by you in a close way, then you have experienced the Eternal. The experience of death does not fit into to any of our simply cultural experiences. Most funerals make someone else’s experience of death into a cultural interpretation. If that someone’s life was especially close to your life, you might experience that loss as an experience of death. You might even find the funeral to be a ritual for taking into your living the experience of death, for you have indeed lost part of your life. And this might be such an important part of your life that you did indeed meet the Eternal.
As an experience of the Eternal, the experience of death is not the same thing as simply dying. In fact a person can die without experiencing death or the Eternal And we can have many experiences of the Eternal without physically dying, and each of these experiences of the Eternal include some sort of departure from the temporal.
There are many temporal moments in which the breath of the Eternal passes close by and blows like a hurricane of Awe or Wonder in the space of your consciousness. This can be a very simple moment, temporally speaking—perhaps looking out the window at an electrical storm with its loud clashes of thunder. Or it might happen while reading a book that provides a new way of seeing something that has been crucial to your now defunct worldview.
Eternity might happen eating a piece of bread and taking a sip of wine in the context of knowing that bodies and blood was shed to awaken you to the Eternal, and that your own body and blood might be shed to continue this Eternal favor to someone else. Or an experience of the Eternal might happen sitting cross-legged under a shade tree and watching your breath breathe until you are watching this watcher awaken to the awesome presence of being freed form all pervious thoughts of who you thought you were.
Seeing the Dazzle
If you have experienced the Eternal in some way, you will also have the ability to understand the following bit of Christian scripture. I am going to quote from Mark’s Gospel verses 9:2-10, and after each set of sentences take note of how these sentences point to experiencing the Eternal.
Six days later, Jesus took Peter and James and John with him and led them high up on a hill-side where they were entirely alone. His whole appearance changed before their eyes, while his clothes became white, dazzling white – whiter than any earthly bleaching could make them.
What is symbolized here is the dazzle of the Eternal, the glow of Profound Reality, the shine of the Land of Mystery. And this dazzle was happening to mere peasant clothing— perhaps ragged, perhaps dingy and sweaty—worn on an ordinary peasant, Jesus.
Elijah and Moses appeared to the disciples and stood there in conversation with Jesus. Peter burst out to Jesus, “Master, it is wonderful for us to be here! Shall we put up three shelters—one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah?”
These sentences add to the Jesus dazzle, the dazzle of Moses, the symbol of the Holy Law of Eternity, and the dazzle of Elijah, the symbol of the Prophetic proclamation of Holy Justice. What are we to imagine about the conversation that Jesus is having with Moses and Elijah? From the larger context of Mark’s narrative, we can guess that this conversation is about the road that Jesus must take—the awful path of crucifixion and its dazzling resurrection meaning. These three disciples, the most awake of the twelve, do not understand what is happening. Peter supposes this all might be captured in three religious booths.
He [Peter] really did not know what to say, for they [all three disciples] were very frightened. Then came a cloud which overshadowed them and a voice spoke out of the cloud, “This is my dearly-loved Son. Listen to him!”
A temporal cloud now becomes the voice of Eternity. Awe from the Awesome overshadows them. Jesus is proclaimed by this Awe producing event to be the “Offspring of the Eternal”—Jesus is announced to be the Word spoken by the Eternal—Jesus is his temporal life is revealing some sort of Final Realism to be listened to above all else—instructing our lives to be lived in accord with the always WAS and the always will BE the Way, the Truth, and the Life that all humans are constructed to live. This does not mean a cultural life, but an Eternal Life.
Then, quite suddenly they looked all round them and saw nobody at all with them but Jesus.
The only content available to temporal eyes and minds is temporal content—in this story the content is, let us say, a five-foot ten, black haired, sandy-faced, young man in dingy peasant garb. All the Eternal Fuss that was “seen” by these three dumbfounded truth seekers was entirely contentless of any temporal content. All the temporal words that were lodged in their temporal minds were not Eternal. Three fancy booths would not have held the Eternal either. The temporal itself was not what was dazzling. An Eternal experience, according to this wild story, was dazzling a temporal moment in three human lives.
And as they came down the hill-side, he warned them not to tell anybody what they had seen till “the Son of Man should have risen again from the dead”. They treasured this remark and tried to puzzle out among themselves what “Rising from the dead” could mean.
Indeed this story was written, told, and heard after the crucifixion, and after a revelation to some people of what “rising from the dead” could possibly mean. Also, the language here is cryptic partly because of its antiquity, and also because of its profoundness. “Son of Man” meant “Offspring of the first humans—Adam and Eve,” “Son of Adam” means humanity returned to its essence before the fall into inauthenticity. “Son of Man” also included an “end of time” imagination. In the imagination of those who wrote and treasured this strange story, essential humanity with no sin was to be risen from the dead at the end of time.
In this story, these three (the most aware disciples) had no idea what Jesus’s meant by “rising from the dead.” Later they would come to see that resurrection had indeed begun happening three days after the crucifixion of Jesus. This Eternal, end-of time arrival had begun happening to three women, then to the male disciples, then to thousands, then to Paul, then to millions, maybe it is happening to you and me.
Clearly, resurrection was not a cultural happening, even though it was told about in the cultural words of that time. Resurrection was happening to people, and those people were proclaiming this happening in wild sets of stories, icons, dramas, rituals, communal practices, and later in paintings, sculptures, and architectural buildings. Yet, resurrection was none of these cultural expressions. It was a revolutionary presence in persons. Then these persons had transformative effects in their existing cultures. These cultural effects were not the happening of resurrection; they were the humanly-created results of the resurrection. Though these effects bear witness to the resurrection having happened, only those to whom resurrection is now happening are able see the truth of this witness to the happening of resurrection in human lives
This has only been my witness to my experience of the Eternal—nothing more, nothing less. So if there are any Eternal sensitive “ears” reading these words, may those ears hear the Eternal “speaking.” Temporal ears alone hear only temporal things.
My teacher and mentor of many years, Joe Mathews, spoke about his experience of the Eternal in terms of a story he told describing a trip he made from Dallas to Houston in which he explored the unusual city of Waxahachie, Texas. The concluding line of his story was, “If you haven’t been to Waxahachie, you haven’t been to Waxahachie.” And so it is with our experience of the Eternal.
For more commentary on the Gospel of Mark see:
https://realisticliving.org/New/mark-commentary/