Apr 08, 2018

Easter, 2018 (2)

“Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies,

It remains only a single seed.

But if it dies,

It produces many seeds.”

                  John 12:24

What is the real meaning of Easter? Is it only about the death and resurrection of Jesus? Or is there a message that Jesus spoke about many times, not only in the quote above.

The true message of the passion and death of Jesus was not to have us marvel and weep over him, but to serve as a model for all of us.

We are that kernel of wheat that must die. We must, at some time in our life, reach the edge of the cliff where there is no place to turn and no place to run, but to die to self and be reborn. As the 12 step program of Alcohol Anonymous (AA) states in the very first step, we must come to the point of admitting we are powerless, that nothing will we do will help. (Step 1: We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable…….). This, in turn, is echoed in the Step 1 of my 12 Steps to Joy and Happiness: step 1: We admitted we were powerless over our ego – that our lives were unmanageable and filled with unease and restlessness.

It was the death of Jesus, where he was caught up in a system where there was nowhere to turn, and his life was truly unmanageable, where he was powerless, that he could move to fully join his birthright, the Christ, as part of the Trinity. It was only at the lowest point in his life that he could join in that eternal dance we call the Trinity.

       We have the same conundrum. We must fall to the ground and die, 0therwise we can never relinquish our separate self, our ego, and learn to surrender our inner being over to the ‘care of God as we understand God’, as AA states in step 3. The passion time, truncated to three days in Jesus, is a path that we must all tread sometime in our life if we are to find the truth of our inner reality, that person who we are in our essence. I spend a lot of time in my recentlypublished book (The 12 Steps to Joy and Happiness – finding that ‘Kingdom of God that lies within’) discussing the necessity of surrender, and it does not happen until we have reached that bottomless pit approaching despair. The cause can be any of many things: an addiction, the loss of a loved one that does not seem to be consolable, the loss of a house, the dissolution of marriage or relationship, — there is no end of what can cause us to reach that cliff that has no bottom. It is only in pain, that pain of the cross, can we surrender our ego and let our God lift us up.

We scream at God during these times, but despite h0w they hit us, they are a gift from God that is the key to the evolutionary process of life. Jesus spent three days in this process, but we may spend months or even years in the case of addiction (and we all have some form of addiction) where that bottomless pit stares us in the face.

The process is the same. We must die to ourselves and be born again into understanding the mercy and love of God, where there is no one else that changes our way of life. The Cloud of Unknowing calls it ‘becoming meek’, for only the meek will inherit the earth, as Jesus says. After this experience we begin, just begin, to see the uselessness of so much that we treasured before – bigger car, more money, larger house, possessions, possessions, possessions.

Meditation

My God of mercy, You patiently wait for us to perish in our ego so that Your Love may be allowed to consciously flow through us. The pain we feel during this process is our birth pain into a new life of inner glow, even though the pain may still be present to some degree. I am grateful for the pain in my life that has opened me up to Your Love that has always filled and flooded me, for ‘I was blind, but now I see’. This chance to be alive in your Love is so powerful, that I desire only to share Your Love with all I know. I ask only for the grace to be Your servant for the remainder of my life.