now the eyes of my eyes are opened An Easter Reflection
Anne Bancroft and James Ishmael Ford
11 April 2004

Text
i thank You God for most this amazing day:
for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:
and of the gay great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any – lifted from the no
of all nothing – human merely being
doubt unimaginably You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
e. e. cummings

Anne
I was speaking to a colleague recently about her plans for Easter Sunday. What was her congregation doing, and how was she approaching the message, I wondered. She is a Religious Educator in New England, but today, she’s in Florida. It is not the culture of her congregation to celebrate Easter in an out-of-the-ordinary-Sunday way, besides which she confessed she is very uncomfortable with it. And I would venture to guess she is not alone. Regardless of your upbringing, if you’re sitting here chances are good that Easter is confusing, uncomfortable, and perhaps fraught with expectations of celebration that may not quite square with your present theology – or lack thereof.

Let’s be honest, this is a hard message for those of us who do not accept the resurrection of Jesus to become the Christ. And we have to look honestly at what we have presented with our yo-yo’s – the idea that all of life’s downs come back up, even with intention – as a distinctly Unitarian Universalist take on this Christian story.

In the conversations James and I have been having about the meaning of Easter for normative Christianity as opposed to the way UU’s might understand the message, James sprinkled his thoughts with phrases like substitionary atonement, referencing Pelagius and Augustine. James loves big words. We thought maybe a little clarification on perspectives might be useful

James
Anne is, as always, right. I love big words. I love big ideas. And, or but, I’m not sure which is best. Easter points to some of the big ideas with big words attached to it we religious liberals find particularly problematic. Like substitutionary atonement. Perhaps you’ve heard Mel Gibson has a new movie out? That movie is about substitutionary atonement, the belief that Jesus’ suffering and crucifixion was the price of human redemption. You can see the seeds of this thinking in the pages of the New Testament but it was really mostly worked out by Augustine of Hippo in the first half of the fifth century. Originally a Manichean (that is he believed the flesh was evil while only the spirit was good), Augustine taught we human beings were totally lost without God’s extraordinary initiative sacrificing himself through Jesus.

Augustine believed we were condemned because of original sin. Now this idea was flat out rejected by those who would evolve over the years into Unitarian Universalists. Look around at this building. While it represents high Unitarian Christianity one of the great threads of our liberal religious movement, you may notice there are no crucifixes, no dead or resurrected images of Jesus. Our spiritual ancestors agreed there was hurt and suffering in the world. But that hurt is brought about by what people choose to do of their own free will.

If Augustine is the source of mainstream Christian thinking about atonement, at-one-ment, getting right with the world and God, then perhaps Pelagius should be considered one of the main sources of liberal thought about these issues. Pelagius lived at the same time as Augustine, but he rejected the idea original sin and therefore the need for a subsitutionary atonement. Instead he said we’re born with the ability to choose between good and evil. And what we need to be better, more whole, and good are teachers.

So if Adam set a bad example for us through his bad behavior, Jesus was an exemplar of the good life, of what it means to live fully and in a holy manner. Our nineteenth century forbearers developed this as “salvation by character,” salve, healing, by our choices in our lived lives. For Unitarian Universalist Christians the central myth or story is therefore not Easter, but rather Christmas, celebrating the birth of hope within our humanity.

On the other hand Easter is a powerful and compelling time in the cycle of life, and it really doesn’t have to be connected to substitutionary atonement. Easter is in fact rooted in the deep experience of spring; of hope birthing anew following the long dark. And there are ways we can engage the traditional Easter story about Jesus’ life and death and the story of his resurrection that can be meaningful for us here today.

i thank You God for most this amazing day:
for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

Anne
Last week I had the high school carpool, so I was listening to the KISS 108 morning show. There was a contest going with two call-ins. The question was who could name the most Stations of the Cross. For clarification, they are the places that Christ paused in his journey to the crucifixion and representations of those places adorn the walls in, and I have this on good authority, EVERY Catholic church. The first caller was from Arkansas. Her mother was a Sunday School teacher, and she had no idea. The second was from Nashua, raised Catholic, and was almost equally clueless. I think they both guessed one apiece, with a great many hints. In consternation, because it was a tie, the talk show hosts decided to change the theme of their questions – which had been Holy Week - and asked the contestants to name the seven dwarves. They got them all, no problem.

The reason I bring this up is to suggest that there is a spectrum of understanding on spiritual matters that has more to do with intent and attention than to the level of religious detail with which one is familiar. A person might know nothing of details and yet know a story’s intent and live its message well. Or, a person might know every element of a story, and still not garner a message that allows them to make use of it in their living, and if you can’t do that, then the story, in and of itself, is of limited use.

The Easter story in particular is one in which, especially here, we find more usefulness, perhaps when we take it out of the literal, or historical, context. Marcus Borg, professor of Religion and Culture, author of Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, and The God We Never Knew, suggests the idea of a pre-Easter Jesus and a post-Easter Jesus. The pre-Easter Jesus is a “Jewish mystic and healer, an enlightened wisdom teacher, and a social prophet.” Unitarian Universalists don’t have much problem with the pre-Easter Jesus. He lived, he taught, he made choices, he loved. The post-Easter Jesus, however, gives us pause.

As Borg explains it, the post-Easter Jesus is the one who was “experienced,” that is, he was the risen form who people spoke of seeing and talking to after his death. The post-Easter Jesus is the theologically complicated one, created long after his death by those who experienced his divine presence in their lives, the one who eventually became one third of the trinity. Borg makes it easier to understand the “experience” by taking it out of the literal sense of rising. The story is about resurrection, not resuscitation, he explains. “Easter need not involve the claim that God supernaturally intervened to raise the corpse of Jesus from the tomb,” he states. “Rather, the core meaning of Easter is that Jesus continued to be experienced after his death, but in a radically new way: as a spiritual and divine reality.”

In a similar way, we might find ourselves in another place on the spectrum of spiritual understanding. Even if we, as individuals, do not necessarily experience the divine Christ presence, we can experience the message of Easter as a human desire to rise above the “tragic dimension” of our living that Clarke Wells articulated. It is our desire and choice to live with the hope that joy is available to us, that it is intrinsically within us and with us. And for those times when we cannot access hope or joy ourselves there is the message, reflected in the natural world, of spring and re-birth and new life that reminds us of its very existence.

i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:
and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth.

James
About ten years ago I attended a district Unitarian Universalist clergy conference held at a large Roman Catholic center on a lake in northern Illinois. One of the features of this center was a garden walk with stops every so often with large images of the Stations of the Cross. During one of the breaks in the conference four or five of us walked what I’d have to call a UU version of the Stations. We’d come to one of the images and argue over what it meant.

Again, Anne is right; mostly our UU understanding of Christianity is going to be found in the pre-Easter Jesus, what we call “the religion of Jesus not the religion about Jesus.” But I agree with Anne, and Marcus Borg, we can look at what the experience of a “risen” Jesus as a rich metaphor, giving us hints on our own spiritual way. Here, let’s consider the lowly yo-yo. Not at first blush, what one might think of as a symbol of Easter. But, actually, as we consider it, the yo-yo can point to something, to an experience of transformation, and hope in our lives. Now, if you’re hesitant about this assertion, I don’t blame you. When Anne first brought this up, I found myself a tough sell. We are, after all, talking about yo-yos and Easter.

But doing so we get a way out of the literal, once and forever, and see something else: up and down. Not unlike our lived lives, and not unlike the cycles of life on our planet. At the heart of the Easter story, at the heart of the great spring festivals is the reminder that things don’t just keep getting darker and colder. Rather, it is a cycle, and like the crocuses outside the back door of the Society, eventually out of the cold they spring forth. In fact I love the crocuses, as they push forward even ahead of the season, and even if they’re frozen back once or twice, they keep on coming. Hope.

But back to the yo-yo, and how one actually uses a yo-yo: What happens if we try to be more directly involved, and most important, what happens as we give it attention? Attention is, I believe, the great antidote to much of human suffering, the first step of our human ability to change. When we cast our gaze on hurt it can sometimes be reframed as a problem, something we can engage, and if not actually end (we really can’t fix everything) often we can mitigate the hurt. And attention is always the first step toward healing.

As we give our attention to the events of our lives, to the rise and the fall, to cold and the emerging warmth, we find the possibility of transformation for ourselves. Not simply going up and down, not simply repeating the cycle endlessly (remember the yo-yo is just a metaphor, just a pointer), but now fully engaged, now alive, now birthing hope in every glance, revealing love in every touch. Here is the secret of Easter: With each breath we can be born anew. Now. Now. Now.

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any – lifted from the no
of all nothing – human merely being
doubt unimaginably You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

Happy Easter. And amen.