Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Duluth 
Faris Keeling
April 11, 2004
Happy Easter! After the darkness and suffering of crucifixion, Jesus has risen from the dead! Halleluia!
....But what does that mean to us?
If you are a Christian, then this is your most-sacred and joyous celebration. ...And much more than bunnies, colored eggs, and welcoming Spring.
But what if you are—like me—a NON-Christian Unitarian Universalist? What might “Easter” mean to us?
And if you are a Christian—whether UU or not—might there be some new layers of meaning to discover in your sacred story?
To better understand the sacred story, let’s start with a personal one.
When I was 5 years old, my Episcopal Sunday school teacher had us draw pictures of what we thought God looked like. She was a bit shocked at mine, but hung it on the wall along with my classmates’ drawings of old white men on thrones of clouds. After church, our parents dutifully came to the classroom and viewed the artwork.
On the way home, it was very quiet in the car. Finally, mom asked me to tell her about my drawing of God. “It looks like a chicken, don’t it?” I said. She and dad had to agree that—yes, it did look quite a lot like a chicken. With my best tone of 5 year-old exasperation, I explained “I don’t know what God looks like. But I know what a chicken looks like. And I like to draw chickens.”
My folks accepted the wisdom of this solution. So they weren’t as upset as the teacher was a year later, when my favorite animals to draw had become: alligators!
There is a question about this personal story—a question relevant for understanding sacred stories. Why were those particular animals my favorite ones to draw at those times of my life?
A student of Carl Jung would explain how my chicken image—with its egg-laying, nest-sitting, and chick-herding behaviors—expressed a life-creating and child-protecting view of the world and my place in it.... ....in a word, my “religion” at the time. A year later—as expressed by my alligator image—I was trying to adjust to the dangerous, devouring, frightening, destructive aspects of the world. Together, my chicken and alligator images—like the sacred images of any religion—expressed the twin mysteries of birth and death with which I was wrestling at ages 5 and 6.
The sacred stories, art, and symbols of a religion serve the same purpose. They transform inner, wordless experience into outward things and events with which we can more easily come to terms. They are like pliers with which we humans grab onto and manipulate the otherwise nebulous and slippery mysteries of life and death.
Each religion’s sacred stories communicate the timeless insight, inspiration, and wisdom it offers to the world.... ...in a symbolic form that captures our imaginations.
Non-Christians and Christians alike need to hear universal patterns in the Easter story: the divine person is sacrificed to help all people, and is raised from the dead to eternal life, which is also offered to all.
For example, the religion worshipping Mithra was brought to Rome from Persia well before Jesus’ birth, and was Christianity’s leading rival in Rome for the first 4 centuries AD. Mithra was a saviour, son of the Persian sun god, born of a human virgin, on December 25th, in a cave, attended by shepherds and Magi bearing gifts. He grew up to cast out devils, heal the sick, and raise the dead. He had 12 disciples, one for each of sign of the zodiac. They were guests at his last supper, which became one of the religion’s sacraments, during which bread was marked with a cross and eaten to identify with him. Upon his death, he was buried in a cave, and his ascent into heaven was celebrated at the spring equinox. Mithraic priests taught that the earth would end in fire after the final conflict between the forces of light and darkness, and that the faithful devotees of Mithra would be saved, while the others would be cast down to the underworld.
Attis was a god brought to Rome from Phrygia, one of the outer provinces of the empire in 204 BC. He was a savior, slain to bring salvation to mankind. He was castrated, hung on a pine tree to die, and his holy blood ran down to redeem the earth. He descended to the underworld for three days, then rose from the dead on Sunday. His worshipers were told: “The god is saved; and for you also will come salvation for your trials.” His death and rebirth was believed to occur cyclically, each year at the spring equinox, and coincided with the virgin conception which led to his birth nine months later on December 25th.
There are many others, but these suffice to exemplify pre-Christian archetypes expressed also in the life of Jesus. Arguments have raged for centuries about why these are all so similar.
But my point is: Doesn’t the Easter story mean more—not less—if it transmits spiritual truth so important as to have been preserved through multiple religions? Especially if similar truths have arisen over eons in multiple cultures and places. Jesus’ is our culture’s embodiment of an age-old pattern: the divine person sacrificed to bring eternal life to his followers.
Implications: There can be no gain without sacrifice. No resurrection without crucifixion. No new life without death. No creation without destruction. These are spiritual truths expressed in myths the world over.
In the Hindu creation myth, out of the primeval golden egg came the first being, who offered himself in sacrifice in order to create all aspects of the world out of the parts of his body. In Hindu art the creative, protective, and destructive divine powers are often represented as three faces on one head, since they are inseparable. (After all, germination destroys the seed, but creates the tree and protects the species. The carpenter then destroys the tree, but preserves the wood and creates the table.)
The supreme Goddesses of Indo-European mythology were often of this same inseparable creating-and-destroying nature. Kali from India. Ishtar from Assyria. The nurturing mother and the devouring mother are one. The chicken and the alligator are one.
Agricultural mythologies from many lands, including the Americas, describe how plants such as corn or wheat—upon which the people’s lives depended—grew first from the dead body of a sacrified deity. ...A very direct image of death creating life. [Nurse logs.] The deity was then worshiped as a savior, who rose to live again. Each spring the deity was sacrificed anew, the fields were fertilized with blood and flesh, and the crops grew.
Ancient Indo-European kings and queens were ceremonial and religious, rather than merely political, figures. They were considered divine, or inhabited by deities. Their sexual potency and fertility were believed to be crucial for the land’s productivity. The king’s reigns were short, because of the ritual sacrifice of them in order to renew the land with their blood or buried body parts.
But what does all this mean to us? We don’t believe this stuff! So what does it matter?
I would argue that—on an unconscious, mythic level—we DO believe this stuff.
These sacred stories are the product of human minds—spiritually inspired, yes.... but still human. Remember, these stories of events out in the world are metaphors for inner psychological and spiritual experience. They depict gods “out there,” but refer to powers “in here.” When we hear the stories, and see the images in art or in our imaginations, they resonate with that deep, intuitive, mythic place inside our hearts. There—rather than in our heads—they make sense.
So these stories can be experienced through our hearts, as spiritually true and important. This is religious faith, religious practice, and ritual. This is one way how, for example, Christians relate to the Easter story. And so could we, if we but allow it.
OR, if we want to understand them in our heads, we need to translate them from outer-world to inner-world language.
For example: The divine person being sacrificed, suffering, dying, traveling to the underworld, then returning to a new and better life, being completely transformed. Isn’t this a metaphor for any psychological or spiritual transformation?
To make a major change in our selves, we have to suffer painful ego wounds, and go through that excruciating process of letting go of familiar comfort, and face the fear of the new unknown, and go through a dark time of feeling inadequate, before finally emerging into a new life, transformed.
And it’s not just the ancient myths which speak of transformation. What about our most modern myths? What about the stories created by our culture’s most unique “religion”—that of Science?
Just like older religions, Science mediates between humans and the great mysteries. It gives us explanatory stories—such as the big bang, continental drift, evolution, and ecology—which help us make sense of our world, and define our place in it. It gives us some sense of control over the forces of life and death. It inspires its followers, and gives them a sense of being part of something larger than themselves. Sounds like a religion to me!
In recent years, discoveries have given physicists and biologists a new image of the universe—which has led them to agree with religious mystics of all times that “All is one.”
The Newtonian world view has given way to the quantum one, in which everything is interconnected and constantly interrelating. The many basic units of matter are constantly being destroyed and created, transforming into one another. Particles are waves. Matter is energy. Nothing can be dealt with in isolation. There is no simple cause and effect. Subject and object are one field. Wholes are more than just assemblies of parts. The universe may be infinite, may be one of many. There may be no beginning, no end.
Further: Life cannot be clearly separated from non-life. The atoms in your body are constantly being exchanged with the environment. Not a single atom within you now was there when you were born. Physically, you are merely a self-regenerating pattern of information, basically a software program, and even the software is not stable over time. Change is the only reality.
The whole universe—from sub-atomic to supra-galactic—is abuzz with relationship, self-regulation, evolution, and unceasing transformations. And we are part of it all. It is part of us. We are it. It is us.
Yet we humans are not yet in tune with this post quantum worldview. We consider the state of being in which all of us in this room currently are as the only acceptable one. We are “alive.” Being not born yet is not OK. Being dead is not OK. We want to stay as we are. And we want to stay separate, independent, individual. We cling tenaciously to ideas of separateness, of stability, of permanence.
In the post-quantum myth, we are one with everyone and everything. We are part of the whole which is more than the sum of the parts. We are co-evolving with all life around us, indeed with the whole living organism of the earth, in the living universe. Our activities may even lead to the extinction of our own species. Yet, regardless, life in various forms will go on. And—if we can shake off our delusion of separateness and permanence, our misperception of beginnings and endings—“we” will be there.
Our heads can find lots of rational arguments against this post quantum view, especially since our daily experience is Newtonian. But our hearts recognize the quantum vision, the mystic vision. Because it’s familiar: it’s the same ancient mythic vision.
The Chicken and the Alligator. The 3-faced Hindu god of creation, protection, and destruction. The supreme goddesses of Kali and Ishtar, in whom Death & Rebirth are one. These resonate with beliefs such as Reincarnation, with it’s recurring cycles of death and rebirth. And with the mystic’s insights that all is one, that time is an illusion, that death does not exist.
And with the ancient Indo-European story of the god whose sacrifice brings eternal life. Not just to him, but to all who follow him. Follow him by seeing all humans as one—by loving our neighbors, forgiving our enemies, soothing the suffering, and helping those in need. Follow him by sacrificing our wish for separateness and permanence, and by suffering the death of our old sense of self, in order to be born anew into the truly eternal life of a post-quantum, mystic, and mythic worldview.
So there’s a lot to that Easter story after all.
And for that I can truly say:
“Thank you, Jesus! Halleluia!”