"Resurrection Time"

“Be still and know,” the Psalmist encouraged. “Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest awhile,” invited Jesus. “If you truly want to capture the Grace of a moment of authentic tranquility,” they seem to be saying, “don’t just do something - sit there!” And in the sitting, in the stillness, in the resting place of quiet contemplation a profound sense of understanding is available . . . a flowering of spiritual sanity can occur that “sets us free” to see and hear and celebrate the immense Creativity of Stillness, the transforming Clarity of Silence, and the absolute Perfection of the Here and Now. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda captures the Grace of slowing down in his poem “Keeping Quiet” . . .

Now we will count to twelve and we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth, let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for a second and not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment without rush, without engines;
we would all be together in a sudden strangeness.
Fishermen in the cold sea would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt would not look at his hurt hands.
Those who prepare green wars, wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes and walk about
with their brothers in the shade doing nothing.
What I want should not be confused with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about.
If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence might interrupt
this sadness of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead in winter
and later proves to be alive.
Now I’ll count to twelve and you keep quiet and I will go.

And quiet we kept and go He did to “rest awhile” . . . and we called it Good Friday. But, as David de la Rosa reminds us in his tribute to “Christopher,” “little did we know His leaving was just changing in disguise.” Just a weekend trip Home to Mom and Dad, then . . . Shazam!!! . . . Back again, teaching, eating, laughing . . . inviting us to, “Dig Infinity!” . . . and we called it Easter.

So, here we are again, Resurrection Time , 1,965 more or less years down the lane of His memory, remembering how He left and how He returned. Revisiting what He taught and what He stood for . . . and, who knows, maybe even deciding the time is now to “pick up our cross and follow Him” into the Promised Land of His Good News . . . a Revelation of the Way so straight from the Source of all Wisdom He said it contains the power to “set us free.”

Well, here we are, twenty centuries later, still asking, “free from what?” revealing the tenaciousness of the unenlightened state. “From your ignorance of spiritual Law,” (biblically, “sin”) His Spirit of Truth patiently counsels. “What ignorance?” we innocently inquire.

“For openers,” He might begin, “you are still a wee bit confused about what it takes to add a permanent measure of joy and contentment to an earth-life. If you’ll remember, I encouraged you not to get lost in a value system that assigns foolish levels of significance to the passing show of your earth-world. Yet, here you are, a heartbeat from a new millennium, still lost in the myth that happiness lies hidden somewhere between a 10K Dow, buns of steel, eternal youth and no pain.”

Chogyam Trungpa, the transcendent Buddhist monk, spoke to our neurotic pursuit of physical comfort, security and pleasure this way. “Your highly organized and technological society reflects your preoccupation with manipulating physical surroundings so as to shield yourselves from the irritations of the raw, rugged, unpredictable aspects of life. Push-button elevators, shopping malls, air-conditioning, flush toilets, mass production, weather satellites, television, insurance companies, Super Bowls, Star Wars, Wall Street and the Pentagon all reflect your attempts to create a manageable, safe, profitable, predictable, pleasurable world that is only possible at the expense of the vast majority of your Earth brothers and sisters.”

“Remember,” His wisdom continues, “the ignorance I am speaking of has nothing to do with the physically rich or the secure life situations you create in and of themselves. Rather, it refers to the neurotic preoccupation that drives you to create them, to try to control nature. It is ego’s ambition to secure and entertain itself, trying to avoid all irritation. So you cling to your pleasures and possessions, you fear change or force change, you invest your life energies trying to create comfortable, secure nests or entertaining playgrounds and in the process, you create lives of ‘quiet desperation’ while destroying the ecological basis of your biological existence.”

It’s wake-up time! The treasure that can truly bless our lives is a divine inheritance that lies hidden within us. Let us commit ourselves this Easter to go work in the fields that are ripe and ready to reward us with the ultimate human treasure . . . the fields of loving-kindness . . . the fields of compassionate service. As Lyte sings it, it’s time to “bring the harvest home to our hearts.”

I invite each of you to join me in making this Easter an authentic tribute to His Resurrection and Ascension. Let’s raise His Wisdom high above ignorance and affirm with our livings that we know happiness does not lie in the accumulation of more and more pleasant feelings. Let our lives testify to our awareness that gratifying craving is not the path to authentic wholeness or the kind of contented peace that “passeth understanding.” When we realize in our own experience that happiness comes not from reaching out and grasping, but from letting go . . . not from seeking pleasurable experience, but from opening in the moment to what is true, we have cultivated an understanding that frees the energy of compassion within us. Our minds no longer struggle with pushing away pain or holding onto pleasure.

The Stone of Ignorance has been rolled away. The Love and Wisdom of the Risen Christ illuminates the darkened tomb . . . Our Resurrected Hearts sing “Alleluia, I am free, Alleluia, free at last!