[Oe List ...] An Easter Greeting

Sat Apr 23 06:05:19 CDT 2011

Monday, Saipan Tribune

Hallelujah Chorus at the Empty tomb

Other than the daffodils and the bunnies (Hugh Hefner’s and the Hallmark Hall of Eggs), Easter is not a Hollywood happy ending.  In fact, the image of the empty tomb harks to the power of negation in western civilization rather than as a blueprint for the days ahead. 

In the western mind, we posit an ideal and measure our actuations on the images we design to approximate that ideal.  Utopian dreamers abound, both for those who long for golden ages of bygone eras failing to abide in the present, and those who actively pursue their ideal as something that awaits them at the bend to assuage their conscience that the perceived present mess will straighten out in the future.  We call those who yearn for and pattern things to the wisdom of the past, conservatives; those who insist on ushering the divine imperative of their future, liberals.

In Christendom’s Holy Roman Empire with Amerika as its latest incarnation, Easter is the pinnacle of the triumph of the good over evil, as well as the redemption of individual shortcomings for another shot at transforming the old into the new.  “Behold, I make all things new,” is the mantra of those who cling to chivalrous charity and oligarchic benevolence; it is also the justification of those who will beckon Armageddon to facilitate social transformation at a more rapid pace.

In the seed of the Persian dichotomy of the eternal conflict between light and darkness (an understandable Aegean metaphor), the focus got stuck in the clash, a battle unto death, methodologically formulated in the Hegelian dialectic of the thesis v. antithesis resulting in a new synthesis (that then becomes the new thesis, the process repeating itself into the evolutionary march ad infinitum).  This is embedded in the desert ethos of the Judeo-Christian-Moslem traditions.  Rabbinic hope of next year in Jerusalem in the midst of diaspora, Sanvitores’ in Hagatna did not mind martyrdom because it ensured his reservations in heaven, and young jihadists wrap incendiaries on to their bodies on their way to explosive oblivion since numerous maidens await their arrival in paradise.  There is surety and confidence in the rightness of one’s cause.

Across the Dardanelles heading southeast, and the Gobi dessert straight far east, this passion for significance takes on a different quality.  Nirvana is attained by an autistic repetition of something mundane to attain ennui and effortless inertia.  The beating of the drums that expresses bottled energy, and the discipline of martial arts that curtails aggression, are Japanese, Korean and Chinese abnegation of the attainment of selfhood, an ardent knowing without certitude and doing without assurances, the balance and harmony at the pivot point of the yin-yang.  

(Parenthetically, Anshallah is willfulness before nothing, and Om/Amen are tonal expressions of simultaneously embracing the One and the All so that the detail of the specific disappears.  Nothingness embodies awe and mystery itself.)

Easter, in fact, is just the first day of spring.  It is total wipe out.  Tabula rasa (blank or erased slate) reigns.  All bets are off on anything before sunrise.  The ice melts and any on-going revolutionary (radical), evolutionary (incremental), and imaginal (paradigm) change can start all over again.  Western activism created the Passion of the Christ and its built-in anxieties, and in it, a resurrection from the dead, not so much as an epilogue after the empty tomb, as it is Act III culminating in the symphony of a tabernacle orchestra in the exuberant and celebrative strains of the Hallelujah Chorus.

While Brussels tightly tiptoes through the tulips, the Indo-Aryan ensemble drowns in the deafening percussion of crescendo-ing Ravel’s Bolero, or bask in the triumphal 1812 overture!  It is unfortunate that the Christian story of the Way Life Is (YHWH), deteriorated into an idolatry of its lead performer whose only possible utterance at the cross, according to Gospel writer Mark, was the cry of nothingness: eli eli lema sabaqtani, “life force, life force, why ebb away from me?” 

“When it is nothing, absolutely nothing, then it is everything,” D. H. Lawrence later mused on the reality of the new heaven and the new earth.  The options are wide open; a choice waits to be made; we only have to decide.

My peers are still stuck on scribal bibliolatry – inviolability of the Koran, inerrancy of the written Word, memorizing mantras, seeking authority from the Sutras, genuflecting before Scriptures - rather than heed the living truth as witnessed by the authenticity of life experience, from the logos that “lights every person who comes into this earth.”  My Chinese students begin our Oral English class with: “This is the day we have; we can live this day or throw it away, this is the day we have.”  They can choose each day to live the resurrected life!

The Jesus of my devotion, following Mark, wants to meet his followers back in Galilee after Jerusalem.  It is a message to be new all over again, regardless of what Golgotha held.  The empty tomb is bereft of coercive powers, it offers only the option to choose the force of life.  This leads me to believe, our rituals and rites notwithstanding, that resurrection is a factual reality of ordinary existence, and it does not happen once a year; it is the character of every sunrise and a live option we can choose daily the rest of our lives.  We can live this day, or throw it away.  Indeed, Easter is the only day we have!

j'aime la vie
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