I’m not a religious person, but I have a reverence and respect for the more pure forms of spiritual truth which I think the world’s religions are trying to grasp and make more tangible. When I hear phrases and anecdotes which are often repeated in order to anchor-in religious doctrine, like “Jesus died for your sins.”, or “Do unto others as you would have done unto you.”, or “He who is free of sin shall cast the first stone.” I try to register what these really mean and how they can realistically be taken up in our lives now. With some, this is fairly easy to do, but with others, it’s a bit more of a challenge. For instance, I’ve always had a hard time with the “Jesus died for your sins” statement, because this so often seemed to be presented forcibly… as if the speaker were trying to bend people to conform to the religious obligation that we should repay Jesus for his martyrdom by towing the line in the way that this religion dictates. Well, somehow I don’t think that’s what Jesus would have wanted… to have the truth of his martyrdom used to leverage others to conform, out of guilt, to another’s will. So the use of this statement had me stumped for years, until I came to understand better the actions of one person I had the great privilege to know fairly well. It’s been my belief that we’re all here, in life, to work out our personal issues in some way… to right our karmic wrongs, and to evolve ourselves, and life on Earth, toward something more aware, free, healthy, and enlightened. And that once someone has taken this up effectively, to such a degree that they no longer need to focus just on their own personal work, then they can actually do quite well in lifting up the darkness in the world around them, transforming that into the needed and so desired healthy aliveness those of us invested in this process seek. Some extreme examples of people who have been able to accomplish this are, Jesus Christ (of course), Buddha, and the Dalai Lama. So once I learned, through this one man’s example, that a person having accomplished a high degree of spiritual awareness or enlightenment who knows they will be dying, can consciously, and very effectively, take up a lot of the darkness around them (our sins) and actually rid the world of this upon their death… that light bulb came on over the “He died for our sins” statement.
And so, once I saw that pretty-much anyone can take part in this process… whether you’re stumbling along in your own work of consciously addressing your own pain and darkness like I try to, or you’re actually at a place where you can truly, very substantially improve the world around you (whether others know you’re doing this or not)… something else started to occur to me about possibly the resurrection, but more the second coming of Christ. I began to think that the second coming of Christ could actually refer to the willingness within each of us to take up this process in ourselves to such a point of global saturation that the presence and intention of Christ’s work actually does live again, it’s just en mass.
Anyway… just a thought.
