Petey's Easter Message: Hooray! Surrection!

This is just a rambling compilation of past Easter posts. Not sure if they make much sense or even nonsense. I'll let you decide.

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Here it is, the religious unday of them all, the sonny dei that commemorates the undoing of what was did way back when, on that dark and sinny day in the park. Remama? You knew the One. Around Eve, it was. It's a hiss & her story, he shed we dead, but insurrection comes to resurrection in the serpentine foulness of time, at the bar of history. So a beery Hoppy Yeaster to you ale, the whole brewed!

Aside from that, what can one possibly say about Easter that hasn't been said in the past 1975 years, give or take? Somehow, despite all that has been said and written about it for hundreds and hundreds of years, there is always more to say. It is incapable of becoming saturated. You think you're looking at it, but it is always looking through you. It is actually a means with which to look at the the world, especially the deep vertical world.

Because of its specifically "unsaturatable" quality, we can never really comprehend a divine revelation, in the literal sense of "wrapping our understanding" around it. Rather, try as we might, it is always comprehending us. Furthermore, paradoxically, the more of it we comprehend, the more it comprehends us.

How can this be? It is the reverse of becoming an "expert" at something. An expert knows everything about something that is ultimately about nothing. But spiritual growth involves the constant rediscovery that you know what amounts to nothing about the ultimate something. You are a lifetime apprentice, apophatic nonentity. It is constantly instructing you.

Mouravieff writes that unless one is unusually saintly, one will not be able to travel the path of the Way without a kind of death, "without first passing through an interior bankruptcy; a moral collapse." Paradoxically -- but not really -- Mouravieff notes that for most men, "success and joy, instead of awakening them, plunge them into mental sleep." Thus, "from the esoteric point of view, disagreeable shocks are a better base for work than happy accidents."

For one thing, these shocks will tend to ground one in the sense of humility that is demanded of anyone on the spiritual path. Best to start off broken than to fall from a much greater height later on. When we fall, we only fall back to the ground. For those who believe themselves to be high above the ground, the height is only in their imagination anyway.

A number of Coons have mentioned recently that they have been undergoing a sort of "reversal," in which worldly things that used to interest and excite them no longer do so. It is not a transformation they have consciously willed, but it is simply happening of its own accord. It seems that this is an inevitable consequence of increasingly living one's life in the light of the Real or Absolute. It is the death of one mode of being, accompanied by the birth of another.

2000 years ago, Rome certainly represented the world. It had always been and would always be, and it certainly would not tolerate someone who presumed to live -- and taught others how to live -- outside its strict boundaries. But like everything else on the horizontal plane, Rome had a beginning and an end. However, the vertical principle they attempted to extinguish proved to be only a beginning, as it always is.

For horizontal man, there truly is no exit to their absurcular existence. The cosmos is a closed circle with no doorway in, up, or out. Life is a straight line with a period at the end of the death sentence. Period.

In manifesting his celestial nature on earth, Jesus did not seem particularly concerned about making it fully intelligible, at least in words. After all, that's why we're still talking and arguing about it two thousand years later. He simply incarnated his cosmic destiny and largely left it for others to figure out. What did it all mean? What could it possibly mean?

Rudolf Steiner wrote something to the effect that "the secrets of the Mysteries became wholly manifest in Christianity."

An anonymous Greek Orthodox theologian remarked that "We do not ask whether or not the resurrection happened. It is the horizon in which we live." Dwelling within this vertical horizon is a way to contemplate reality at its deepest level -- a level that is well beyond mere discursive thought. I'm not sure if this is fully kosher, but I understand the Father as the eternally transcendent aspect of God, the Son as the immanent aspect. How to reconcile them?

Perhaps they were only ever separated by the illusory veil of death. It is said that upon Jesus’ death, the temple veil was rent vertically from top to bottom. The resurrection is reality unveiled, which is to say reveiled, for it is a mysterious new veil with which to engage reality and to reconcile its ultimate terms.

The Catholic theologian von Balthasar wrote that "truth is the unconcealment of being, while... the someone to whom being is unconcealed is God."

In a similar vein, Lucy Beckett writes that "If God does not exist, the transcendent has been wiped away, there is no longer a vertical axis for the human soul, but only a horizontal, that is, a historical, axis for the human mind. More particularly, the vertical never crossed the horizontal in the Incarnation."

Nor in us. Now that would be a real inconveyance, not to mention, folly -- to be up to Greek without any kenosis.