Divinity rising

We tell ourselves some amazing stories. These stories end up being what we think we are. They’re stories about what we think, believe, feel, want, or fear, or about what we should do or shouldn’t do, should have done or shouldn’t have done.

Every year at Christmas and Easter I tell myself that I ought to find a church to attend, if only for that day. Every year the day comes and goes and I don’t go to church and nothing is lost thereby. But every year I tell myself that story.

The story begins in a devout, though theologically innocent, Congregationalist family, and continues in a fervent fundamentalist Baptist adolescence. So what does that mean? It means nothing, except that it’s a story.

Part of that story is the theme that God became man (Christmas) to redeem human beings from their sins, and effected that redemption by dying on a cross and rising to life again (Easter).

The amazing thing is that I don’t believe this story anymore, but I keep telling it to myself. So I must really believe it on some level, right? I must "know" it to be "true," even though I "deny" it, right?

Wrong. I "really believe" exactly the opposite, but find the story too captivating to let it go. We hold on to lots of stories just because we like them, or used to like them, or feel we ought to like them.

Easter is about Divinity rising. In recent years I’ve read that the Resurrection isn’t about the person Jesus physically rising from death–whether he did or not–but about the end of the experience of separate self. It’s hard to express. Its exponents agree that it’s hard to express. It involves something that can’t be contained in words or ideas. Essentially it means that we stop experiencing ourselves as separate beings and instead realize the existence of all that is as One divine Being.

This realization isn’t just telling ourselves another story, that God is all and all is God. Realization means "making real". It means living the reality that all is God and God is all. The transition to this reality from the story of separation is often called "awakening" because it’s like waking from a dream. We stop believing the story that we’re separate beings and start living the fact that all is One.

Well, guess what? If all is One there is no sin. God is manifesting exactly what God will have occur at every moment and nothing else can happen. Divinity cannot be offended, because It would be giving Itself offense by doing Its own will. Divinity can and does, however, manifest "us" thinking that we give and receive offense–manifests "us" telling ourselves a story.

Why would Divinity do that? Only God knows, and God isn’t telling. But this case is like every case. God chooses to manifest us not knowing. Get used to it.

Easter is about Divinity rising, but God didn’t become man; God is man, and everything else, and infinitely more. We have no sins from which to be redeemed, unless by sin we mean belief in sin–the belief that Divinity could offend Itself, or that anything could happen other than what Divinity wants.

To this "story" there are countless objections, but every one is about us telling ourselves it can’t be that way. There is no need to belabor them. Everything we believe about our world and ourselves is a story we tell ourselves–nothing more.

Easter commemorates a supposed historical event: the man (God) Jesus rising from the dead. Whether he did or not, the story has been an enormous blessing to humankind. The Christian faith, inspired by the resurrection story, has changed human nature for the better in the Western world. Christianity draws its ethics from Judaism, but it was the resurrection story that captured the Western imagination and created that change in human nature.

Divinity didn’t just rise at Easter, though. It rises constantly, as It manifests Itself knowing Itself for what It is–all that is.

When I was little and my mother thought I had lied to her, she would ask, "Are you telling me a story?" In the nature of things there’s One story that’s true. Everything else is just a story. The good news is that all our stories are contained within that One.