Resurrected unto Wholeness
Grief and Glory in Sacred, Eternal Time
For this time of Lent, we have been moving with grief and glory. As we come to the end of this season on the cusp of Easter, we walk toward the mystical pathway and invitation of resurrection.
Growing up in the church, Easter was always a great celebration of the victory achieved by Jesus, conquering death and overcoming the grave. We wore our best clothes and donned bright colors. We sang triumphant songs and retired to our homes to eat a nice dinner and chocolate.
There’s nothing terribly wrong with celebrating Easter as a holiday, except insofar as it relegates a spiritual reality to a single day on the calendar—and to a single individual. If we limit resurrection (and death) to Jesus alone, then we can easily turn the page to Monday and life as usual.
This is the worst blend of cyclical time and historical time. An annual memorializing that will keep spinning in circles as we pass from one season to the next.
In a more integrated way, we can follow the deepening spiral of this sacred cycle, which leads us into the wholeness of eternal time. Our pathway into this reality is our own experiential participation in the divine becoming through the mystical portal of death and resurrection—which opens us up into the living reality of the mystical body of Christ. Sometimes we call it “heaven.”
In other words, resurrection is not an end. Rather, Easter is an advent, an arrival for us all who walk this spiritual path of death and resurrection, of grief and glory.
Crucially, this is not a passing from grief into the fullness of glory. This is not a victorious hero vanquishing the foe and riding off into the sunset happily ever after—whether that be Jesus or us. Rather, it is the awakening unto the deeper reality of wholeness that includes both life and death. Death is not the end but a new beginning of life. And life is full of many deaths.
In resurrection, we continue to include the grief in integrated wholeness. We do not transcend pain, loss, and struggle. It is not about conquering this part of reality. Rather, in wholeness we are in a deeper embrace with the fullness of divine reality, which includes all that is not yet made whole. All that is wrong. All that is still lacking. The rightness yet to come.
We may personally not be ready for Easter. We may not be ready for the celebration or feel an inner state reflective of the end of this sacred season. We may still be in the place of grief and loss. And yet the cycle carries us through—especially as we are in connection with the wider community, the collective and cosmic groove of this sacred spiral. We may find our personal state and process, even as we are in the “not yet,” held in the larger container of the body and the blood of Christ.
In resurrection, we live into all that is already. Into the fullness of glory. The fullness of time. This also includes a living connection to the beginnings, to the sacred before of Source. We live at home in Origin, the ever-present becoming irrupting in the here and now. In the alpha and omega, we are.
In this time-freedom, we can live with both holy longing and holy contentment. We know that what is yet to come is, in a mysterious, mystical way, already here. We long for it to come forth, and we participate actively in its creation. But we live in a greater freedom, not gripped by our hopes and longings for future glory. And we are not bound to our grief, even if we are still living in the midst of it. We live in greater freedom to embrace our vulnerability and pain, knowing experientially and in our whole being that it too belongs.
We hold this as well in a global sense, seeking the integration of grief and glory through the merciful embrace of our vulnerability in lament with the earth. And with the wholesome enfolding and deep longing for a more glorious world. It is all held in belonging. It is all here now.
Can we see it?
Blessed Are Those Whose Lives Radiate from a Core of Love
Throughout this season, we are using Jesus’ teachings, often referred to as “The Beatitudes,” as pathways to help us walk with grief and glory. We offer various translations of the same beatitude, which illuminate the rich textures of meaning that are contained in the original Aramaic language Jesus would have spoken originally.
A Practice of Blessing
We invite you to receive these various translations as a meditative practice. Let your whole body receive them, slowly, absorbing them deeply. This might include thoughts about the words or phrases heard in a new way, but as those come, integrate them in your whole being, into the deeper spaces of your soul and embodied receiving.
This practice can also be done with a partner, reading aloud to each other. One person can read all of them, pausing between each for at least 30 seconds, and then the other does the same. Or you can each say the phrase aloud to one another, pausing to receive before going on to the next.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
(KJV)
Ripe are the consistent in heart; they shall see Sacred Unity everywhere.
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Healthy are those whose passion is electrified by deep, abiding purpose; they shall regard the power that moves and shows itself in all things.
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Aligned with the One are those whose lives radiate from a core of love; they shall see God everywhere.
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Healed are those who have the courage and audacity to feel abundant inside; they shall envision the furthest extent of life’s wealth.
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Resisting corruption are those whose natural reaction is sympathy and friendship; they shall be illuminated by a flash of lightning; the Source of the soul’s movement in all creatures.
(Aramaic)
Aramaic translations by Neil Douglas-Klotz
Embodying Integrated Whole-Heartedness
How do we embody resurrection?
We want to live into these realities beyond just mental conception and understanding. We want to inhabit the abundance in our inner being and live electrified by deep, abiding purpose.
When Jesus speaks of the “pure in heart,” he isn’t talking about morality or being cleansed—he deconstructed those understandings throughout his ministry. Rather, as the various renderings of the layers of meaning held in the Aramaic words indicate, he is speaking more about whole-heartedness. A heart enlivened with purpose and passion, radiating with love, abundant and courageous. Living with a heart that is consistent and without corruption, naturally engaged in connective relationality.
And for Jesus, it’s also likely that in speaking of the heart he was referring not just to the physical center of the heart but as the center of one’s whole being. The complete or full heart Jesus is speaking of would have included and integrated the totality of all of the aspects of our being. In other words, living in wholeness.
This whole heart is already illuminated by unity everywhere. It is not a reward for good behavior. This is not an if/then statement. Jesus is saying that when we live in whole-heartedness, we see God everywhere. The nature of recognizing the divine comes through wholeness. When we are consistent in heart, when our lives radiate from the core of love—then we are able to see what already is and has been, what we have been blind to before. God is everywhere.
Divine love is always radiating from the core of our hearts. When we awaken to this reality within, when we open up and clear the coverings we have placed over this inner light, we live in and from the heart of God.
This is not just an inner process of clearing—which is as simple as opening an eyelid and as difficult as waking from a deep slumber (or being resurrected from death)—but is also a recognition of this core of love in any and all things. We can energetically resonate with a felt sense of the power that moves and shows itself in all things, even when it is still covered over in another. Even when they are mired in grief or living in death.
The God we see in them is the creative potential of possibility. God becoming us in the ever-unfolding process of renewal, transformation, and fulfillment. We might see the same potentiality in ourselves. And with great sight coming from embodied wholeness of heart, we may even see it across the whole world.
The promise of resurrection is not a future reality but an awakening to the mystical body of Christ in the here and now that is a collective embodiment of this divine manifestation continually coming to form. The presence of God in all things seen and brought forth. The ongoing coming of heaven unto earth, becoming in the world.
This wholeness is here in all its glory. And the world is still coming to wholeness in the midst of ongoing grief.
Resurrection awaits. Resurrection is here.
Image by Dalmo Mendonça
Wholeness
Our word and primary invitation for this week is wholeness.
I invite you to pause and speak the word aloud several times. As you hear it spoken with your own voice, where does it land in your body? Where do you feel the word wholeness touch you within?
Remain in that felt sense.
Let it deepen into your body, not thinking about it, but first receiving it in your heart, your spiritual womb, your feet, or any other part of you where you sense it touching. Perhaps let it fill your whole being.
Let yourself be immersed in the wholeness of more than your personal body. The wholeness encompassing the fullness of expanse beyond you and through the universe within.
Open to the energy the wholeness of all is bringing awareness to in you.
Stay with the inner process unto wholeness as long as you need.
Come to an Easter Gathering
Celebrating Resurrected Wholeness
Join us for a Whole-Body Mystical Communion practice with one another, the earth, and the whole cosmos.
Sunday, March 31st
8am PDT / 9am MDT / 10am CDT / 11am EDT / 4pm BST / 5pm CEST
Click here to sign up for an email invite each week or join with the zoom link below: