Dr. Freeman

For Christians it is the most decisive event in all of human history, the truth upon which ones faith is said to stand or fall, for others it is a pernicious superstition that props up an out-dated and irrelevant institution. Whatever else it may be, the Resurrection event that founded the 2000 year history of the Christian tradition is an intriguing and singular phenomenon that many of those awakened to the Midnight Sun are naturally drawn to question and inquire into…

So for starters, we can begin with a brief Integral summary of the successive stages of developmental unfolding in all 1st-tier approaches to the Resurrection:

Red-Ego: At this level Jesus is a divinely ordained magician and his Resurrection is a divine power play, expressing for its adherents a denial of death and mortality awareness, and a triumph of magical wish-fulfillment released from the very real limits of space, time and embodiment…

Amber-Traditional: At this stage God raised Jesus from the dead on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures. The Resurrection here is physical and bodily and it believed in as an event in which God intervenes in human history to save a new group of chosen people… The gospel narrative is taken to be literal reality, and so with the Resurrection the figure of Jesus is vindicated as God’s one and only begotten Son, sitting at the right hand of the Father, and coming again to judge the living and the dead.

Orange-Modern: With the world-view of modern science and reason there is no historical evidence for the Resurrection which is seen to be just another one of the miracles attested to in the Gospels, all of which contradict universal Laws of Nature. Although the resurrection is seen to be a myth, from this stage it may also be said that either the life of Jesus symbolizes a universal human possibility or that the Resurrection simply means the memory of Jesus lived on in the hearts and minds of his followers, who may have been suffering from some kind of delusion or hallucination in the wake of their leaders execution.

Green-Post-modern – Here the Resurrection is not so much a historical event but a myth that is found in many different pre-modern religions, or possibly a New Age symbol of the coming global transformation. The question is not, “how is such an event physically or historically possible?” but rather, “what event do these stories harbor?”, “what do these stories mean?” At this stage there are no facts, just interpretations and so all things flow in a river of meaning. The Resurrection is therefore intended above all as a matter of subjectivity or interiority

Now, while an Integral approach can see the relative degrees of truth and meaning in all these previous value-structures, it also adds its own important contributions, based on the capacity for vision-logic (multiple perspective taking) and the discoveries of the modern and post-modern world. It is these that we shall now turn to:

Firstly, from within an evolutionary context of inter-locking hierarchical systems, the Resurrection is a foremost instance of Spirit’s creative advance into novelty (Whitehead), where the risen Jesus is the first fruits of an altogether new kind of humanity… As Pope Benedict XVI said at his first Easter mass, borrowing the language of evolutionary science, the Resurrection is

“The greatest ‘mutation’, absolutely the most crucial leap into a totally new dimension that there has ever been in the long history of life and its development: a leap into a completely new order which does concern us, and concerns the whole of history.”

From an integral perspective, we see supporting evidence of Pope Benedict’s somewhat surprising view of the Resurrection event in the serendipitous creativity of the evolutionary process. From a primordial fireball that gave rise to countless swirling galaxies to a hot house planet teeming with carbon-based life to the collective passions and unceasing ingenuity of the human endeavor, the amazing metamorphoses and stunning transformations of the evolving universe are paradigmatic of the Resurrection event and give a contemporary expression to the very substance of what Jesus of Nazareth is always doing in the Gospels.

For just as evolution is marked by an inexorable capacity for bringing “order out of chaos” in consistently going beyond what went before it (from matter to life to mind), Jesus’ is also transforming lives in all of his works and deeds, giving people hope where there was despair, love where there was fear, and the intimacy of companionship where there was only isolation.

And when it comes to Jesus and his radical enactment of the Kingdom of God, none of these transformations is more amazing than his being raised from the dead. In the transformation from death to life, we see Jesus bring - not eternity - but a new time with new hope for the future out of the abject horror and radical injustice of his crucifixion. For just as evolution consistently brings forth new forms of living complexity out of the incredible pain, waste and accident of the 3 billion year history of life on Earth, the Resurrection shows us that the love of God flourishes precisely by taking up meaningless suffering and absorbing the finality of death, even as the Creator Spirit also brought forth abundant life from a planet that was formless void in the book of Genesis. In other words, Resurrection is reality.

Moreover, in accordance with Integral theory, the Resurrection can also be likened to what Ken Wilber calls a “Kosmic groove” that has been laid down by Jesus of Nazareth in inaugurating the Kingdom of God and the creative emergence of an altogether new kind of humanity. According to Wilber’s theory of Kosmic grooves, once a difficult task has been accomplished anywhere in the world—from crystallizing complex molecules to stabilizing Non-dual awareness—the same task can more easily be repeated anywhere else on the planet. In this respect, the Resurrection is a Kosmic groove laid down in human history, first by Jesus of Nazareth – who is the locus of the transformative energy of the Kingdom and the one in whom the evolutionary trajectory of Spirit’s own self-realization becomes conscious of itself for the first time. And through the temporal process of human evolution this initial Kosmic groove is now being slowly crystallized into a Kosmic habit – as more and more rare individuals take up Jesus’ radical path of crucifixion and resurrection (losing self to find Self) that constitutes the meaning authentic Christian discipleship.

Furthermore, with the recent integral insight that Enlightenment itself is perpetually evolving along with the rest of the universe, the Resurrection is not merely “always already” accomplished for each and all in and through God’s self-offering in Jesus Christ but it is also deeply and profoundly still “to come” – as an event that is by its very nature beyond any horizon of meaning and action that we can currently program or foresee. So while an Integral approach maintains that both the “already” (sudden) and the “not-yet” (gradual) perspectives are held to be 100% true, there is also a suggestion here that with the “Logos made flesh” in the Christian tradition that God is not ultimately real (in the Hegelian sense of “concrete universal”) until He/She//Thou/It actually enters into the stream of time and space and expresses God’s self as a flesh and blood human being in and through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

In view of the Resurrection event, then, there is an impulse to New Creation in the depths of the Divine, which is now seen to be radically present in “anguished intimacy” with the long and painful evolution of increasing exterior complexity and deeper interior consciousness, from atoms to amoebas to humans to God knows what in the future.

For just as St. Paul tells us that all of creation “groans for fulfillment”, with an integral understanding of the evolutionary nature of enlightenment, in the passion of Jesus to go all the way, to go to the point of maximum intensity where ones soul reaches it breaking point and yet does not break - but instead shifts into a deeper expression of it’s own inherent potentials, we discover an archetypal expression of Spirit’s own self-realization through the creative advance of the world-historical process into radically new forms of sentient life and consciousness.

And from this perspective, the Resurrection is not so much an historical fact but an eschatological event. In other words, the Resurrection does not conform to our demand for historical evidence and neither does it fit into our conventional expectations or categories of thought, rather it is an event that signifies a new reality breaking into the business as usual world, bringing with it hope for a New Creation.

And importantly, as an eschatological event those who hope in the Resurrection can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. In Christ, peace with God now means conflict with the world, and as such the Resurrection, as hope in that which is “to come” becomes the source of Christian orthopraxy. Those who follow the way of Jesus and the hope and promise of his Resurrection therefore behave in this world with the eschatological goal of transforming it, in expectation of a divine transformation. Daniel Migliore grasps this well:

“Authentic Christian hope will certainly stand in opposition to present injustice and to every effort to absolutize the status quo. However, in the struggle for justice, equality, and human rights, Christians will always insist on “more”—on a different, greater future than what is ever achievable by human effort and ingenuity, a hope beyond hope. Utopian hope finds in humanity itself the resources and capacities to remove all suffering, establish universal justice, and complete history. A Christian theology of hope, by contrast, knows that the fulfillment we seek is an incalculable gift of God. Consequently, Christian hope will generate criticism both of the status quo and of all absolutized programs of progress and strategies of revolution.” (Faith Seeking Understanding, 341)

In working to honor the hope and promise of Christianity to bring about a fundamental transformation of the world as it is - as a gift from God, at the heart of an Integral Life is a call to live with paradox, to navigate irreducible perspectives (e.g. the 4 Quadrants), and to hold the creative tension between opposites in the recognition that no single perspective is privileged or pre-given.

This capacity to live with paradox and ambiguity, as well as being central to the teachings of Jesus, is also found within the somewhat fragmentary Resurrection narratives recorded in the New Testament gospels. From the two women fleeing from an empty tomb in fear and trembling (Mark), to the disciples on the road to Emmaus where Jesus disappears at the instant he is recognized (Luke) to doubting Thomas, the Resurrection is an event that is constantly vulnerable to human misperception – a precarious, delicate, insubstantial and fragile Reality – and therefore utterly precious, much like a new born baby. So, just as the risen Jesus tells Mary “do not cling to me”, the Resurrection will slip through our fingers if we hold onto it too tightly, and so we cannot be too sure that we have ever gotten hold of it fully. As such an encounter with the risen Christ breaks into our human experience world as a mystery to be approached with astonishment and awe, and is disclosed in an act of faith that is held with courage and often in spite of deep trepidation and cognitive uncertainty.

And in further developing this point, just as the crucified Jesus is himself an expression of the love of God (see Good Friday blog), if we look at the earliest forms of Christian art that depict the Resurrection we find that the glory of risen Christ is always expressed in the visual form of the wounded Jesus. The risen Christ has wounds. That is, we cannot separate the risen Christ from the wounded Jesus, they are to be held together in the creative tensions of an integrally informed faith, where the authority of the risen Christ is found precisely in his precariousness, in his very wounded-ness and vulnerability.

So, just as the passion and suffering of the crucified Jesus is always already an expression of the glory of the risen Christ, the glory of the risen Christ is always and already expressed in the form of the wounded Jesus.

So at this point of maximum intensity, where we accept and embody the irreducible paradoxes of Christianity, the more we experience the tension and intensity of the crucifixion – i.e. the violence, injustice and unspeakable horrors that have been suffered by the countless untold dead of human history, the more radically we awaken to and deepen our capacity for faith, hope and love in the Resurrection “to come”. In other words, where living through irreparable loss releases the event of a new birth, the more we pray and weep for the irredeemable sufferings of the past (in Auschwitz or Belfast, in Kosovo or the West Bank) the more we resurrect an irrepressible openness to the future.

And from this more dynamic and evolutionary perspective, the Resurrection can now be seen an Omega-point of Christ consciousness (Teilhard de Chardin), an Omega-point that has already entered into human history and been accomplished in the person and work of Jesus Christ, but whose ultimate temporal horizon is radically unforeseeable…

And moreover, the paradoxical secret that stirs within the Resurrection event also points to the transformative potential of Christianity. For if losing ones life is a necessary condition for finding it again then the critical deconstruction of the Christian faith tradition in the modern (Darwin, Marx, Freud) and post-modern (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida) world is precisely the condition required for Christian renewal, and as such may well be the greatest achievement of the last 2000 years of Christianity.

Of course Christianity has already undergone five or six major historical turnings, suggesting that it is a faith tradition that is open to transformation and novelty. And in the wake of the Death of God in the 20th century (or any over-arching center of truth and meaning) and an institutional Church that is more concerned with self-preservation than renewal, having exhausted the potentials of its traditional forms and structure, it seems that the Church is again on the threshold of crucifixion/resurrection, and as such more prepared to transform itself than any other religion.

Of course, what Christianity will become is totally unpredictable, but if it is to be true to its origins and re-activate the challenge and invitation of Jesus of Nazareth, the future of Christianity will involve an unpredictable earthquake, an event that exceeds our comprehension and expectations. For if Christians are really honest with themselves they will admit that Jesus is not the Messiah (Christ) that we either want or wish for, since the Kingdom will come “like a thief in the night” and at a time and place that we least expect…

As a Good Friday gesture I want to take a fresh look at the crucifixion of Jesus and develop an Integral short-circuit between the scandal of the Cross and the Always Already truth of the Non-dual traditions of the East, articulated so brilliantly by Ken Wilber in the last chapter of The Eye of Spirit (1998).

We can recall briefly that the radical secret of the Non-dual traditions is that you were never truly lost and that there is “nothing to attain” for ultimately: there is only Spirit. And therefore Non-dual awareness – as ones ever-present condition and True Nature - is not so much hard to find but impossible to avoid. Other ways of speaking of this profound realization on Non-dual Emptiness include: Primordial awareness, One Taste, the Is-ness of what is, I Am-ness, the Already Free Self, your Original Face and Consciousness without an object – and while these words are just fingers pointing to the moon and not to be confused with the moon itself, the basic point is that ultimate Reality is not something that can be attained, rather it is always already present and therefore impossible to avoid…

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Now, if we turn to Christ crucified and the scandal of the Cross we find the exact same teaching - but in a diametrically opposite form and context, for here also ‘the Real’ is something that is ever-present and therefore impossible to avoid… That is, in the last agonizing words of the crucified Jesus “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”(Mark 15:33-34) there is also sense of being directly exposed to the ultimate reality of “what is” – but in a contradictory and radically unexpected fashion.

For the extreme physical, emotional and psychological suffering experienced by Jesus on the Cross entails the impossibility of detaching oneself from the instant of existence. And at this point, right where his suffering is “ever-present and impossible to avoid”, Jesus is riveted to being, haunted by the impossibility of escape, where the painfulness of his pain lies in the sense of being pinned to existence, directly exposed to rock bottom reality and hard-wired to the unavoidable is-ness of human existence in the here and now.[i]

In other words, in the crucified and god-forsaken Jesus there is an absence of all refuge from the present moment, nowhere else to turn, an impossibility of fleeing or retreating from reality that is virtually identical with the Non-dual pointing-out instructions of the East that the ultimate Truth is “not hard to find but impossible to avoid”.

To be sure, the unavoidable suffering of the crucified Jesus is not about standing tall against overwhelming forces and coming out on top, like a Mel Gibson’s version of Jesus in the passion of the Christ.  This kind of secret pleasure in masochistic suffering is one thing, but it is quite another thing to be beaten senseless, reduced to “crying and sobbing”, to be turned inside out, reduced from a subject to subjection, where my activity is thrown in reverse into passivity, which is what happens when suffering “attains its purity.”[ii]

The supreme responsibility of following Christ turns here into supreme irresponsibility, into infancy, where to undergo the Christian experience is to return to an infantile state of shaking and sobbing… where we pray and weep in the power of powerlessness and groan inwardly for the fulfillment of something, we know not what. So to die to self in Christ is to return to this state of extreme irresponsibility – for as Jesus says: one must become like a child to enter the Kingdom - and this is also a profoundly Non-dual state for there is no longer anything between I (self) and it (suffering).[iii]

There is, then, a subversive message in the Cross, a message more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss. For in the anguish of Jesus’ cry of dereliction there is a radical suggestion that  right here - at the very turning point of world-history - God is not at one with God’s self. That is, in the crucified Jesus – God was forsaken of God… there is a gaping wound in the heart of God’s own self, where we encounter God’s decisive self-communication to humanity in the person and place we least expect… in the very midst of this senseless nightmare, where we cannot make things make sense… and where God himself seemed for an instant to be an atheist.[iv]

The radical message here is the impossibility of Nirvana, the impossibility of us escaping from the instant of existence into the fictitious peace of Nothingness beyond the pull of contradictory forces. And furthermore, it is precisely this absence of refuge from suffering that strips away the mask of the false self and exposes the survival-lies and character defenses with which it masquerades in the world.

So the message of Good Friday is that enlightened awareness is occasioned not so much in a vast Emptiness where the entire universe arises inside your own primordial awareness, but in pain of the present – where salvation (metanoia) is occasioned in the very instant of suffering, where suffering is the precise realization that “I cannot escape myself”. From this Christ-centered perspective spiritual awakening or realization eventuates when we face up to the cold hard truth: the absence of all refuge from the gaping wound of existence where the incomprehensible Mystery is revealed in a suffering, vulnerable and broken human being.[v] And so Jesus is here the ultimate divine Fool, deprived of all majesty and dignity, the one who is ‘Lord of lords’ precisely for those who are little in their own sight, conscious of their brokenness and powerlessness, astonished by the power of the Cross to make the impossible possible and who thereby cast themselves before the Cross trusting alone in his “mercy within mercy within mercy.” (Thomas Merton)

The crucified One also overturns all we thought we knew about transcendence, about a God who is identified as the one in control and having all power. And here it could be said that Christianity renounces the Jewish God of the Great Beyond, the un-nameable Real that resides eternally behind the curtain of appearances… For in holding still before the crucified God the Mystery behind this veil of tears is now the gaping wound in God’s own self. To be sure, it is not that we “renounce transcendence” in a this-worldly embrace of human finitude and mortality, but that the Great Beyond (Heaven, the Other-world) becomes accessible precisely in and through this vulnerable, suffering Jesus that we love. So far from being a projection of what is highest and strongest in man, the purely spiritual dimension towards which all humans strive, the love of God is a fragile appearance that can only really shine through in an imperfect and suffering creature. For just as we love someone because of their lack, their vulnerability to suffering, their helplessness, as German theologian Jurgen Moltmann says: God cannot love if God cannot make himself exquisitely sensitive to our pain and vulnerable to our suffering.[vi]

Furthermore, at this point where the crucified Jesus’ cries out in god-forsaken agony and doubt, there is also an existential confession of radical Not-Knowing where we refuse the temptation to construct a meaningful universe that makes perfect sense of everything. For where we no longer demand a causal chain reason to provide a meaningful story to account of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (also see the Book of Job, which anticipates the crucifixion) and where we see through the New Age notion of ‘bad karma’ and challenge simplistic conclusions about the link between right behavior and reward… and when allow ourselves to acknowledge an irreparable loss that cannot be compensated for or covered over, it is then that we release the event of a new birth (resurrection) as the condition upon which our true nature in Spirit is awakened.

As the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams tells us, when we strip it all back, when we shatter the precious illusions we hold about ourselves, when we penetrate the ignorance of Samsara and dig beneath all of the habitual thought-forms of our socially constructed reality we encounter not one but two undeniable realities, two different but inseparable realities that are “not hard to find but impossible to avoid”: irreconcilable pain and inexhaustible love.

With the influx of the Non-dual traditions of the East to the West we have been given the Non-dual secret of ever-present Awareness – “You are always already awake!”, “There is only the enlightened mind!” Of course, this has always been called Grace in the Judeo-Christian West – the ever-present self-offering of God’s to each and all, a radically free gift of God’s own self that is also “not hard to find but impossible to avoid”.

And in the crucified Christ of Christianity we encounter the other undeniable and unavoidable reality: the irreconcilable pain of human existence. And apart from this theology of the Cross (which originates with the Apostle Paul), the glorious Resurrection that follows (and the Eastern equivalent of Enlightenment) is only a side-stepping of pain—the same sort of “avoidance of legitimate suffering” that Carl Jung names as the root of all neurosis.

An encounter with unconditional love makes us divine and an encounter with irreparable loss makes us fully human… Love and Death, two equal but opposite realities both of which are “impossible to avoid” and both of which are ultimately inter-wined at the innermost core of our experience of being human, each one unhinging and deepening the other. Or as Ken Wilber put it so succinctly, as one’s awakening gets deeper, the pain of human existence “hurts more but it bothers us less”, that is, as we deepen our capacity for living consciously we begin, sometimes gradually, sometimes suddenly, to let in more of both: more suffering and more love…

Again, the matter becomes too difficult for language at this point, but encountering the love of God in the impossibility of fleeing or retreating from suffering also reminds me of the story that Elie Wiesel reports in his book on Auschwitz called Night:

Two Jewish men and a child were hanged. The other prisoners were forced to watch. The men died quickly. The boy lived on in torture for a long while. Then someone behind me said: “Where is God?” and I was silent… After half an hour the boy’s body still convulsed and shook in the throes of death and my companion cried out again: “Where is God? Where is he?” And a voice in me answered: “Where is God? . . . He hangs there from the gallows…”

[i] Caputo, J. D. The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event, Indiana Press 2007

[ii] Levinas, E. quoted in Caputo 2007, p.332

[iii] Levinas, E. quoted in Caputo 2007, p.332

[iv] G. K. Chesterton “That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already; but that God could have his back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents for ever… In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss… a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt… When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. [Mt 27:46 quoting Ps 22:1] And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt… Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.” [cf The Everlasting Man CW2:344]

[v] “A Cross is a blunt and graceless form. It has not the completeness and satisfying quality of a circle. It does not have to grace of a parabola or the promise of a long curve… A cross speaks not of unity but of brokenness, not of harmony but ambiguity, it is a form of tension and not rest… The cross is the symbol because the whacks of life take that shape… And unless you have a crucified God, you don’t have a big enough God.” Joseph Sittler quoted in Westhelle, V. “The Scandalous God: The Use and Abuse of the Cross” Fortress Press, Minneapolis 2006.

[vi] Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God, trans. R. A. Wilson and J. Bowden (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1974).