JESUS VERSUS CHRIST; THE UNITED STATES VERSUS AMERICA

Dali: Meditative Rose

For whatever reason, 2014 was the year when I perceived more fully than before a striking difference between “Jesus” and “Christ.” These are two different terms, with different connotations. No one speaks of “Jesus Consciousness.” But it’s possible to refine “Christ” into “Christ Consciousness.”

“Christ Consciousness” has nothing to do with the historical Jesus as the end-of-the-world preacher. We are not even sure he came from Galilee. “Nazareth” is possibly the result of a linguistic confusion with “Nazarene.” Christ Consciousness has nothing to do with virgin birth, walking on water, or resurrection. But it has a lot to do with Jesus’ acts of compassion. It actually doesn’t matter if those acts really took place. What matters is that we know about them.

I find Bart Ehrman very convincing in his presentation of the historical Jesus as one of the many apocalyptic preachers of his era. But Christ Consciousness of non-judgment and non-vengefulness remains an inspiring ideal.

I felt this when I heard a Benedictine monk say, “Your deepest self is the Christ.” Something in me instantly said yes to that. If he’d said, “Your deepest self is Jesus,” I would have automatically recoiled. But this monk has studied in India, and what he said was opposite of the usual Christian talk of being a sinner, so hopelessly fallen that an innocent had to die under torture to effect a collective atonement, or pay “the bloody ransom” to his own [alleged] father.

The Christian doctrine of salvation turns my stomach. That’s why “Yours in the light of Christ” or simply “Yours in Christ” somehow sounds right, while “Yours in Jesus” is off-key. The constant use of the name “Jesus” evokes the fundamentalist churches of hate that keep talking about being “rinsed in the blood of the Lamb” and how “without blood, there is no forgiveness.” 

(Note that you can say, “Yours in the light of the Buddha,” but “Yours in the light of Moses,” or “Yours in the light of Muhammad” sounds off-key — probably because both are associated with violence.)

THE UNIVERSALITY OF CHRIST

Note also that the name of the religion is Christianity, and not “Jesuity” or “Jesuitism.” This we owe to St. Paul, whose faith, according to Harold Bloom, could be summarized as “Not Jesus, but Christ.”

Jesus is a Jewish man of the first century. He bears the cross of ancient beliefs that become more and more bizarre as modernity advances. Christ is international; he transcends time and ethnicity.

It was toward the end of the year (December is my month of the “meditative rose”) that I began wondering if some salvaging of Jesus was possible — “Jesus without lies.” But so much text would have to removed that it's easier to leave behind the doctrine and stories, and think in terms of "Christ consciousness." It could be defined as non-judgment, compassion, kindness, and “the kingdom is within.” An ideal, not a person — but the initial connection with a person gives it more power for those of us who could be called “cultural Christians.”

Buddha consciousness is pretty much the same ideal, with freedom from desire as part of it. When a friend said, “You are suffering because you want something from this person,” I experienced at least partial enlightenment. And it worked: I decided there was nothing I wanted from that particular woman, and the suffering dissolved. As an unexpected bonus, I also suddenly began “getting respect” from that woman.

In an attempt to get away from the anthropomorphic concept of the divine, some have posited “Cosmic Consciousness.” But that term is just too abstract for me, and I suspect it’s too abstract and uncuddly for most people. And “Cosmic Consciousness” does not imply kindness.

If I could reform Christianity, I’d totally remove the crucifix and of course any notion of the “bloody ransom.” Christ Consciousness is the opposite of a vengeful deity who requires anyone’s death under torture “because someone has to pay the price.” Says who? That’s the old mentality built around the justification of vengeance. Christ Consciousness is the opposite of that.

On the other hand, I can imagine a supportive “Elohim Consciousness” that breaks away from Yahweh’s wrath, jealousy, vengefulness, and narcissism. Given that we can’t endure people who demand constant praise, how did early humanity ever create a god who wants to be praised 24/7? I suspect that the answer lies in the cruelty of the early gods and the need to appease them as a way to try to control reality (storms, floods, famines, and the like “acts of god”).

My first inkling of the difference between “Jesus” and “Christ” goes back a long time. Already in childhood I noticed that the two words were used differently, and the more educated seemed to favor “Christ.” Jesus was a person, Yoshua, a name like Tom or Bill. Christ was not a first name, but a signifier of consecration. The word implied something more abstract and mysterious. Only now I feel I've clarified it for myself: Christ is a concept, an ideal. And that ideal is meaningful to me.

My deepest self is a lover, so Christ consciousness feels very natural to me. I say this as an atheist since the age of 14, whose journey into atheism has only deepened with age. I used to enjoy shocking people by saying “No, I'm not a spiritual seeker.” In California that’s the supreme heresy. I have very strong values, but they are built on the rock of this life and this magnificent world. I know I’ve been spoiled by California’s la dolce vita. But I find that sweetness of life to be completely compatible with Christ consciousness, which praises joy and wishes joy to all.
  Dali: Galathea of the Spheres 

Why not “Mary Consciousness”?

The cult of Mary existed already in early Christianity. Nevertheless, it did not begin to flourish until the 12th century, when the great cathedrals were dedicated to “Our Lady.” Kenneth Clark makes an interesting suggestion: perhaps, in parallel with courtly love, the times were just too harsh for the devotion to the Sacred Feminine before then. Only when life became just a bit more gentle and secure was there room for the tender image of unconditional love.

Isn’t Jesus of the Gospels an image of unconditional love? Not exactly. Even Jesus talks about hell. He is tainted with the doctrine of the Last Judgment where sinners and nonbelievers (too bad about having been born in Turkey or Japan) will be tossed into hellfire. Not so Mary; she is the one who never judges, never condemns.

Still, “Mary consciousness” doesn’t work. The use of a common first name makes it vaguely ludicrous. “Virgin consciousness” would be even worse. Alas, there is no title of Mary that can serve the purpose. The best I can come up with is “mercy consciousness” — but only to Catholics is Mary the Mother of Mercy. 

Another problem is that Mary’s life and personality are too vague. Here I have to agree that mythology has power. There aren’t enough stories about Mary to indicate anything but submissive passivity. 

Dali: Madonna and Child

“THE UNITED STATES” VERSUS “AMERICA”

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.  ~ John Steinbeck

It’s no secret that the relationship between The United States and America has always been difficult. True, the words are used interchangeably, with some preference for “America” because it’s shorter. But on a certain level there are different connotations to each term. The United States is reality; America is an ideal.

I don’t intend to analyze all the nuances of that difference. The issue arose for me because of the frequent use of the term “the American dream.” Some years ago I realized that I didn’t really know what the phrase meant, so I asked friend. “Getting rich” was one reply. “A house in the suburbs with a white-picket fence,” someone else said. “A good job, a two-car garage, and being able to support your family,” was yet another definition. It could be summarized as prosperity and a comfortable standard of living.

“I thought the American dream was about more than that,” I said morosely. Not that I dismiss the “good life.” The average American standard of living is higher than in Europe, and it is a blessing. But I wasn’t quite satisfied with reducing the American dream to prosperity — even though that’s probably an accurate “translation.”

Mental time travel brought me the answer I wanted: “The dream IS America.” I had to go back to  when I was 15 or 16 and wondering where I wanted to live. “In the West,” I decided. And “the West” meant above all America. That was the true Promised Land. America itself was the dream.

It meant to me a place of abundance including financial prosperity, but beyond it. I was fascinated by the statement, “America is a country of immigrants.” That’s what I wanted: a place of kindness to the stranger, with freedom to pursue one’s path in life without being unavoidably caught up in politics and petty nationalism. The freedom to pursue what to me was more important — knowledge, for instance.

Actually my first reaction to the phrase “pursuit of happiness” was negative. It seemed shallow. I would have preferred the “pursuit of excellence.” I couldn’t quite understand how someone as brilliant as Jefferson could put forth such a non-inspiring ideal. Remember, I was still in my teens and hardly knew anything about life.

But my struggles with the concept of happiness are a separate topic. To make it worse, in spite of not appreciating happiness on the conscious level, for many years I felt unhappy, and came to realize I’d probably be much happier if I’d stayed in my homeland. Once the thought, “If I studied at the University of Warsaw, I would have had a ball,” crossed my mind, it opened the door to all kinds of other “if only I’d stayed” fantasies. And tears came again, as they so often did during the first two years after arrival.

Becoming an immigrant is a rather desperate move. To all prospective immigrants, I’d say only one word: “Don’t” — unless life where you are is unbearable. Bitterness among immigrants is as endemic as homesickness — but that’s another huge topic. I’ll let one poem speak for some of that sadness:

BRIDE OF THE WIND

Because at bedtime I read, Music is the memory
of what never happened, and heard
the slow movement of the Brahms sextet
in B-flat, remembering how in my youth

I would have said, “B-soft” — the melody,
like a summer that far north, brought back
a memory of what never happened,
long ago, in my room in Warsaw.

It was a dream of heaven: I was in my bed,
and the green-eyed motorcycle rider I met
in the Mazurian Lakes, and waited for
that whole year, walking the leafy

length of Warsaw, found me at last —
this bridegroom of the wind
above my river-avenue of poplars —
his weight the sweet burden

of everything unknown.
That night at last I heard
the music of what never happened,
though it did: he’d come to me

in my other life, the one unlived
in the country I left. In that life like thin mist
blown against All Hallows’ graves,
I had no plans: I only wanted to feel

his body on my body.
In the music that would never stop,
we lay dreamless in the quiet dark,
far from time, not needing anything.

~ Oriana © 2014

*

I had that dream on the morning of Valentine’s Day — I forget the year, but definitely before 2009, when I closed the door to depression. I woke up with tears in my eyes.

I’ve removed a few lines from the earlier version:

Only now, too late, I know
America will not make you happy,
nor publications, nor awards.

When I wrote the first draft of the poem, I was beginning to understand that I had traded personal happiness — although there can be no certainty about that, just an intuition — for the kind of hardship that would make me seek a desperate escape, and re-imagine myself as a poet. Publications and awards did happen, but I never crossed the threshold into true recognition. After a long crisis, I re-imagined myself again, as a writer of the personal essay. It’s a fairly common midlife story: diminished expectations, micro-ambitions.

I called it being posthumous. The life of achievement had already happened. Now I didn’t have to do anything, prove anything.

And gradually I became happy.

And, surprisingly, much of this happiness IS due to America. Most likely, had I stayed, I’d never have the luxury of the kind of deep solitude that’s needed for unhurried creativity. I’d be busy with my professional work and my family. I’d probably be quite content, but as a completely different person.

Nietzsche and Heidegger were right: we are thrown into our time and circumstances, we belong to our time, and no life can be compared with any other life. As I like to say, we are of the moment and belong to that moment.

And to that place we learn to call home, even if in dreams we travel somewhere else.

And thus I entered my dream of America, this time with gratitude. 
 
Oskar Kokoschka: Bride of the Wind


AN ADDENDUM, JANUARY 9, 2015

As President Hollande said in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks: “We are a free country. We carry an ideal that is greater than us.” This is even more true of America: America carries an ideal greater than itself.

SZYMBORSKA, CORDING: THE MIRACLE OF REBUILDING

14h century French triptych, ivory. Its depiction of Nativity is unusual, possibly unique. In the upper right, Joseph is holding the baby; Mary seems to have just said, “You hold him now, I need a nap.”

MY NEIGHBOR’S MAILBOX

The first time some teens, buzzed on beer
or coke, caved in her mailbox with a bat,
a new one appeared the very next day,

but with two small hand-painted geese
on the routine black metal where the flag
is raised. When that one was crushed,

her next gave both sides to a scene
of woods and field and a small brook
that jointed each other at the door.

After yet a third time the mailbox
and even the post was taken out, she built
a little red barn out of wood

with a door that opened to receive
the mail. Below the mailbox, she placed
a flower pot, of deep blue porcelain,

filled with salmon-colored lilies . . .
Often I see her pulling weeds, watering
the ocean-throated lilies, tending to

the spot of ground around the mailbox
as if Martin Buber were right, and God allots
to each of us our own little area to redeem.

Of course her actions may only prove again
how thin the line between divinity and madness.
Or that she may be merely holding on

to some principles learned in Sunday school,
those kids no more to her than a test
of neighborly love. But maybe

she sees those boys, whoever they are,
with girlfriends and high school classes,
all of them rushing into what lies ahead

without a sense yet of who they might be;
and maybe she can imagine them
arriving one night only to pull back their bat

and just laugh, the barn door open,
a letter lying like a beast in its stall, the night air
disarming, charged with the scent of lilies.

~ Robert Cording

Cording lives in rural Connecticut (in Woodstock, but not the one of the rock music festival in 1969), and often writes about the area: the changing seasons, the walks he takes, the sparrows, the swallows. He’s no Mary Oliver, however, removing humanity from the scene so he can feel ecstatic about the deer or the birds (though he does write about deer and birds also). What I especially value is his poems about the people he knows, trying to make sense of their suffering. I chose the mailbox poem because, with constant images of rubble and destruction on the news, I think we can use a poem praising those who restore the world.

The neighbor may be naive, but there is a strange beauty to her naiveté and persistence. She reminds me of people in Europe rebuilding their cities over and over again after each war — as if in the hope that the beautiful town hall would ultimately be allowed to stand un-shelled and un-bombed. And it seems that hope and peace have prevailed — but some think there is always a chance that a new vicious ideology will march in in SS-like black boots, reminding us that those deprived of a positive outlet for the enormous energies of youth will find a destructive venue. “You can’t imagine how much fun we are having here,” a US-born ISIS recruiter speaks on TV. “This is the real Disneyland.”

(Do I have the right to read all this into a “small” poem? Yes, because a poem belongs to the reader, and the meaning of something small can be huge.)

Is the neighbor who keeps restoring her mailbox a saint, showing neighborly love, or perhaps someone who’s losing her grip on reality? Yet her ability to tend to the lilies testifies to a will to create and preserve order and beauty at least in her small plot. This is a miniature vignette of the race between civilization and destruction. A young man who can’t build a house may find it “fun” to blow up someone else’s house instead.

And the poem could easily end on:

Often I see her pulling weeds, watering
the ocean-throated lilies, tending to

the spot of ground around the mailbox
as if Martin Buber were right, and God allots
to each of us our own little area to redeem.

That would leave me entirely satisfied. Yes, we each have a special small area to redeem, our own garden to cultivate, just one child to turn on to reading and learning — and that is enough. The poem reminded me of a young woman whom I managed to motivate to become an A student — her first name happened to be Hope, because life doesn’t care to be subtle.

Dali: Madonna and Child

But the poem goes on past what me is the main message. There is a religious subtext here, to put it mildly. I was surprised at the word “beast”; because of the barn and the lilies I fully expected Baby Jesus. And yet even a “beast” — a word we might associate with the nasty boys — is, as an animal, any animal, a symbol of innocence.

Again it’s hard to escape from the imagery of Nativity, even though Pope Benedict had the bad taste to insist that there were no animals at the birth of Jesus since the Gospels do not mention animals. Fortunately Pope Francis, following his patron saint, has just announced that all animals go to heaven. Pope Francis understands that the human heart needs animals to inspire us with kindness and patience. And blessed are those who clear the rubble, install a new mailbox, and yes, grow lilies in a flower pot — for it is they who day by ordinary day keep saving the world. 

First known presentation of Nativity, 4th century, Sant’Ambroggio, Milano
**

To my readers: Rather than continue with infrequent lengthy blogs, I’ve decided to shift to more frequent short posts. Here’s wishing you all a joyful winter solstice, and, afterwards, happy lengthening days.

**

John Guzlowski sends this “rebuilding” poem by Szymborska:

THE END AND THE BEGINNING

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.

Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.

Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.

We’ll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens and nods
with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way
for those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out,
blade of grass in his mouth,
gazing at the clouds.


~ Wisława Szymborska, translated by Joanna Trzeciak

Oriana:

John, thanks for this gift. I love the last stanza.

And how oddly relevant to recent events:

Someone else listens and nods
with unsevered head.

~ as if to show that “the poem is news that stays news.”

*

If Cording’s poem is “micro-news,” then Szymborska’s is macro. Both of them have the same message: this is what the human spirit is. No matter how huge the devastation, we get up and start clearing the rubble. And eventually someone will again lie down and watch the clouds, chewing on a blade of grass.