Dear Friends in Christ,
As we think about our celebration of Easter this year, let’s begin with this quote from Ira Progoff:
“As the Christian symbolism unfolds by means of deepening inner
experience, it gradually becomes strong enough to work autonomously
and express a power of its own within the person. Something much
greater and more potent than the personal begins to establish itself.
At that point the image of the Christ becomes not merely a doctrine
that has been taught as a content of belief, but it becomes a living
reality that reaches even beyond itself to give a quality of timelessness
and universal meaning to the finite, temporal events of life.”
For me, the center of Easter is not a belief in someone else’s resurrection, but a leaning into my own resurrection. And I am not talking about my resurrection in eternity after I have died as I can have no idea what that might look like; I am yearning for my resurrection now–in the midst of the manifold forms in which death has infiltrated into what we call life. St. Paul, St. Augustine, and Martin Luther have convinced me that I can already now access the power of resurrection life in faith. Bultmann calls Easter “a faith event”–by virtue of my faith, Easter becomes a present event in my life now.
Is this just “symbol talk?” Ahhh, yes, I have to constantly remind myself that we are empiricists, literalists, and materialists who think symbols and metaphors are less true than facts. As Dr. Mikial Sovick, my philosophy teacher in college, used to say (in his thick Estonian accent): “Ach, vat a blunder!” Facts are not truths, facts are facts. Truth is the spiritual task of making something out of facts, building something with facts. It is important to argue about the facts, to get them as right as we dunderheaded humans ever can, but not because they are the point! We must be careful about facts for the sake of the spiritual, moral, political, and aesthetic worlds we construct out of the facts. As Progoff says, “Symbols are vehicles, and therefore they are leading elsewhere.” We turn facts in symbols (H20 ends up as Baptism, the water of life) so that we can get “elsewhere.” Me? Well, I’m trying to get to resurrection. A real life.
Have a Happy Easter,
–Pastor Bastien
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