I Am the Resurrection

Happy Easter!  This episode is a different take on Easter and suggests that we can show up for ourselves and create our own personal resurrection in our lives.

I AM the Resurrection!
You ARE the Resurrection!

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Transcript

This episode features a different way to view Easter.  

But first, the intro!

Welcome to Fearlessly Feral Living!  Broadcasting to you from the Woogie Ranch, out here in the back 40 of northwestern Nevada, where I’m a half hour away from the nearest gas station and grocery store!   

Our MISSION is to provide a strong and unshakeable inner foundation that works for long term successful living.

Our PURPOSE is to activate inner self awareness.

Our VISION is a world in which everyone lives wild and free.

I’m just going to jump on in there and propose that YOU ARE the resurrection. I AM the resurrection.  And I urge you to let that concept percolate within you while I move on.

Joseph Campbell has this to say about Easter:  "What has always been basic to resurrection, or Easter, is crucifixion. If you want to resurrect, you must have crucifixion. Too many interpretations of the Crucifixion have failed to emphasize that. They emphasize the calamity of the event. And if you emphasize calamity, then you look for someone to blame. But it is not a calamity if it leads to new life. Through the Crucifixion we are unshelled, we are able to be born to resurrection. That is not a calamity. We must look freshly at this so that its symbolism can be sensed."

Yes, I am advocating a fresh new look at the symbology of Easter, so that we can live more fearlessly feral than ever before.

So let’s take a look at the symbolism of Easter.  In religious circles, Easter begins way before whatever Sunday it happens to fall on.  It is preceded by Palm Sunday, which is an opportunity to welcome Jesus into our hearts, and then by Good Friday, a day of sorrow and penance, a day to remember the crucifixion.

I was a member of an interfaith group when I lived in a bigger town than where I live now, and one year we put on an interfaith Good Friday service.  It was held in the local Catholic Church.  I was the only woman minister there amongst the priests and pastors.  I participated in this service because I wanted to remain open to new experiences as I was early in my ministry.  I think I envisioned that I would be able to stand up there and give a metaphorical, new thought interpretation of Good Friday, but that didn’t happen.  I was assigned a bible verse to read during the service.  Only two of the 8 or so of us actually spoke, the rest of us read a bible verse.  The service meant nothing to me, other than the opportunity to learn about what I did not want to do in my ministry.  I did, however, gain a good friendship with the local Lutheran priest, who was gay, and most likely felt as out of place as I did.  My whole point to this ramble?  At the end of the service, when we were all out in the sanctuary greeting the congregants as they exited, one lady come up to me and said, “it’s such a sad day isn’t it?” She was reveling in her sadness and the empathic part of me felt that so deeply that I felt like I had to do some serious mood changing when I got home.

But think about this progression of symbology:  Palm Sunday.  In New Thought we might use this time to renew our committment to Oneness.  To remember that god is a part of us and we are a part of it.  I don’t know about you, but every time I renew my committment to oneness, my faith or knowingness is renewed.  And that is always welcome, particularly now, in a time when my faith gets broken apart almost daily by the news of the latest shenanigans of the wanna be dictator and his cronies.  

And I’m thinking about Good Friday, and a part of me wants to ask, “what’s good about it?”  But here’s the deal with that: when shit happens in our lives, we need to lean into it.  That why it happens, because we get what we need to from it and then move towards our own personal resurrection as a result of the calamity. We work to clean it up but we also must process the event.  I think the most important thing to come out of calamity is the evolution to our next level of being.  This is what Joseph Campbell is speaking to.  And we do evolve, every single time calamity happens, as long as we are willing to explore and do our work.  Exploring involves asking such questions as “what wants to be known here?”  What wants to be revealed about me and my thinking and my beliefs.  What wants to be changed here?  My experience is that everytime calamity has happened, it has been to expose me to a limited way of my own thinking that my higher self wants to change.  And of course, there is also grief work to be done, and usually some forgiveness work as well.  

So we do all that, and along comes Easter, where we have that personal resurrection that Joseph Campbell speaks about.

We create our own Easter moment when we view this time in terms of our own oneness with spirit, what wants to be changed within us, and then making that change, and thus experiencing a new way of living, a resurrection.

We crucify old beliefs and trends of thinking and rise up into a new way of being.

One of my peers, Rev. David Ault, puts it like this:  

“Resurrection is about something that was dead, and rises from that dead state to a new transformed state.  It’s a transmutation to a new level of consciousness.

The resurrection/Easter moment is a moment in consciousness when one realizes that the power of the eternal is yet still alive in them despite some set back.  Transformation is possible for any and all…”

Today we are at that moment in consciousness, that Easter moment.  We are at that moment when we get to decide whether or not to accept and embrace that divinity within each and every one of us.  That moment when we get to each individually decide whether or not the power of the eternal is alive in us.  We get to invoke our own resurrection.  Here is where we get to declare that I AM the resurrection.  

Emma Curtis Hopkins spoke to this quite nicely in her book High Mysticism:

“No sage of earth has ever declared himself any other than a seeker after the way of the light that can raise the dead and heal the foolish; but Jesus of Nazareth said, “I am the way.”..“I am the resurrection,” said Jesus of Nazareth.

And...Jesus also said, these things I do, you can do them also, only better.  The call, the invitation, is to declare, I AM THE RESURRECTION!

As Joseph Campbell says, this is the perfect opportunity to view the events in our lives with fresh eyes and new perceptions.  To become our own personal resurrections.

Wouldn't this be the perfect opportunity to look at the betrayals and crucifixions and abandonments and all the other excrement of our lives and...instead of dying from them....we die to them?

Rev. Mary Morrissey said, “ Before there could be a resurrection, there had to be a betrayal.” 

Rev. Dr. Kathy Hearn says this: "The mystical tradition holds that anyone walking the path of awakening toward full realization of our oneness with God and our divine identity will at some point and in some way personally live the various stages in the story of Jesus’ life.  Each step represents a natural and inevitable step in the journey toward realization of the Christ Truth - the Divine Truth of our Being."

Emma Curtis Hopkins says this:  “In the midst of what seems your degradation, when you look old, feel sick, fear poverty, cry at failure, if you would cease to give way to these things for one instant you will see the meaning of it all is for you to know that you are a transcendent being with transcendent powers.”

All of these messages are telling us the same thing:   We might be feeling betrayed, we might be feeling sick, we might be fearful, we might be wallowing in the excrement of our thinking and our beliefs.  Our very way of life has been turned upside down.  What passed for normal before no longer works.  We are literally being forced into a new way of being.  We are indeed being crucified.  

It is time to be the resurrection.

Isn’t that what happened to Jesus?  He was forced into a new way of being.  The message of Easter is not so much about a physical resurrection as it is about a metaphorical, spiritual and psychological resurrection.  The physical will follow.

If you have taken any of our classes, you might remember our teaching symbol (behind me) and the lessons in our basic classes:  seed, soil, plant.  Thought, law manifestation.  So we take this time, we use this time, to examine our thoughts and how we show up in life, and see what new wants to emerge out of this.  Because we are being forever changed by our crucifixion.  We now get to emerge differently, and it begins within each and every one of us.

So we can take the betrayals and woundings and abandonments and move into the wilderness of our own thoughts and then experience moments of baptism – feeling the call of something greater within and dedicating                    

    ourselves to live this truth at all costs.  A rebirth, if you will, into the next greatest expression of being.....

This is our conversation for today.  A changed focus, not on the stuff that has happened, but instead on what could be, the new.  

What is calling you?  What is up next for you?  What is your personal rebirth?  

The opportunity today is to call the power of Spirit into personal application -- not holding it apart from us or at arm’s length from our lives but rather to bring renewal home…

- to our hearts, inviting it in as a living truth.

- to our families, invoking the activity of love in all family relationships regardless of past history and current estrangement.

- to other relationships – particularly the troublesome ones – restoring to our perception the Truth of Oneness.

- to our bodies – honoring them, nurturing them and and allowing them to be temples of the Living Spirit

- to our understanding of situations and events in our own experience and in the world –

            seeing that something about Spirit is always working its way into expression.

- to our work in the world -- giving of ourselves authentically and fully.

- to our dreams, rekindling and lifting them to the highest thoughts of Good

Today I invite you to know:  I AM the resurrection.  Joel Goldsmith wrote, “Jesus never said he would be resurrected.  He said I AM the resurrection.”  If we believe in Jesus as the great way shower, the great example for us all, then we can use his example and be still and know:  I AM the resurrection.

I thank you for listening and for your support, and I am knowing fearlessly feral living for me and for you!

Outro:  Fearlessly Feral Living is a Focus Ministry of Centers for Spiritual Living.  Your support is much appreciated and fully tax deductible!  You can support us in a number of different ways:

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