Midweek Faith Lift
April 4, 2018
Easter-Celebrate the Empty Space!
Rev. Deb Hill-Davis
Good Morning and Happy Easter! Happy Spring! Today we celebrate the power of transformation; the power of the empty space, the power of the tomb. I just want to be clear up front, that in Unity we don’t celebrate that Jesus rose from the dead. We celebrate the tremendous demonstration of the power of Life and the possibility of our transformation from our small limited life into true LIFE. And it happens in the Empty Space, it happens from within each one of us. It happens from that space of the tomb, the inner space within each one of us that is the emptiness. That place within each of us that shines the light, the energy, the very breath of Spirit. It is not the Light of God shining into us, it is the Light of God shining from within us. It is the empty space.
At Christmas we celebrate the womb and all the possibilities of the birth of new life, of what can be born in us. At Easter, we celebrate the tomb, that empty space of even greater possibility when we let what has been born in us die so that something even more beautiful can become manifest in this great letting go process. At Christmas we celebrate and embrace birth. At Easter, we confront death and what that means to us. What does it mean that we have a deadline? It is not surprising that people seek out a church experience at Christmas and Easter, is it? The experiences of birth and death are profound for our human journey through life, its beginning and its ending.
That is what Easter is truly about, isn’t it? It is about the endings. It is a great letting go. It’s like the egg, the symbol of Easter; the egg has to break its shell and let go of its “eggness” in order for the chick to be born and more eggs to be manifest. We argue about the chicken and the egg and which came first, but in truth it doesn’t matter. It’s about the life process. In the first half of our life, we are establishing our presence, our identity as humans, our unique specialness in this world of 7 billion humans. What is our contribution, what are our gifts? We are like the egg and just one egg among many, wanting to be seen for our specialness. It is important to go through this part of the process and feel the discomfort of the boundaries of our shell, our claimed identity.
At some point we get cracked by life and we are broken open, like the egg. Frequently, we do the cracking because we can no longer exist inside the limited identity that we have claimed for ourselves. The boundaries are too small and confining and to stay inside them is surely death. And yet to leave is also the letting go of what was; it’s another kind of death. It is a great shock to our system, our sense of who we are when we realize our true insignifigance in that letting go process. Are we going to be a chicken or an omelet?
Richard Rohr, one of my favorite mystical theologians characterizes it like the Prophets of the Hebrew Scripture who constantly called out the Jewish people on their shortcomings: He writes:
Prophetic thinking is the capacity for healthy self-criticism, the ability to recognize your own dark side, as the prophets did for Israel. Without facing their own failures, suffering, and shadow, most people never move beyond narcissism and group thinking. Healthy self-criticism helps you realize you are not that good, and your group is not the only chosen people. It begins to break down either/or, dualistic thinking as you realize all things are both good and bad. This makes idolatry of anything and war against anybody much less likely.
~“Human Development in Scripture;” Monday, March 26, 2018
This bigger life is one that is lived from within, the one that is centered in our consciousness, in our sense of Being-ness as Divine/Human beings. It is the awakening to our Christ consciousness; that is what comes from letting go, from our crucifixion experiences.
What happened on that Easter morning? It was a breaking of the boundary between what we thought was separation a between us and God; between the finite and the infinite. It was and is a breakthrough into non-dual consciousness. It was an encounter with the emptiness and an invitation to encounter that bigger life that Jesus promised; the Kingdom of God, the God Consciousness that is able to hold all the contradictions and complexities of Life. Here is what happened according to the Gospel of Mark:
Mark 16:1-8 (NRSV)
The Resurrection of Jesus
16 When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. 2 And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. 3 They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” 4 When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. 5 As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. 6 But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. 7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” 8 So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.
What does this story hold for us? We are all the characters in this story. We are the busy anointers who take care of things and do the right thing like Mary, Mary Magdalene and Salome. We wonder like them, how the stone of our consciousness will get rolled away, and then we encounter that within us that says, don’t be alarmed. It was our crucifixion experience that rolled it away. What you are looking for is not here, it is not outside of you, it is within your own emptiness. That is where you will find the Christ of your own being; within your own emptiness. And how did they respond? With terror and amazement, just like us and they said nothing, because there are no words to describe this kind of awakening.
What is it that happens to us when we discover LIFE that has arisen from the tomb? Again, I like how Richard Rohr describes it:
Here you discover the language of mystery and paradox. This is what the second half of life is supposed to feel like. You are strong enough now to hold together contradictions in yourself, others, and the universe. And you can do so with compassion, forgiveness, and patience. You realize that your chosenness is for the sake of letting others know they are chosen too!
I call this classic pattern of spiritual transformation “order-disorder-reorder.” …..There is no nonstop flight from order to reorder. We have to go through a period of disruption and disordering. What we first call “order” is almost always too small and too self-serving. The nexus point, the crossover moment, is one that (we don’t) like or even understand. It will always feel like folly.
~“Human Development in Scripture;” Monday, March 26, 2018
It feels like folly, but that is where we truly live, in the place of both/and, embracing our humanity and living into and from our Divinity. That is what the symbol of the cross really means. The horizontal beam is our human life, with a beginning and ending; our timeline. The vertical beam is our Divine self, calling and lifting us to a higher consciousness, a higher perspective, our higher self. We live at the place of both/and; both human and divine, just like Jesus. And as we live from inside out, we continuously break the boundaries of our own self-imposed limitations. It is not easy to live there, it is both terrifying and amazing, but to truly embrace LIFE, that is where we are called to live, holding the space where our human and divine selves intersect, the empty space that is so full.
It is like the Buddhist concept of nothingness or no-thing-ness, or the empty space, the tomb. If you think of a vessel, is it defined by the walls or the empty space inside? When you think of Unity Church of Ames, the building it is the same question. It is the outer shell of the building that makes the inner space possible. It is both/and. It is what happens within this inner space, and within the emptiness that allows us to know our Oneness with the Christ. There is no separation between the inner and the outer; you cannot have one without the other. We live at the intersection of our Divine/ Human selves, bringing to LIFE all that we are called to do.
When we live with this awareness, that the inner and the outer are not separate, but One, we are aware that each cannot exist outside of the other. It is a great paradox of non-duality and it offers us infinite possibilities for creative expression. It is the tomb experience that is amazing and scary that opens us up, not the eggshell that keeps us safe, but fully confined. I’ll take the tomb any day, and live at the edge of my growth in the emptiness of the Inner Space. When I do that, I get cracked open again and again and I love ever more deeply, and I feel ever more alive. How about you?
I want to leave you with the words of the poem that we sang earlier as we prepare to bring our Cross to Life in our flower ceremony:
Inner Space
Gentle rays of the rising sun
Touch the core of one’s being
With a refreshing sense of freedom
One enters into a brilliant inner space
Mind illuminates
The heart opens
The spirit opens
The spirit of goodness observes
Meaning of life altered
The stream of life
Flows through
A silent valley
~Bhante Y. Wamala~
Happy Easter and blessings on the path,
Rev. Deb