The celebration of Christ’s Resurrection and bodily Transfiguration is one that is best celebrated as a communal event, just as the Eastern Orthodox Christians will celebrate it this coming Sunday (They are on a different calendar than the Latin West). See this beautiful icon from Turkey as an example of what I mean. The Orthodox celebrate Christ first going down not up. He goes down to break apart the doors of Hell and reaching his hand into the darkness there to pull all people out with him as they ALL rise. The Resurrection is not an individual matter, but a social one and it is uncompromisingly universal and inclusive of all peoples, whether they be human or vegetable, fish, or mountain range. Catholics and Protestants need to retrieve this. Richard Rohr, who is a Franciscan and is sensitive to the issue, does this in his new book The Universal Christ (Convergent Books, 2019), and earlier Dr. John Dominic Crossan and Sarah Sexton Crossan’s book Resurrecting Easter: How the West Lost and the East Kept the Original Easter Vision (Harper Collins, 2018) make this excellent point.
Easter is celebrated in the Catholic Church over an 8-day period––what’s called an “octave,” which is also a musical term. I think it is true to say that music is one way in which spiritual truth and love are best expressed. The liturgical music that shaped me growing up came through my mom and dad. We sang all kinds of songs for mass, mostly folk music which was made popular at the time with the changes of Vatican II. But at the University of Notre Dame where I sang in many choirs, I learned more about hymnody. Steve Warner and the ND Folk Choir were my main teachers. I am so grateful. Each day now, during this pandemic the University of Notre Dame sends an email to friends and family with music and the mass readings for the day. Today’s Gospel reading is from Luke 24:13-25, the story of the Road to Emmaus. Jesus greets two men walking to this small village from Jerusalem and they don’t recognize him until he stops and breaks bread with them. He vanishes from their sight in the breaking, but he remains in their hearts in the recognition. It is a wonderful story that resonates with the experience of Meher Baba when he dropped his body and his lovers gathered at his tomb the first week of February 1969, no one noticing that he had gone. He was so fully present because his love was unbounded! The song that ND sent along with the Luke story is sung by the Notre Dame Children’s Choir, which is equally wonderful as the story. The hymn is called “Joyful is the Dark.” It is set to a profound poem written by the Englishman Brian Wren. The darkness of death and hell is celebrated in this song as the very birthplace of light, which encourages me at least to befriend the dark. I don’t know of a better message and Dr. Wren does it justice with deep feeling. The musical composition by Hillary Doerries is also very lovely.
In the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, they celebrate something similar that has been forming my experience for the past 20 years. They talk about and more importantly, experience a dawning new creation and new human being as a result of the work of their spiritual guides, the Mother (1878-1973) and Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950). The darkness of the old world that is right now trying to hold on to its supremacy is dying: a world of “mainstream and marginalized,” of “people who are right and people who are wrong,” of “old-time religion.” Their dawning “new time religion” is not a religion at all, but a non-sectarian path called the Integral Yoga, and it seeks to break old forms and integrate what can move forward in the new creation. The Ashram is still going strong today in Pondicherry, India, comprised of some of the most mature human beings I have ever met. It is a wonder.
The Mother said that the old world exists next to this new world that is now coming, a world of universal inclusion, universal transfiguration. But to live in that new world, to strengthen its presence so that it can take over the strength of the old world, one must let go of the old ways of being religious. One must set out on a completely new adventure. I don’t want to make these posts too long, so I invite you to read the full account of the Mother’s words on this delicious subject here. (She made these remarks on July 10, 1957, which is an important date for those who love Meher Baba as he began his silence on July 10, 1925). The following is a taste of her words that moves me, and I hope it moves you too; that you might see how much God is flooding all paths with the same divine force even as the paths themselves become more what they are meant to be––the Catholic mystic path, the Sufism Reoriented path, and the Integral Yoga path in my case. Even more, there is a flood of divine force that invites one into the third space between all these paths, as I wrote about last time.
The Mother concludes her remarks this way,
“There are people who love adventure. It is these I call, and I tell them this: ‘I invite you to the great adventure.’
“It is not a question of repeating spiritually what others have done before us, for our adventure begins beyond that. It is a question of a new creation, entirely new, with all the unforeseen events, the risks, the hazards it entails—a real adventure, whose goal is certain victory, but the road to which is unknown and must be traced out step by step in the unexplored. Something that has never been in this present universe and that will never be again in the same way. If that interests you... well, let us embark. What will happen to you tomorrow—I have no idea.
“One must put aside all that has been foreseen, all that has been devised, all that has been constructed, and then... set off walking into the unknown. And—come what may! There.”