To touch again the finely woven, seamless cloth of joy & woe — an Easter Sunday meditation
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| One of the (putative) seamless robes of Jesus on display in Trier |
Today is Easter Sunday and, for someone like me who simply does not, nor indeed can, believe in the literal resurrection of Jesus, quite what one is supposed to be celebrating on this day has often been far from clear to me. Believing that this may also be true for most of you, I have tried in this piece to say what it is that I, at least, am celebrating. In order to catch a glimpse of what I’m talking about, it’s very important to hold in mind throughout this piece that the word “metaphor” — in its etymological sense —means, “to carry over” or “to transfer.”
So, leaving aside the increasing number of people who simply do not realise Easter is a religious festival — and there may be many more of them than you think — most modern liberal people with an interest in religion are minded to interpret the Easter story as being a metaphor for spring. In these northern, British isles, this is not an inappropriate thing to do, because as Christianity first slowly began to arrive from the first century onwards — a long time before Augustine’s Christian mission in 597 CE — it was fortuitous that the celebration of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead coincided, more or less, with the spring equinox and the honouring of the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre. As this was an agricultural festival with its own metaphors which celebrated a time when the land is waking up from the darkness of winter, the metaphor of Jesus’s resurrection was able to be carried-over/transferred — we might say metapherein(ed) — almost seamlessly to the resurrection of the land at the coming of spring. And, of course, this went the other way as well, these transferences and carrying-overs are always going in both directions.
But for the coming of spring properly to be acknowledged and then truly celebrated, it was — and I think still is — absolutely necessary to do this remembering the hardships that preceded it in the form of months of winter darkness, cold, hunger and, oftentimes, death. Only in this belly of darkness — the word for which in Old Irish is “Imbolc” — could the seeds of spring begin to stir from out of which genuinely new life can burst. The festival of Imbolc, celebrated around February 1st and 2nd, was associated with Brigid, the Irish goddess of fire who, it was said, was born at dawn, rising into the sky with fire streaming from her head and, not surprisingly, this goddess was also eventually carried-over/transferred almost seamlessly into the Christian Saint also called Brigid.
For what it is worth, it seems to me that the belly of darkness that is Imbolc has been carried over into the Christian myth in the form of the dark tomb in which Jesus is laid on Holy Saturday between his death on the cross on Good Friday and his resurrection on Easter Sunday.
Now, of course, here we are dealing with the syncretic, intertwining of myths, and so my simplified account of these carrying-overs/transfers from pre-Christian religious beliefs and practices to Christian beliefs and practices needs to be taken with great caution because the carrying-overs/transfers are almost certainly going to be way, way more complex and convoluted than the simple story I have just told.
But I tell this story to remind you of what I see as the need to link Easter Sunday indissolubly to the death of Jesus on Good Friday and his entombment on Holy Saturday. If Easter Sunday’s joy were ever separated from the darkness and suffering of Good Friday and Holy Saturday — and too many modern, liberal religious Easter Sunday services are willing to do this — then it would be an empty festival that is of little or no spiritual use. This is because all the great spiritual traditions have understood that darkness and suffering are indissolubly tied together with light and joy, and that this must be acknowledged, understood, addressed and incorporated before any true and lasting joy, and light, can spring forth. And since Thích Nhất Hạnh is a Zen Buddhist teacher highly respected by many of us in this local, creative, free spiritual community in Cambridge where I am minister, it seems appropriate to quote him here talking about the third of Buddha’s Noble Truths, concerning the solution to suffering. Thay said:
“Don’t throw away your suffering. Touch your suffering. Face it directly, and your joy will become deeper. You know that suffering and joy are both impermanent. Learn the art of cultivating joy. Practice like this, and you come to the third turning of the Third Noble Truth, the “Realization” that suffering and happiness are not two. When you reach this stage, your joy is no longer fragile. It is true joy” (Thích Nhất Hạnh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation, Rider, 1999, p. 43).
Thay’s words cannot but help make me think of some lines from William Blake’s poem “Auguries of Innocence” which we sang this morning in our hymn:
It is right it should be so
Man was made for Joy & Woe
And when this we rightly know
Thro the World we safely go
Joy & Woe are woven fine
A Clothing for the soul divine
Under every grief & pine
Runs a joy with silken twine
And Blake’s words here serve as a powerful reminder that what we might be tempted to call a Buddhist insight is, in truth, simply a perennially appearing insight into the human condition that belongs to all religious and spiritual traditions, and it can, in principle, be found everywhere. It is a truth that was also seen by those pre-Christian pagans who honoured — and still honour in new ways — Eostre and Brigid, it was seen by those who have honoured — and still honour — the risen Christ, it was seen by the creative, free spirit, William Blake, and it was, has, is and will be seen by many other people and traditions besides.
This is because truth, or the eternal seed/fruit of the really real (what the Japanese call “shinjitsu” (shin 真 meaning “true” or “reality” + jitsu 実 meaning “fruit” or “seed”) is always metaphorical in its activity, i.e. truth is always-already being infinitely carried-over/transferred from person to person, myth to myth, culture to culture, generation to generation, religion to religion, which, in turn, ensures that truth can appear to us, sprout from that seed, under an almost infinite number of forms and in an almost infinite number of people, places and times.
But it’s never easy always to be living by the universal truth that joy woe are woven fine because the daily joys and woes of life can all too easily alternately cancel each other out and threaten to split them apart. We simply find ourselves in joy or woe and we forget those connections that exist between them. And this is why there is the deepest spiritual value in returning, year after year throughout our lives, to the story of Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday — or to some analogous practice, such as Hoza within the Rissho Kosei-kai community (see below) — because over the course of these three days we can take time reverently to touch again, and be deeply mindful of, the finely woven, seamless cloth of joy & woe, the only material out of which can be made the universal robe of true, unfragile Joy spoken of by Thích Nhất Hạnh and William Blake, and expressed, of course, in the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth and Shakyamuni Buddha. And, if a person is able to put on this robe during this weekend, or at any time of the year and even if only for the briefest of moments, then I feel assured that they can experience in the here and now a resurrection into a new, richer, fuller, more compassionate and joyful form of life.
It is this that I celebrate today.
Happy Easter.
My friend, and collaborator in the project to translate Imaoka Shin’ichirō’s works into English, George M. Williams, produced a short, 20 minute-long film a number of years ago about Rissho Kosei-kai’s practice of Hoza, which if you choose to watch it, you will see is intimately connected to the basic theme presented in my short thought for the day here.
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