From Negation to Affirmation: Trusting the “Great Life” [大生命, Daiseimei]—An Easter Sunday Thought for the Day

Blossom in the Cambridge University Botanic Garden, May 2021, taken on my Fujijilm X100F

A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation

You can read the essay I am referencing in this the following piece either HERE (on my blog), or HERE (on Google Docs along with many other essays by Imaoka Shin’ichirō [今岡信一郎])

(Click on this link to hear a recorded version of the following piece)

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Writing something vaguely interesting and genuinely helpful for Easter Sunday is a perennial challenge for a liberal, free-religious minister. The reason is that my audience—which is to say, all of you—likely contains few, if any, who believe the resurrection to be a literal, historical event.

Yet, for me, the challenge is, perhaps, not quite what you might expect. In many ways, our disbelief has allowed the Easter story to become a versatile metaphor: a symbol for the triumph of spring, or a “second act” following the figurative death of an old way of being—perhaps a failed career, a divorce, or a major life mistake—and then the subsequent birth of a new way of being in the world.

But, to be honest, as I sat down to write my twenty-sixth Easter Sunday address last week, I felt little inspiration this year to run with these familiar metaphors; and while wondering what on earth I could say, I decided to revisit an early essay written in 1910 by Imaoka Shin’ichirō [今岡信一郎], composed just as he was ceasing to be a Congregationalist minister to enter fully into the Japanese Unitarian movement.

When I first began translating this piece in late 2022, I was mildly puzzled by its title: “I am the Life and the Resurrection”. Imaoka-sensei knew his Bible intimately, yet he had pointedly inverted Jesus’ words from John 11:25: “I am the resurrection and the life.” However, on my first reading, I confess I took this reversal as a matter of minor significance. But this year, having immersed myself in his thought for four more years, and revisited this essay rather more closely, I realise that through this reversal he was attempting to pass on a vital insight—one that speaks directly to us today.

In his essay, Imaoka-sensei is primarily concerned with helping us see—as did one of his religious exemplars, Ralph Waldo Emerson—that the source of religion is not external to us. It is not found in ancient stories, the teachings of Christ or Śākyamuni, or church doctrines regarding the resurrection or the afterlife. Rather, it is something living, “spontaneous and innate”, which can “never be bestowed from without.” He calls this source “Great Life”—Daiseimei [大生命]. This was a term he continually used until his death at the age of 106, notably describing it more fully later on as “the Great Life of free and unobstructed creative evolution” [自由で無碍な創造的進化の大生命].

Imaoka-sensei suggests that it is to this internal, subjective Great Life that we are to turn and bow down—offering reverence and gratitude—and that we must never bow to any external religious authority as the primary source of truth. In saying this, however, he does not dismiss tradition out of hand. Instead, he is encouraging us to discover within established stories and doctrines what he calls “the sacred activity of the Great Life of our own hearts.” When we look beneath the surface of things in this way, he suggests we can begin to experience a “ceaseless, leaping gratitude.” Our own lives can “develop and ascend,” which in turn enables us to read clearly the “original texts of the scriptures and the Bible within our own souls.” In other words, it is about enabling soul to speak unto soul across generations and geography. In short, Imaoka-sensei has faith that the result of such a search is that “the inner, spiritual Christ [内的霊的基督] is revealed, and we ourselves become Christ—or at least a ‘Little Christ’”; and as he says, “What joy and fulfilment this brings!” Amen! Amen! to that, I say. 

Now, at this point, it is tempting to say that this is a kind of resurrection that brings us new life. Although we might be certain that the Jesus of history assuredly died two thousand years ago and his bones lie to this day in some undiscovered resting place in Palestine, we can be assured that his spirit—the Great Life—is resurrected in you and me. This is, of course, the basic theme of the hymn by the Unitarian minister, Cliff Reed, that we sang earlier.

But I now realise that, left like this, we risk seeing things in the wrong order; because that would it suggests that Resurrection brings or causes Life. Instead, Imaoka-sensei intuited that the true order is always that Great Life enables Resurrection. By placing Life first, he aligns Jesus’ words with his own conviction: that “Life, no matter what happens, is not something that can be bestowed from the outside.” If Resurrection came first, it would imply an external act performed upon a passive subject. By putting Life first, he suggests that the power to “arise” comes from the innate, spontaneous power—the Great Life always-already dwelling within us and all sentient beings.

I hope you can see that this shift in priority does more than settle the linguistic puzzle with which I began; instead, it helps move our liberal, free-religious conversation from a place of mere negation—stating what we do not believe, namely the literal resurrection—to a place of profound affirmation: defining what we can trust—namely “the Great Life of free and unobstructed creative evolution.”

So, today, I would like to finish by suggesting that if we approach Easter looking for an external miracle to save us, we will remain forever “bound” by the past. But if we can recognise we trust the Great Life, Daiseimei, already surging within our own hearts and all sentient beings, then we can also begin to realise that we are not waiting for a Resurrection—for we are already the possessors of the Great Life that makes any kind of rising possible. In this light, the Easter story is not really a report of what was claimed to have happened to one man long ago, but a revelation of what is always-already happening within us here and now.

In these difficult and dark days for our world, I hope this insight of Imaoka-sensei’s can, in a small way, help us to find the courage to trust this Great Life and helping us become “Little Christs” able to proclaim to all people the gospel of a non-sectarian, creative, inquiring, liberative free religion (jiyū shūkyō).

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Jesus died, but Christ has triumphed
A hymn by Cliff Reed

Jesus died, but Christ has triumphed,
Broken now the chains of death;
From the tomb comes God’s anointed,
Kindling cold hearts with his breath.

Now at last we see his purpose,
Breaking through like sunburst bright:
Liberation for God’s people
Ends humanity’s long night.

For there is a Spirit greater,
Who has now the victory;
And our God indwells the human,
striving for our liberty.

And that Spirit dwelt in Jesus,
Teaching us that love redeems;
How God, through a man’s compassion,
Gains great ends by human means.

But for love and life undying
Death of self must be the key;
Jesus died to bear this witness
And Christ rose to make us free.