Another way to get all enlightened
You might be doing it now
Think of the movie image of the Enlightened Guy. Picture him. (It’s usually a him.)
Kwai-chiang Caine, right? Off the old ‘Kung Fu’ show? Or some guy in a towel in the Himalayas? Someone in sandals, carrying a flute, and meditating all the time, probably. Above all, someone withdrawn from the world. We get it. The image of the ascetic solitary goer is baked into us. We like it, too. That’s why John Lennon could brag to us about watching the wheels go round and round, and manage to live on Central Park West. We rewarded him for the fantasy.
The idea that religious enlightenment requires privation is worldwide. The general notion is that we’ve been given a quantum of vitality, a life force – ‘ki’ or ‘chi’ in the far east, ‘prana’ in south-central Asia – and we need to protect it from distractions, and nurture it. We ascend, in this way, to some form of union with the divine. ‘Ascend’ is the imagery we use, too. In western monastic traditions, that language is often explicit. In solitude, to the point of privation, we are accessible to God (or in more popular understanding, God is accessible to us). In western Christianity we imagine that this is what Jesus did.
He didn’t.
To be sure, he was exposed to ascetic culture. He knew, and may have spent time with, the Essenes in the northern hill country. They were a fierce and withdrawn, and probably political, form of proto-monastics. But he did not stay there. When he emerged from his formative life, he came very much into the public. He set up shop in Capernaum, a ritzy beach town full of retired Romans. He perplexed religious onlookers by going to parties, where he laughed and drank. He may have withdrawn at times for prayer with his Father, and evidence is that that prayer was of a wordless, contemplative sort, but at no time when he was being Jesus did he ever get all ascetic. He had a job, and lots of friends, and he was busy on the lecture circuit all the time. His personal life, what we can see of it, shows zero signs of anything monastic, in any sense.
Nor was he a country bumpkin from backward Galilee, by the way. Galilee was not backward. Galilee was on the silk road. Jesus grew up exposed to oriental mystery cults (those three wise men from the east didn’t come there for no reason), to the monotheism that Roman army families brought back from the Persian frontier, and to every manner of latent earth-pantheism left over from the old Baal worship. Upper Palestine was like that. (Jerusalem, by contrast, was a one-industry orthodox town, far more insular by comparison.) Jesus spoke four languages, too: Hebrew, because he read in synagogue like every other young man, Aramaic obviously, Latin, because he could talk with Italians like Pilate, and Greek, because that was the lingua franca in the region, and because he spent several years as a boy in a Greek-speaking part of Egypt.
We’re descendants of the Roman way of understanding the Jesus event, and expecting strange things from Jesus. We codify what he said. We vote on correct ways of understanding it. We consider the legalities of belief, and focus on Jesus’s role, predicated on that belief, in our salvation. The other strands of Christian understanding aren’t like that. Particularly in the east – and most of Christian history has happened in the east, not the west – he’s understood less as saviour, and more as a teacher of wisdom. We know this because we have access to the record of how his word propagated, out of his own Syriac linguistic world, clear across Asia. He is described, in loan words from Akkadian that make their way into Hebrew and Sanskrit, as a Whole Man, or a Spirit Being (so you’ll hear Buddhist cognates like ‘ihidaya’ from time to time). His parables, recent theologians have shown, are not the sweet morality plays we think they are, but something closer to eastern koans, designed to disrupt, to perplex, and to leave unanswered. That’s not very Roman.
Paul noticed this. And he noticed something else. He observed that Jesus was not a wisdom teacher in the usual withdrawn and ascetic way. He did not speak in language of ascent into enlightenment, either, pursuing a God who was somehow distant and hard to reach. He said that Jesus did the opposite, to show that God was intimately present. ‘If you know me,’ Jesus had said, after all, ‘you know the Father’. And Paul invented a word to describe the way Jesus taught. He spoke of ‘kenosis’, from a piece of Greek that means ‘to empty out’. He said that Jesus, far from hanging on to some finite ration of life force and refusing to be distracted by the world, threw all of himself into the world, and gave everything of himself away.
You don’t ascend to God at all, in this way of doing things. If anything, you descend. You don’t engineer your success with your Creator. You fall into it. You give up your sense of self, which you learned as a way of coping with the world, and instead rest in the self you were given by God in the beginning. You’re generous like God is generous. You love, as Jesus had put it, ‘as I have loved you’. That is union with God.
Now think about the people, whether they’ve used religious language with you or not, who seem the most attractive to you, as spiritually sound and nice to be around. Are they prune-faced and theological? Do they spend their time elsewhere, getting all enlightened? Do they talk a lot about doing this? Do they demand to know if you accept Jesus Christ as your personal saviour? Or do they just go ahead and heal you?