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Easter, Mircea Eliade, myth, mythical time, sacred, Voicing Psyche
It’s Easter, and in all the churches that have been part of my life, I imagine what is going on today. There will be the welcome of joyful, loved hymns; glorious choral music from carefully rehearsed choirs; a headiness of lilies banked at the front of the sanctuary, and little boys wriggling in stiff shirts, little girls self-conscious in bright new dresses. There will be baptisms and confirmations; reception of new members; and words, words, words of resurrection, new life, renewal, promises, even salvation. It is a wonderful time of rejoicing and hope.
For one of the rare Easters of my life, I am not going to church. It feels odd, pulling deliberately out of the ritual. Today, though, I am attending to the introversion that is still new in my conscious temperament, wanting to avoid the throngs and all the joyful noise. Yes, as soon as it’s too late, I will probably regret not being there. But for now, I am simply letting Easter itself fill me. I’m thinking about resurrection, about what it might mean, and how that becomes a shaping myth.
What led to this was reading a post, earlier this morning, from the blog Voicing Psyche. The author quotes Mircea Eliade, from Time and Eternity in Indian Thought, p. 173:
Mythical or sacred time is qualitatively different from profane time, from the continuous and irreversible time of our everyday, desacralized existence. In narrating a myth, we reactualize, as it were, the sacred time in which occurred the events of which we are speaking. […] In a word, myth is supposed to take place in an intemporal time, if we may be pardoned the term, in a moment without duration, as certain mystics and philosophers conceive of eternity. This observation is important, for it follows that the narration of myths has profound consequences both for him who narrates and for them who listen. By the simple fact of a myth’s narration, profane time is–symbolically at least–abolished: narrator and audience are projected into a sacred, mythical time.
Mythical time, it occurs to me, is the time we find in stories not only of great sacred figures like Moses and Elijah and Jesus, and of real cultural icons like Martin Luther King and psychological icons such as the Superheroes and Frodo (and now, probably, Harry Potter). Mythical time occurs also around narratives of the quite ordinary people who tell of their near-death or spiritually transformative experiences. It is that indescribable time in which the events of an “elsewhere” are inscribed into memory to be brought back into waking consciousness, where they begin to reshape lives. It is that “moment without duration,” as Eliade calls it, that becomes indefinable but imperative.
This morning, then, I am sitting in that indefinable moment that is Easter and an indefinable resurrection and its two-thousand-year memory in my people. Not a bad intemporal place to be, at all.
dancingpastthedark 
Thank you for illustrating the relationship between profane and sacred time so well, Nan. Mircea Eliade’s “The Sacred and the Profane” and William James’ “Varieties of Religious Experience” are books I return to when reflecting on that relationship – what they have to say validates the ‘reality’ of experiences I have had also.
Sacred. Profane? There is no time except now. Qualifying words like this create more misconception than anything else. The physical world keeps changing because change is the only constant factor it has. For me inside, the time is always now while I watch the changes happen in the physical world around me.
Words can mean almost anything. It depends on the level of spiritual maturity of the person using or listening and reacting to the word. Those who walk the walk, understand regardless of what’s said. Those who talk the talk cling to the definition like a horse with blinders on, and Judgment comes next
Dear Nan,
I’m not sure that you saw a earlier post that I left on an earlier blog entry, so I’ll repeat it here. A couple of burning questions: What do YOU think? Do you think the Universe is basically friendly? And, do you fear death?
I’m working on an adequate answer. It’ll come, though may take a bit of patience (for us both!)
Hey Sandy, while we’re waiting on Nancy to come out with a well thought out response, here’s a little something off the top of my head:
Cricket’s, fish, dogs, elephants and the panoply of creatures roaming this planet have their own consciousness. We humans have our own. (A decent argument can be made that plants, rocks and everything in creation has a consciousness, but that’s another discussion.) Consciousness itself is a miracle, and begs the question “What happened?”
I won’t quantify or grade any level of consciousness, although I’m biased to believe human consciousness is superior. By this, I mean that I seriously doubt that geometry even crosses a fish or dog’s mind. I see other animal fighting, but I don’t see them going to church, so to speak. IMO, we seem to have a Special Place in this creation.
But do other animals have NDE’s? How would we know? By their changed life? 🙂
I believe that NDE’s are simply a glimmer of a greater level of consciousness. Creation is obviously an ongoing, never-ending enterprise. To illustrate how dense we are at trying to grasp the Big Picture, any physicist will tell you that time itself is a psychological illusion. Hence, Einstein’s famous quote: “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
Because of our limited capacity, we can’t see the Forrest for the trees. This is probably why NDEr’s stress how ineffable their experience was. They simply don’t have the language to express it. No language can. They understood “everything” during their NDE, but now they can’t explain it.
We currently live in a world of linear logic, but the Universe is holistic. The sum is greater that its parts. We are part of the sum and the parts at the same time.
It’s not a cop-out to say that the question “Is the universe friendly?” is a non sequitur, because there will always be a disconnection between the premise and the conclusion. We can’t “get it”, all we can do is live it. I’m sure you’ve read many experiencer accounts that stress how Love is everything. That’s about the best we can do. It’s not the universes job to be friendly, that’s our job.
The upshot is another Einstein quote: “The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.”
Now, as far as fearing death – I personally believe the fundamentalists have it bass-ackwards. The God that is eager to throw folks with the wrong religion into an eternal fire sounds more like a devil to me. They stress that Satan is a deceiver. Imprisoning peoples minds and restricting their spirit is downright evil to me on the face of it. Nothing in their hell-fire Christology can be found anywhere in the very earliest Christian communities. The Good News back then was that everybody would be saved.
But something went wrong somewhere along the line. Politics injected itself into the religion. Lesson to be learned – look for the love and forgiveness within, and stay the hell out of the politics of faith.
How do you know if it’s politics? Someone is trying to enforce their beliefs on you. They’re desperate to have someone else shore up their illusion, an illusion that the human soul cries out against. At the depth of my innermost being, my spirit is revolted by the fundamentalist fear of God. That revulsion is God talking. How do I know? Because I believe God is love. It’s spiritual common sense.
Of course, the Good News is that even fundamentalists will be “saved”. 🙂
Rabbitdawg,
Thanks for your post. I couldn’t agree more. Have you read “The Gospel
according to Jesus”, by Stephen Mitchell? Mitchell is a Buddhist, btw. Anyway, he makes an excellent case for hellfire texts as not even being said by Jesus, but certainly added much later by people with an ax to grind, i.e., people who wanted the control other people by fear. Also, there’s a group of scholars called “The Jesus Seminar” who said the same thing.
I, like you, simply cannot believe in that monster god anymore! It offends everything I know to be true. We may not know what the truth is, but we can safely say what it is not-and it’s not the crazy-making vision of fundamentalism!
Hey, I just looked more closely at your icon. I see where “rabbitdawg” comes from.
Too funny.
Sandy,
Back in the early christian era in Rome, when believers witnessed their friends, spouse, parents and / or children slowly and horrifically executed using sadistic methods involving iron and fire, it’s easy to see how traumatized family members could envision a Divine judgement of never ending fire for their tormentors, which by definition would be “unbelievers”.
Some of the things these folks endured would drive anybody insane with grief and rage. Like child abuse, it passed on from generation to generation.
The barbarism continued through the Middle Ages until the Age of Enlightenment, when the “liberal” position was death by guillotine or hanging – much more “humane”. Sometimes I don’t think we fully appreciate how good we have it in this world right now.
In my opinion (personal faith statement alert!), the Holy Spirit has made a lot of progress over a relatively short period of time. 🙂
Rabbitdawg,
Wow! I had never heard/thought about your connection with the early
Christian’s experience. That makes so much sense.
I also believe that human consciousness is evolving, and grace is at work. And one of the ways we are evolving is how we envision the Divine.
Thanks for another thought-provoking perspective-