Ready for Lightning
It is Easter morning 2019. Little has changed. I mean in the big picture of the world’s normality. Normal that is, with respect to the flooded and wind damaged regions of the South, wracked with the latest eruption of climate change. Normal if I keep in mind that Aunt Clara still slowly succumbs to the advance of cancer, the paralyzing pain mitigated by morphine. The body nevertheless wains as cancer is a wasting disease. The political landscape is unchanged. A weak imperious individual remains ensconced in the White House. Normal does not mean that all is well, a state of well being.
This is not unlike the familiar story that is the heart of the Christian tradition: an individual is condemned for speaking truth-to-power, for insisting that the practice of reciprocal love for one another is the way forward. Maintaining one’s grasp on power is the dead end. An open hand of compassion makes more sense, is the better argument.
This is not dissimilar to the Jewish story of the emancipation of an enslaved people from the determination of a great empire to compel their labor, to hold them in servitude. The liberator is aided by powers that he did not expect. The Cecil B. DeMille Ten Commandments movie is a good rendering of the story as long as you are not finicky about the details.
So here we are. We always will need an Easter ending to what is a pain- filled reality; we need resurrection. Did the body of Jesus literally, tangibly transform into an super-human avatar of light? I am not going to tell you what I think. What do you think?
I know that we need a really great story to get us through this life. We do not need another religion, or more of the religion that we already have. The lyric by Bon Jovi is spot-on:
Livin’ on a prayer
You live for the fight when it’s all that you’ve got….
If I be one who sees the future and full of the divining spirit which wanders on high mountain-ridges, between two seas,—
wanders between the past
and the future as a heavy cloud
—hostile to balmy plains, and hostile to all that is world weary,
jaded, unable to be dead nor fully alive:Ready for lightning in its dark bosom,
and for the redeeming flash of light,
charged with lightning which says Yea!
which laughs Yes!
ready for divining flashes of lightning:——Blessed, however, is he who is thus charged!
And surely, long must he hang like a heavy tempest on the mountain,
who shall one day kindle the light of the future!—Oh, how could I not be ardent for Eternity
and for the marriage-ring of rings
—the ring of the return?Never yet have I found the woman by whom I should like to have children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love thee, O Eternity!
For I love thee, O Eternity!
–excerpt Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche, no. 60 The Seven Seals p222
