Sunday, The First Day
Certainly one does not put one’s beginnings over the horizon, in the rear view mirror of life. This Sunday morning I awakened early and made my way to Starbucks. Starbucks is the quintessential secular environment. Individuals or clusters of friends, and a few families sip coffee, enjoy a breakfast sandwich while concentrating their attention upon the screen of their cell phones. The large communal table at the end of the common room features a group of acquaintances engaged in conversation. By and large that’s where conversation happens. Essentially the environment is designed for efficient delivery of consumables, and for solitary work using the internet. Nothing is left to chance, no aspect unaddressed by reason, left to happenstance.
Starbucks, an exemplary outpost of a secularized world: an environment the outcome of cold calculation and design down to the smallest detail, a symbol of the ascendance of the rational. Those of us who patronize this place are assimilated to the overall intention, to the secular spirit that indwells the space.
Continuing to read Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries by Mircea Eliade I remembered many Sundays of my childhood, the time and space that was infused with ritual, the experience of sacred space. We called it, the Lord’s Supper, being fundamentalists of a Calvinist theological bent. A Catholic Christian would have called it Mass.
Sunday morning, in the sanctuary of our church was regarded as the supremely important sacred-time, giving significance to whatever might unfold in the ordinary time of the work week. Communion was another term for the ritual. The participants, (only those qualified were approved to participate) by a ritualistic re-memberance of the suffering, the dying, and the resurrection of the God-man “absorbed” the transformative power of an original, and unprecedented sacrifice. The simple reception of a torn piece of unleavened bread, and a sip of wine were the prescribed actions. One participates in a mystical death; death signifies the surpassing of the profane, of ignorance (of religion) — the condition of “natural” man, blind to the spiritual. What follows is resurrection, that is, regeneration. It was just that simple.
Nothing is as simple as it appears.
Not even the experience at Starbucks…… I have a hunch that reason has not rendered obsolete sacrifice.
Even in a wound, there is power to heal.
–excerpt Twilight of the Idols by Friedrich Nietzsche
2 thoughts on “Sunday, The First Day”
One thing I have never been able to quite grasp is the overarching importance attached to the “sacrifice” Jesus was supposed to have made for the betterment of mankind. As if this was the ultimate form of giving from only one particular individual. Over the course of civilization, millions and millions have made a similar donation of their one and only life to save our species, whether it was through dying while fighting a war, being burned at the stake for speaking their mind, imprisoned for life, or giving of themselves to a point of dying exhausted. Why are not all of these people placed into similar positions of sanctity (I don’t mean just those who have been canonized) and hailed as making the greatest of sacrifice for the good their fellow man?
To answer my own rhetorical question, our species does not have an ability to assimilate the wide ranging sacrifices made by those millions of people, so we focus on the singular, the individual who has become the poster child for self-sacrifice, whether real or fictional. Of course in Islam, Mohammed ascended to heaven so the fixation on his life is equal to Jesus in the Muslim world.
So these few icons will remain as the standard bearers for billions of folks until we learn that we must rely, instead, on our own internal moral compasses and embody the sacrifices we must all make in order to improve the world and save ourselves from “sin”. No god or or magic hocus-pocus will offer us solutions and only the knowledge that we are all personally in charge of our lives will we be able to keep our doomed ship from falling off the edge of the world.
Your comments tempted me to attempt recalling the many “theories” of atonement, that is, the various understandings of Jesus sacrificial death. Having been raised on all of them, it took some years of study and effort to critically appraise those ways of thinking. I confess that I have had thoughts parallel with yours. The Romans routinely crucified trouble makers, as that was the standard practice for maintaining administrative control of their colonial empire. Jesus was no different than any other rebel at the time of his execution. Shortly afterward, maybe within the course of 30 years, he was reappraised as divine. The dying son-of-god who revived, the sacrificial meaning of Jesus’ death came front and center. When everyone living in the Mediterranean basin intuitively understands the function of ritual sacrifice of animals to the gods,–what better way to publicize a radical new cult, that entailed equality of gender and class and race…..? It was a slam dunk! Jesus as the sacrifice of god himself on behalf of the ritual impurity of the human race! I think the logic was persuasive to our ancestors of late antiquity.
I am in full agreement with your conclusion of your last paragraph. The quid pro quo of sacrifice has no currency of persuasion today. And what is worse than not communicating–it doesn’t work either.
With you, I think that each of us must wrestle with our own demons to chart a moral course, considering how our choices affect others and the earth. OUR ship is otherwise doomed to fall off of the edge of the world, if we do not.