The resurrected human

Friday got us past the trek of contrition up the Mt. Tapochaos of our imaginings. Filipinos in the manner of Iberian penitents and flagellants perform various acts of self-scourging, including the actual nailing into a cross, now an annual observance in the Province of Pampanga, with not a few tourists and media folks in avid attendance.

Sabalu Gloria in Chalan Kanoa is a time of quiet waiting, the not too strenuous dusting of the cobwebs of our lives, just a few segue spaces to the Qingming (dusting of the gravestones of ancestors) currently being observed in China. The assumption is that the liturgical journey of this week has been an intense one of meditation, contemplation, and prayer. Where the culture of death in Iberian Christendom preeminently prevailed and the aura of despair shrouded our forebodings, the sunrise of Easter’s empty tomb come barreling into human consciousness as the immeasurable surprise of the mysterious and the awesome.

Easter is more than prettily arranged tulips and daffodils, roses and irises on a white lace-covered mantle. Nor has it much to do with overproductive bunnies leaving eggs in every bush. “Incarnation” and “resurrection” as abstracted paradigm image-handles provide bookends of the human journey in the Christian dispensation.

Incarnation affirms unconditionally the meaningfulness of existence even in lowly birth. Resurrection celebrates the freedom to live again, given what naturally seems to be a demonstrated propensity to want to escape one’s situation into all forms of deadly illusions; the empty tomb gives significance to the willful completion of finite existence when we rise from the living dead even when the terminus is in the ignominy of a crucifixion! Many of us have gotten into the rot of the walking dead that to have the pinch of life reawaken our consciousness comes as a shocking but liberating event.

However, “Resurrection man” in popular usage has referred to sadistic violence in Ireland in a novel and a movie, a DC comic book superhero, and the widespread practice of body snatching, particularly when cadavers were in demand with the ascension in science of anatomy as a discipline in the universities.

We refer to resurrection in this reflection as a fact of nature and an element of human choice. It should not be confused with reincarnation, the return of one’s essence into a younger body; bodily resurrection is a reality in this side of the grave before the worms take over six feet below the ground. It is the metamorphosis of the butterfly out of the cocoon. In the medieval ages, bodily resurrection, touted by wishful thinking of a Nile-originating heavenly other Other World, a pre-Copernican symbol that has outlived its usefulness, is not dissimilar to the tian (sky) and di (under the earth) fortune telling parts of ancient Chinese cosmology.

Dreaming of “heaven” elsewhere, however, remains an item among “fundamentalist” circles in the popular piety of the Judeo-Christian-Muslim communions. That is not what we mean in this reflection. We mean “resurrection” as the hardheaded insistence that Zion of the promised land is actual geography. We do not agree with much of Jewish aggression in Palestine, but we do recognize the right of a people of live out their chosenness in geography.

The Christians had their Ecclesia, the household of the Way Life Is, but then turned their chapels and cathedrals, steeples at the corner of Elm and Main streets, as escapist havens away from the din of common labor and celebrative fest. Deterioration of the Prophet’s Mecca and New Jerusalem into the domain of jihad, and the promise of belly dancing 72 virgins awaiting a suicide bomber in the afterlife adds to the pretensions of the la-la-land nature of paradise.

We take resurrection in the same way that we speak of being born-again! In this life, in the here and now, it happens. No need to textually refer to scriptural passages. Just dive into the depth of one’s life and the truth stares one in the face.

As one Ecclesia divine once opined (don’t remember who or how the insight was worded), “The Christ Word or Happening does not depend on any historical tradition; it is a process that is part of life itself. There is no content, behavioral or historical or sociological or psychological or religious or economic, that is required for the happening to occur. It just happens, and when it does, everything is transformed.”

I no longer trade in the literary commerce of the “Christ Word” but I am no stranger to the paradigm shifting that occurs in life. It is my conscious task to point to that surprising happening that we have tried to run away from, and affirm the enigmatic consciousness that follows which renders all fidelity to all kinds of heretofore human construction kits of security and certainty (fame, status, achievements, honors, etcetera) non-operational. The empty tomb comes as a promise to freely recreate anew.

We print this on Good Monday morning of our lives, if only to defy chronology and declare that the happening of transformation is a daily occurrence and option in our lives.

When the sun rose on Sunday morn, we trust you were sitting ducks in the tornado and tsunami of transformation, and be a resurrected human in the flower vase of Easter!