Sunday Sermon (Easter and the Promise of Spring)

¡Hola! Everybody...
On Good Friday, my grandmother, a devout Catholic, would not allow any electronic gadgets to be turned on. That meant no music or TV. And the women would prepare a huge meal consisting of Puerto Rican-style escabeche -- a marinated type of fish dish. We weren’t allowed to eat meat or do much of anything on Good Friday, which was a huge drag for the teens.

On Saturday, “The Curse,” as I used to call it, was lifted and music and life would seep back into our household. My mother would make this shrimp dish that’s to die for and we would eat it with real Italian bread, so fresh and hot, it burned your hands holding it.

As a teen, Easter Sunday was a huge holiday. We would beg our (mostly working poor) parents to buy us new outfits and we would all go to Coney Island. In fact, when we were on welfare (which we did several times while growing up) my mother sometimes used welfare money to buy us new clothes! I know many of you don’t like this shit and that’s why I’m putting it out there.

Tens of thousands of teens from all over The City would meet up there to usher in the warmer weather, the promise of spring like a new song in our young hearts.

* * *

-=[ The Promise of Spring ]=-

“All isms end up in schisms.”

-- Huston Smith

I have little patience for the people who lump all of spirituality or belief systems into the same category. I find this with many modern-day atheists. They tend to throw out the spiritual baby with the bathwater. Their favorite refrain is that religions have been at the center of much suffering in the world. In that, they are correct. However, I can level that accusation to any human endeavor -- politics and science, for example. Science, while yielding many fruits, also has been at the center of much hardship and danger. Scientism (which is a form of corrupted science) is just as nasty as any organized religion. I would argue that neither science nor religion is at fault. It's human beings that have corrupted both.

Big fucking difference.

The Easter holiday is one that most resonates with my way of thinking because, like spring, it promises renewal and new beginnings. It’s a story that tells us that we can put together again our fractured lives; that we don’t have to be slaves to our past mistakes. It’s a powerful message. I would submit that the world’s sacred narratives help us make sense of our existence. The problem is that when interpreted literally rather than symbolically, the spiritual essence of religion loses its creative energy and becomes instead a destructive force.

Fundamentalists of any faith are drunk on a rapture of certainty, secure in their righteous belief of an exclusive covenant with God. In that way gay human beings become an abomination. And please spare the bullshit "hate the sin, not the sinner" hypocrisy. In fact, we can say our world today is embroiled in a clash of fundamentalisms as predicted by the great mythologist, Joseph Campbell.

Such thinking exists not only in religion, but in all of us -- whether left wingers, scientists, and secularists alike. We all have an inner fundamentalist right there in our amygdala, the tiny organ in the midbrain that triggers the fight-or-flight response to danger. It also originates from the tendency to attempt to split thinking and feeling that exists throughout the brain.

Which brings me to my Easter story of this year. I write it down now, as I prepare to address a group of worshipers at a local church.

Several years ago, I was having a very rough time at a community meeting. I was trying to educate a group of people on the effectiveness of alternative to incarceration programs. For me, it was a no-brainer: treat the root causes and crime decreases. Treat the addiction and it has a double effect. It’s more effective and cheaper than incarceration which is extremely expensive a tragic failure. Address education -- invest in smaller classroom size and make the schools friendlier to parents and we prevent crime before it ever begins. I had the charts, the facts -- in short I had everything I thought I needed to help people see that locking up millions of individuals (mostly young people of color) wasn’t a very smart or effective way to create a moral and just society.

Man, was I getting beat up that day! LOL

At one point, during an intermission, this young white man came up to me and asked if he could address the audience briefly. I don’t why I trusted this individual, I had never seen him before, and I had had it to here

::grabs dese nuts::

... with angry white men. However, inwardly acknowledging that the meeting couldn’t possibly get any worse, I shrugged and told him, “Go ahead, finish putting me out of my misery.”

He got up and told of how two men brutally murdered the woman who raised him, his grandmother -- the only family he had. He told of the agonizing pain and hardship; the anger he felt -- how he wanted those who took his grandmother’s life to be punished -- possibly to have their lives taken also. Then he spoke about something that floored everybody. He spoke about his journey from a heart filled with vengeance to forgiveness and compassion. In the process of speaking of that healing process, he managed to do what all my facts and charts didn’t: he opened people’s hearts to the possibility of a different community; of a different society. A society based not on revenge and killing -- an “eye for an eye,” -- but a society predicated on empathy and compassion and equality. I was never so moved as when I heard this man speak so openly about being torn down only to be arise again. What a lesson! And, no, he wasn’t a religious man, at least not in a rigid sense.

I think this man was able to touch upon the essential nature of vengeance and forgiveness. Vengeance comes from desire -- a desire to make aright, no matter what the expense. If you killed mine, then I must kill you. And in the short term, vengeance serves to alleviate our pain. But in the long term the desire for vengeance -- like all unskillful desire -- erodes our humanity. It eats at us from the inside until we become empty of anything even remotely resembling an enlightened species. Compassion and empathy comes from the part of the brain that triggers love, creativity, collaboration and, physiologically, it releases chemicals and responses that heal -- that strengthen the immune system and encourages fellowship.

I would suggest a different form of spirituality: one that recognizes a universal energy in everything, the humility to admit mistakes, one that promotes flexibility instead of rigidity, and a willingness to tolerate differences.

And isn’t that a story that mirrors any kind of resurrection? Couldn’t such a shift be an evolutionary quantum leap? In fact, this is where we stand today: at the precipice of an evolutionary and spiritual chasm, and leap we must or become the first species to make ourselves extinct.

Love,

Eddie