Annihilation and the Cross of Christ
“My demons walk with me
They told me not to leave them alone
I put you on that tree
I tore your heart to pieces”
The white, western, privileged, evangelical Christian culture in which I have been born and raised has a fucked up relationship with the concept of ‘freedom’.
I would characterize this relationship as ‘bi-polar’. On the one end of the pole is the breathtaking entitlement to live our lives the way that seems best to us, narrated by nauseatingly sweet Pinterest-worthy slogans which we order as prints from Etsy or pick up from our local chemist, and hang in our homes as decoration. These slogans, which we internalize, say things like “Live your best life”, or “follow your bliss” or “in this family we …..”. You know the ones I mean. They are lovely sentiments, to be sure, but they do not actually point us toward flourishing, the kind which transcends the dark nights of the soul, anyway. They are the epitome of post-modern virtue-signaling, designed to ‘brand’ the space they hang in with a certain flavour, to align the owner to a whole suite of sub-cultured trappings, in order to accrue a certain kind of social capital. On the other opposite pole, we find slavish entrapment to mind-bendingly coercive religious or cultural norms which dictate to us the terms of our own existence, dangling freedom as the prize for total obedience and adherence to tribal allegiances, without any awareness whatsoever of the inherent irony. If you are especially unlucky, you will live in a world where both of these bi-polar realities co-exist, so you get a double-dose of the #fuckery.
Both of these extremes require folks like myself, who are afflicted with relentless curiosity, endless questions and a thirst for depth and meaning in life, to undergo the equivalent of an emotional and spiritual lobotomy in order to survive life inside those systems. The alternatives? Well, quite simply, they are to spend as much time numbing out to life as is humanly possible, (I’ve tried this) live in permanent spiritual and existential angst, (I’ve also tried this, do not recommend) or to dive deeply into what has often been called by theological scholars ‘the cruciform pattern’. This is a fancy way of naming the powerful journey which we see in the Gospels, undertaken by the Christ in his last days on earth. His betrayal, exile, crucifixion, suffering, death and resurrection together, comprise a cruciform (cross-shaped) energy signature which can also be recognized in mythical phenomena like the phoenix who rises from the ashes (the totem of the archetype of Scorpio), or in observable natural phenomena like bushfires. The general idea is that devastating death gives way to life, through alchemical transformation which is either attributed to magic, or spiritual power, or the mysterious forces of the universe, depending on your perspective. You might think, because I’ve used the word ‘fuck’ twice in the first paragraph, and used the words ‘magic’ and ‘Scorpio’ right next to ‘Christ’, that I have completely given up on Jesus, lost my way, turned my back on Christianity totally, tossed the baby-Jesus out with the dirty-church-bathwater.
Nope, not at all. In fact, the more I have deconstructed my faith and had my mind blown open again and again by the Spirit who never seems to give up on me no matter where She finds me, the more the cross means to me. But not for the reasons it used to.
The cross is, in fact, a politically co-opted symbol. Which is mostly why I don’t talk about it. It is the gateway to a mine-field of religious trauma, hatred, dogma, delusion and agenda. I’m much more comfortable with writing ‘fuck’ in my blog, than talking about the cross, for this reason alone. The other reason I’m uncomfortable talking about it is because from 2011 to mid 2019, I served on staff at a Seminary, where our core business was the teaching and training of people in the fields of theology, biblical scholarship, ministry and divinity. So what I know for certain, is that I am a gnat in a field of giants when it comes to speaking or writing theologically. I have enough insight and knowledge to know that I don’t know anything, relatively speaking, compared to my old colleagues who spent decades studying and perfecting their scholarly pursuits in these fields. So the things I am about to spout off, though I may use big words, come from a person who has a very small and insignificant degree in Divinity, compared with the heavyweights who I used to rub shoulders with regularly. In that sense, I’m just another person in a world full of armchair-theologians who say whatever the hell they please with no need to back up their assertions with research, tradition or revelation. Not many of them make extensive and liberal use of the word ‘fuck’ while they are writing about the crucifixion though, so I do have that going for me.
Here we go.
“One of the many reasons I am still so awestruck at the cross of Christ, is that it cuts to the marrow of what it means to be truly free. For this reason, I believe that current approaches to biblical literacy and scholarship can only take us so far, because the inherent mysteries around the cruciform pattern can only be entered into experientially or holographically.”
Have you ever seen a rendering of a hologram? It is both multidimensional, and transparent. Imagine you are sitting in a booth at a diner. Next to you on one side of the booth is another person. On the opposite side of the booth are two other people. In the middle of you, being projected out from some futuristic tech on the table between you, is a hologram of Princess Leia sending her SOS distress signal to the Star Wars universe, hoping that someone will come to save her. “Help me Obi Wan, you’re my only hope.”
Looking at holographic Princess Leia in all her 80’s glory from any view will give you at least partial clarity about what the people sitting beside you, and opposite you will see. Holographic Leia is a bit see through, not like that awesome metallic bikini she wore when she was Jabba the Hutt’s slave. You can see her hand extending out, and through her hand to her bent waist, and her feet poking through the bottom of her robe. You aren’t just seeing one 2D perspective on her, but the whole her, projected holographically. It is a much richer rendering than seeing her in a movie poster, or in a graphic novel image, you get the feeling that she is right there with you, that you could almost reach out and speak back to her.
In the same way, if we lay the crucifixion of the Christ narrative flat, and read it as words on a page, rather than enter into it ourselves as an alive and timeless event, we miss all the good bits.
Lets get a few things straight.
Time, in some ways, is an illusion, a shared social construct, and it becomes all but meaningless when we approach mystery. If we decide to allow the concept of ‘linear time’ to dictate our engagement with the crucifixion, we can read about the crucifixion of Christ, on a 2D level as words on a page, as a historical event. When we do this, we get bogged down in details like evidence, disparity in gospel accounts, timelines and other minutiae. We get tripped up by asking the wrong questions if we get stuck here. (I mean, the nerd in me says that there is no such thing as a ‘wrong question’, all questions lead us ‘further in and higher up’, to quote C.S. Lewis.)
Asking questions can be a dangerous proposition, and many of us found that out the hard way. When it comes to asking questions about the Divine, we can get stuck fearing that we won’t be able to have them answered, or that the answer we get will come laden with agenda, entrapment, or guilt-trip. I have many questions about the crucifixion narrative, and each of them opens up its’ own new horizon of other questions. My questions have questions. I am not here to answer questions (as if I could!), but to show you how the asking of them opens up a holographic reality and allows things that may have appeared either flat and static or solid and impermeable, to be seen with a holographic lens where all is dynamic, multi-dimensional, mutable, possible, and can look different depending on your vantage point. In my opinion, this is what happens when we intentionally shift our consciousness into the quantum field, which can be done through meditation, prayer, chanting, visions or other spiritual disciplines. Spiritual practitioners have known this since we first began to draw on cave walls.
So lets enter into this graphic and brutal scene of the crucifixion of Christ, the way I see it in the quantum realm, holographically, and begin to ask some questions. As I write this, I am intentionally pursuing just one small avenue of enquiry, to limit the scope of this piece. The scope is the question of freedom. If we were to adjust our scope to the question of love, or honour, or sacrifice, we would pursue entirely different avenues of enquiry. So I’m offering this here as a template, for you to use and replicate to build your own holograms of this sacred and devastating scene, should you want to do so.
What does it reveal to us about the nature of the Divine, that ultimate freedom can only be achieved through total surrender to death and dying? If we are to believe (as I do) that Jesus the Christ was a temporal (time-bound) incarnation (en-fleshment) of the Christ Consciousness which is the blueprint of all of creation (the one we see here and the ones we may not know anything about), then surely this person embodying Divine power could have found a way to enact freedom and liberation both for himself and for the whole earth, without dying in the process? What does the fact that he does not even try to avoid it teach us about the nature of Divine?
“How might our ideas about power, sovereignty, freedom and divinity itself shift if we begin to see divinity as inextricably wound up in blood, wine, sweat, rejection, betrayal, abandonment, loneliness, fear and powerlessness?”
If Jesus the Christ was truly one with the Father / Mother God, the great cosmic parent, how come (as some scholars will argue) he doesn’t get let in on the plan ahead of time? If he does (as some other scholars will argue), why is he confused about his own abandonment in that moment of agony on the cross, “my god my god, why have you forsaken me?” Is this question rhetorical? Or literal? Or is it poetic license taken by those who later wrote these accounts? Why do only three of the four gospel writers include a resurrection?
It never fails to astound me, as I gaze on this holographic image of the Christ on the cross, that arguably the only ‘person’ in human history who could have cheated death, didn’t. Not only that, but his followers did not (at first) use his death as a tinderbox-martyr type situation and leverage it as fuel to incite a civic rebellion and overthrow their Roman oppressors. Later, as we know well, oppressive empires used it as license to validate their colonialist, genocidal political agendas and so post-Constantine, it really went to shit, if we are honest. Oppressive empires are still using this story to those ends, and it sickens and disheartens me no end. (and this is being published as the votes are being counted in the 2020 US elections, as case in point.) The violence of the crusades, the unholy marriage of church and state in the political spheres, the moral and ethical corruption of tele-evangelists and the cover-ups of church governing bodies the world round of the pervasive sexual, emotional, psychological and physical abuse of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable just to name a few horizons, are hard to sweep out of the way to see this holographic image clearly. And if you can’t do it, I don’t blame you. But if you can, an astonishing and shocking tableau is there, shimmering on the quantum field, outside of time and space, resonating at a frequency which is vibrating all around the world and being experienced and entered into by all sorts of interesting doorways, right now, while you are reading this. Because this mystery is not owned by anyone. It doesn’t belong to the Jews or the Christians. It doesn’t belong to the theologically-degreed, or the well-read, or the pious or the devout. It doesn’t belong to anyone, it doesn’t even belong to the Bible, which is, in the end, just a methodology for the transmission of this story which would be carried forward in oral history all around the world by most of the population who were illiterate. It is mystery, free to be entered into by anyone, regardless of their religious beliefs or convictions. There are no special words or mantras that give you special access to this mystery, no insider knowledge that maybe you are missing. No secret handshake, no club password, no fancy dress needed. All that is needed to enter into this sacramental reality, is your very next breath. And, if you would like to add them in, you could also experiment with bread and wine and a couple of friends and see where the wind takes you.
When I enter into this holographic moment, this is what I notice.
I notice that it is timeless. It is happening today, it happened yesterday, it will still be happening in thousands of years, outside of human constructs of time or space or memory or religious imagination. It is happening on a plane which is both earthly in its expression, but divine in its enactment. By that I mean, because the locus of this moment is happening inside the en-fleshed Christ-consciousness, it is necessarily both human and divine, happening in a way which can be physically seen and attested to and recorded by eye witnesses in a certain time-bound location, and in a way which can only be experienced by entering intentionally into the field of the collective consciousness, or the quantum field, or the spiritual realm – depending on the kind of language you prefer. This is the moment where the divine and human worlds coalesce permanently, and we are to understand then, that they were never meant to be interacted with separately. This moment (along with the conception of Jesus which I ain’t touching with a 10 foot pole) is the great unmasking of the sacred / secular divide. I notice that Divine engagement with the embodied suffering of the human Jesus is intentional, that Divine love, suffering, passion, conviction and desire for connection with ‘the other’, was always designed to be housed inside a human body. I understand the body where the sacred and the profane meet and find reconciliation, one with the other.
What is most curious to me though, is that in this holographic tableau, where I can see all the way through to the resurrection on the other side, I learn that true freedom is found in absolute surrender to death. This is so totally counter-intuitive, it flies in the face of all human instinct. Now I don’t for a minute believe that the cross has any transactional value whatsoever. I will just tell you that right now, so we can get that out of the way. Jesus is not some offering to a bloodthirsty, vengeful god who demands atonement for sin. Its okay if that is something you thought for a while, because that idea has been around for like, hundreds of years. Some of our theology needs some, umm, updating. People tend to think this idea is true, because that is absolutely how an ancient Jewish civilization who’s entire economic system revolved around the buying, selling and slaughtering of animals in the temple saw it. Why shouldn’t they? It made sense to them! It doesn’t mean it needs to make sense to us that way. Sacramental mysteries are mediated through the lens and perspective of the viewer. And our post-modern, post-enlightenment lens allows us to perceive other dimensions to this story, which support human archetypal development in this age.
What I see, when I look at it, (which I hope is different from what some of you see, because we need multiple points of view in order to build a collective view!) is that the Christ was willing to forgo all of his sense of his own Divine entitlement, to demonstrate that bypassing suffering and keeping safe is not the way into freedom and power. In fact, how I see it, is that the only path to total one-ness with Divine, and all of creation, which is where our ultimate liberation and power is grounded, is through entering into total self-annihilation. That moment of pure grief and sorrow on the cross, the feeling of having been abandoned by the loving presence of an attendant Divine ‘other’, is the trigger point for entering into the dark night of the soul, which is where the cross delivers the Christ, in a very real way. He literally gives up his spirit, as his body finally gives out under torture, and descends into the underworld, before being resurrected three days later. This is why, in my opinion, when Jesus was asked for a sign of the Kingdom of God, he said that the only sign that would be given would be the sign of Jonah, which is another powerful archetypal metaphor for three days in Hades, or in the underworld, or in the belly of the whale or in the dark night of the soul. Whichever metaphor you prefer is fine.
When I enquire into this holographic reality with the ‘freedom’ scope on, the other thing I wonder is that if the Christ Consciousness is no longer bound by a body, isn’t it possible that it is still, on multiple dimensions or realities experiencing suffering, rejection, abandonment, betrayal, pain, death, the dark night in hell, and the resurrection? Is it possible for us then, to encounter the Christ Consciousness in those moments when our own realities take us to those places? I think it is. I have experienced the Christ Consciousness most powerfully in my own dark-night moments, where I have understood that when I am ready, when the dark has finished its work on my soul and re-birth is right around the corner, that the door will be held open for me by the One who stands outside of time and space opening the doors to hell and setting people free, and that I will walk right out into the glory of resurrection.
I’ve come full circle on the whole ‘blood of Jesus’ thing, by the way. From believing it literally as a child, to believing it superstitiously as a young adult, (as most Christians do, whether they admit to it or not), to believing it to be an abhorrent hang over from violent and masochistic theologies that belong to the dusty relics of time, to seeing it metaphorically and quite clinically; as a construct of collective imagination and useful as a meta-narrative device. Once you learn how to live archetypally, these kinds of shifts stop catching you off guard and you begin to be able to see them coming. If our theology doesn’t change, its because we aren’t really paying attention, which is something I learned from Saint Sarah Bessey. I’ve left these old lenses behind now, thanking them for the critical role they played in my development and acknowledging that I now need something with more substance. So I have now arrived into entirely new territory.
I now believe the blood of Jesus is powerful and has weight and potency, but not in the way I used to, not as some sort of weird talisman, that we can symbolically sprinkle around to keep the demons at bay. To me it is sacred and precious and divine, because it is the mechanism for Divine seeking its own self-understanding, its own ontological genesis, its own grounding in the world it imagined and breathed into being, then chose to experience by fully inhabiting a human body.
To me it is a portal element, not for the ‘cleansing of sin’, but for the entering into total union with Mystery, which is just the other side of the same hologram, really. Someone sitting opposite me at the table sees ‘the cleansing of sin’, and I see ‘union with Divine.’ Same, same, different perspective. I made this shift, after being shoved into this holographic tableau quite violently on the quantum realm during a moment of deeply intense suffering and anguish I was moving through.
There are times where I will sit in silent meditation, and consciously enter into the quantum realm through prayerful intention, and allow the Spirit to guide me as she sees fit. In those moments, I am intentionally being available. This is my spiritual practice, my own discipline.
In the moment this happened to me, I was not making myself available consciously. I was, however, suffering acutely, and I believe that suffering thins the veil between the earthly and spiritual realms, which is possibly why I was transported there almost against my will. I was standing at the stove in my old kitchen, stirring dinner, and weeping silently down both cheeks. The breaking of my heart ached like a physical wound in my chest cavity, and a couple of times I had to grab the side of the counter and bend over to breathe deeply through it, a bit like a contraction. I remember thinking something along the lines of ‘I’m not going to survive this, my heart is breaking and it is literally going to kill me.’ (I’ve always been good at melodrama). In that moment, the Spirit swooped into my internal war-scape, and like a clucking mother hen, started to chivvy me along in front of her, the way you would expect a grandmotherly-type to propel you toward a hot shower when you’ve been playing in mud. To my great horror, I saw that she was chivvying me directly toward the Christ hanging on the cross, moments before his death.
It was too much, to be honest.
I’ve always been spiritually sensitive, so I’ve avoided reading the crucifixion narrative as much as possible, because I can’t read it without weeping freely. I couldn’t go and see the Passion, for this reason, I tried, and ran out crying in the first 15 minutes. I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would pay money to sit in a theatre and watch a good man be executed, for entertainment. It just boggles my mind. I lay all that out to say, I truly was freaked out when I saw this scene rapidly approaching me, as if I were sitting in a see-through train headed directly toward it. As I got closer to Jesus, I got smaller and smaller, until at the moment of collision, I was so tiny, that the Spirit shoved me – unceremoniously I might add – straight into the gaping wound at his side. She said to me ‘hide in there’, in some foreign language. As soon as I was inside this gaping wound, I felt this absolute and total meeting of my soul with the soul of the suffering Divinity in his suffering humanity, and I understood a whole lot of things all in a flash. I understood that his participation in this moment meant that none of us are ever alone when we suffer, and that our own willing participation in suffering will deliver us into absolute Divine power. In fact, that moment of sacred union with the wounds of the Christ (as bonkers as that sounds, I know, I know it sounds bonkers), so utterly transformed my suffering that I began to see it, too, as productive and useful. Like labour pains. I understood, experientially, in an embodied and visceral way, that I was quite literally allowing a part of my soul to die and that I would be re-birthed on the other side. I was immediately at peace, and felt held and comforted and seen. It was the moment I understood what the ancient mystics describe as the annihilation of the soul, which is the key to unlock union with Divine.
What I have come to understand, is that the freedom which comes with leaving all known reference points behind, and starting again, is a peaceful zero-point energy which is what awaits us on the other side of the fiery furnace of annihilation. Most of us, in this day and age, find the cross a very crude symbol of torture and suffering. It is, as I have said earlier on in this piece, heavily politically co-opted. In the collective consciousness, the magic which is wrought by the archetypal crucifixion can also be metaphorically entered into through the portals of baptism by water, or the burning of fire – both have the same alchemical potency to take us from life to death to life again. What I now understand, is that if the fires of our lives don’t burn away our attachment to victimhood, our entitlement, our narcissistic specialness which lies to us, telling us that we should get to be exempt from one thing or another, then guess what?
They are not finished with us.
We stay in the fire, or under the water, (or on the cross) for exactly as long as we need to be there, to learn what it is we need to learn.
Like the story of Shadrach, Meschach and Abednigo, we learn though, that we are not alone in the fire. The presence of the Fire itself is there with us. The presence of the Christ is with us in the crucifixion moments, in the agony, in the abandonment, in the absolute absence of the Godself the Godself is there.
And when the fire clears, and we are finished with that chapter of transformation, if it has truly done its task – there will not even be the whiff of smoke on us. We will not look singed, charred or blackened. Jesus demonstrated this by emerging fresh as a daisy from three days in a tomb, jumping into the body of the gardener, completely unconcerned with the look and feel of the skin he had on, because he wanted us to grasp the mystery that energy cannot be bound by skin. Energy, the force of love, originates in the body, but always eventually takes us beyond the boundaries of the body and catapults us into the quantum field, where every reality is possible, and probable and every timeline converges and collapses and all the sad things can come untrue and all the glorious things can be birthed. And even as this is happening in our own holographic reality, someone, somewhere else is being propelled by the Spirit into the wounds of the suffering Christ because that is where they need to hide until the fire is finished with them.
On the other side of this Cosmic Christ crucifixion and resurrection, we enter into the freedom that comes from facing down our own ego, our own attachments, our own entitlement and gave it up, trading it in for nothing. For uncertainty. For descent. For for three days in the hollow dark of the belly of the whale. The only path to freedom, is found in this counterintuitive trajectory, pointing straight toward the only thing which can annihilate us.
The way up, is down.
The way out, is in.
The path to power, is to surrender.
The way to freedom, is to walk into hell not knowing where the exit is.
The portal to new life, only comes through death.