MYSTERY OF THE RESURRECTION

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It was so comforting that the tradition of the Church had given me a means through which I could express my heartache for them. The Church has these traditions there, waiting for us, when we need them. I continue to grieve for my mother, but in doing so, I have been prepared to be a comfort for friends who inevitably will lose their loved ones, too. Even in her death, my mother continues to give and teach. The way we choose to live our lives is our choice; death is not. We cannot live in fear of the inevitable, but it is only natural that we ask the obvious questions: Why did that plane crash and not mine?

Will I live to meet my own grandchildren? Like other questions of life and death, we Orthodox find answers in the mystery of God. We do not know, but He does. This is something — and something major — which we are comfortable not knowing, not having the answers to.

Mystery of the Resurrection

This works for me in the worldly issues of politics and academics, but human certitude is vapid in the face of God. We must live in the world without being of the world. But I remember the conclusion of his answer: God is a mystery. Our faith gives us a reason to keep living joyfully. In her absence, we continue to live our imperfect lives.

The Ritual Mystery of the Resurrection

And we wait for it. This c 3 is recognized as a leader in the Orthodox Media field and has sustained consistent growth over twenty years.

OCN shares the timeless faith of Orthodoxy with the contemporary world through modern media. In fact, he, himself, was a God before this physical realm was organized.

This seems difficult to understand to the mortal mind, but when we have put on the mind of Christ, it all becomes clear. There is nothing difficult to understand in the Word of Truth, but we must first put on the mind of Christ, the Holy Spirit, so that we no longer think as mortals, but as the children of the Eloheim.

The Savior swallowed up death.

He showed the illusory nature of this mortal world, and everything which is in it, including death. He transformed himself into an immortal being, through the power of his Parents, and was lifted up from mortal existence, which is lifeless death, to divine existence, which is Deathless Life. He swallowed up the illusions of mortality, to show us the hidden Way to Immortality and Eternal Lives. We, too, are part of this revelation.

As the Apostle Paul says, "We suffered with him; we rose with him; we ascended to the heavenly realm with him. We are embraced by him until our setting, which is our release from this mortal existence. We are drawn to the heavenly realm by him, for we cannot be separated from him, any more than the sunbeams can be separated from the sun.

This is the spiritual resurrection, which elevates our minds and our bodies to a higher plane of life. If a person does not believe in the resurrection, there is no way to persuade him of its reality. Those who were dead will rise up, but becoming centered in this mystery, so that we can experience its reality, is a process of faith, not of intellect. If a person believes in the resurrection, even if he does not know our Lord Jesus Christ, his faith in the principle of resurrection will help him prepare to enter into that mystery.

He will not be able to raise himself, but he will be raised by the free gift of our Lord Jesus Christ. Those of us who know our Lord and pursue his gnosis, however, will learn how to have a part in the power of our own resurrection.

We know the Son of Man, and we believe that he rose from among those who had died. This faith enables us to center in his power of resurrection, so that we are led to the keys of Immortality and Eternal Lives. We are guided by him of whom we say, "He became the destruction of death; he is more powerful than all the lords of darkness; he is worthy of our faith in him.

The knowledge gained by those who are saved will not perish. The minds of those who have known the Lord will not be destroyed. We, who were elected to salvation and redemption, are predestined, from the beginning of our mortal lives, not to be trapped like those who do not accept gnosis; we will gain the wisdom of those who know Truth, if we are not false to the election and calling which have been placed within us.

Truth is hidden from mortal mind, but the Keys of Truth are held by the Doorkeeper, who is the Son of Man; he will teach us how to open the door, and enter into union with Truth. The illusions of mortal existence are strong. They make us feel insignificant and transient, but we have come from Divine Light. We are the offspring of Gods. We have the potential to enter into the Highest. When the reality of this has become alive in us, when we have put on the mind of the Anointed, then we will know that the resurrection is the only possible step to take after leaving this mortal existence.

Then we will begin to know that we have always existed, and we must always exist, unless we choose the annihilation of the sons of Perdition, who permeate their souls with darkness, until there is no existence left in them.

Never doubt the reality of the resurrection, Rheginos. In the forty years or so that I've been working around the globe, I've seen the increasing desertification of the world. We are truly experiencing a worldwide Golgotha. As Heidegger says, "The dreadful has already happened.

When I travel through America, I am appalled by the limbo of shopping malls, the limbo of automobile culture, the limbo of corporate culture, the limbo of wasteland ecology, the limbo of people tied to a screen, or text messaging all day, all night, their thumbs having become calloused, their faces neutral from having few face to face encounters, the limbo of meaninglessness, of lack of caring. Robert Coles speaks about the lack of caring among students for each other in our schools, noting the brutal competition that mitigates against human values.

This danger is particularly apparent in the caring professions like medicine where the competition is so fierce that often those who would make the finest healers of body and mind are strained out in favor of those ability to pass a test wins them the approbation of the computer. Then there is the personal limbo of our time. Many people, bereft of meaning and no longer committed to the standard brand culture, philosophy, or religion of our era, have long periods in which they quite literally feel dead. Many of us feel ourselves caught up in limbos of our own and others' making.

We long for the call: Resurrected ones are walking among us and we mistake them, as did the three women, for pleasant hippie-type gardeners. Could it be that the success of the Obama campaign came about because it offered a sense of return to meaning and a resurrection into new ways of being an American? Resurrection is essentially a remembrance of one's true nature and a waking up to this remembrance. Resurrection is the hearing of the message that unlocks our latent informational systems; our deep evolutionary coding is evoked by this new awareness and more of our internal systems are recruited for whole system transformation.

What then takes place is a change that accelerates exponentially to such a degree that it is not the same body-brain-psyche. In this form of resurrection latent evolutionary systems have awakened to full manifestation. The present critical mass of new information, the transcendental data gatherings of Googlites, and the releasing of tribal, insular, and national bondage in our time, albeit with radical fundamentalist back lash, the density of cross-cultural and cross informational exchange, release on a global scale a phenomenon that could also be described as planetary resurrection.

Resurrection is about being pulsed into new patterns appropriate to our time and place. It is also about living in a continuum with extended and"resurrected" realities, be those realities Buddhas, gods, Christ, archetypes, and maybe the stars themselves. Perhaps in our time the longing itself becomes the experience. Perhaps we can paraphrase Meister Eckhart when he said "The eye by which I see God is the same eye by which God sees me.

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I believe that the strength of that mutual longing can give us the evolutionary passion to roll away the stone, the stumbling of blocks that keep us sealed away and dead to the renewal of life. The Walk to Emmaus. The mystery of the journey of Jesus in the world does not end with the resurrection but with another journey, a walk, in fact, on the road to Emmaus.

As the gospel of Luke recounts, several days after the crucifixion two men were walking along the road to Emmaus, a town some seven miles from Jerusalem. They were deeply absorbed in their conversation and hardly noticed when a third man quietly joined them on the road.

After a while this stranger interrupted to ask them what they were talking about so intently and with such sadness. They told him that they were discussing the condemnation and death of Jesus and the discovery of the empty tomb by certain women of their company who had come back saying that they had even seen a vision of angels, who said that Jesus was alive. The stranger agreed that Jesus was indeed living and as they continued to walk together took them through an interpretation of the scriptures, showing them in chapter and verse how everything that had happened had in fact been foretold.

The two men were feeling great warmth in their hearts toward the stranger and when they reached the house in Emmaus where they would be staying, they invited him to join them as it was now late. The stranger agreed and went to dinner with them, blessing the bread and breaking it to give to them. At that moment they underwent a shock of recognition and knew the man not as stranger, but as Jesus. The two men instantly got up and sped along the road back to Jerusalem where they told the disciples the wonderful things that had just happened. As the were telling these things, Jesus suddenly appeared among them, quieted their fears that he was just a spirit, and invited them to handle his very physical hands and feet.

Then he asked for something to eat and proceeded to chew and swallow some broiled fish. He concluded his visit by blessing and empowering them and they were filled with great joy. The Emmaus journey continues the mystery rites of the resurrection in new and remarkable ways. Luke's gospel narrative is one of completion and fulfillment. Emmaus is cited as "seven miles from Jerusalem.

The Emmaus walk marks Christ's return from the eternal to the temporal world in an act of compassion, relatedness, community, and, most importantly, concreteness. Jesus, in his three day sojourn in the non local Reality has become capable of acts of radical humanity. But the real presence was difficult for the disciples. Here we discover the Eucharist as continuing the central mystery of the Christian tradition which ironically, and almost comically, turns out to be a glorying in the most physical and concrete of all experiences.

The ritual gesture of the consecration of the bread by Jesus is an enfleshment, a palpable statement of the concreteness of God-in-the-world, an earthly presence of Christ among the community of the faith.

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