Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Reconciliation: Who Needs It?

Once you've had a relationship to something in which you experience a divine union, when your perception of that experience is one where your soul loses its ego boundaries, when you have merged into sacred ecstasy--and I am fully cognizant that this is a relationship few people discover--and then the relationship changes and you can no longer experience that unity of spirit through the same channels and *it wasn't you that changed*, what happens next?
This divine union occurs in many ways but just to give this question some flesh, let's look at Jesus and his disciples and his (maybe, sure, why not, let's go there) wife. They had an experience with divinity. Maybe they called Jesus "God" and thought him divine or maybe they didn't, but they all certainly felt that their relationship with him was not of the normal order of human relationships. Then, through no particular action on their part (except maybe Judas) but definitely action on Jesus's part, Jesus dies and bodily disappears from their lives. The connection that they had with incarnated divinity is abruptly ended. 
How do you go on? You've been married to Jesus (one way or another). You have become one flesh; you've been indwelt by the Holy. Or at least you've left your wife/husband/children/family system to bond with the spiritual master. Then in a fit of messianic suicide, Jesus goes on a political rampage--parading in the streets, publicly and virulently denouncing the local ruling classes, interrupting the One Percenter's nifty banking scheme to parlay the religious devotion of the Ninety-eight Percent into tremendous profits--and gets himself executed. 
Now it's two months later. You and your friends have had some freaky ghost-sightings of your beloved, the Lover of your Soul, which maybe happened or maybe were produced in a mass hysteria or just out of your own deep grief. Then even those bizarre events stop and you are a widow, an abandoned friend, a master-less devotee. 
Now what? How do you make sense of what happened? Of that whole interlude when you felt whole and holy? When your soul is ripped wide open and you are left alone with your memories and the knowledge that society thinks you've lost your freaking mind, what do you do?
When that divinity abandons you, how do you live? 
Do you concretize the memories into institutions and liturgies? Do you take the blame for the leaving on yourself, claim he left for your own good? Do you forswear the divinity and pretend you never thought he was a god? 
Do you trauma-bond with others equally bereft and form a cultic pocket of Christian communism in an attempt to recreate that sense of divine unity? When this community insists that the mass hysteria, the ghost sightings, the crazy, irrational stories constitute a Resurrection, do you accept that doctrine in a desperate attempt to reconcile your memory with your reality? Do you participate in the institutionalization of deification? Does that help bring peace to your soul that Jesus left broke wide open? 
When the love that gave meaning to your very Being rips your soul into shreds, how to you go on? How do you live when everything that was Life has betrayed you?
When God left you behind.
What stories do you tell yourself? Your children? 
Who needs to reconcile to whom?