The South is a land rich in simile—think mad as a wet hen, lost as last year’s Easter egg, queer as a football bat, and sweatin’ like a whore in church. But in the South of my upbringing and in the Baptist church that raised me, there was little talk of the value of metaphor, of the symbolic quality of Bible stories, or of the symbolic quality of any story for that matter. There were no sermons on the lilies of the field, and no talk of how Christ, as a symbol, might represent the possibility each of us holds to overcome selfishness. I only knew then that he, an incarnation of God, came to the earth to experience human suffering, was crucified and on the third day resurrected, and that his sacrifice somehow saved me from eternal damnation. I don’t remember hearing that the meek shall inherit the earth or that the peacekeepers are the sons and daughters of God. Only that we are saved by the blood of Jesus. That there is nothing without the blood.
I never accepted this story as anything other than a myth. By myth, I don’t mean false necessarily. I mean myth as in a foundational story of our civilization, one that is very old and probably allegorical. Even as a child, I couldn’t understand the rationale behind God sacrificing his son, also supposedly part of himself (?), for the sake of our sins. I understand now that there are deep (also symbolic) theological explanations for these things, but couldn’t we just ask God for forgiveness? Why did there have to be a sacrifice to end all sacrifices? Just the thought of this led me then, and leads me now, to believe there is something about the story modern believers are missing. The story must represent something deeper.
Ancient Hebrew sages believed the Torah to have “seventy faces,” and to be at least four layers deep—P’shat, the surface literal meaning; Remez, the allegorical meaning; Drash, the moral imperative meaning; and Sod, the mystical or esoteric meaning. They saw the text as a work of literature, directly inspired by God, full of symbolism, riddles, and poetry, among other forms of figurative language. I know many modern Jews and Christians still hold these beliefs about scripture, that the ideas contained in scripture are mysterious—that they can be taken as literal but don’t necessarily have to be. So I don’t mean to generalize. I write this because I am still, and perhaps always will be, coming to terms with the conditions in which I was born and raised.
When I became a lover of stories, when I learned that reading could be a past time that provided both pleasure and depth to my life, probably sometime in my early to mid twenties, I discovered that what I loved most was not necessarily the details of stories but the themes, the universal lessons embedded within stories, never explicitly stated, but interpreted by me, the reader. Every book then became a puzzle, something to sift through and decern wisdom from, sand in a sieve. Somewhere in there, the jewels were hidden, and my task was to uncover them.
For a long time, especially as I was a young arrogant student of history, I rejected religion completely. I remember reading about the Pagan origins of Easter and thinking what an absurd idea it was that Christianity took an already beloved European tradition, one that went back thousands of years, and put the stamp of the crucifix on it, like a bird of prey robbing the nest of its next to kin. Even more absurd was the idea that most modern believers had no idea that this was the case.
The word Easter is derived from the ancient Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre, goddess of spring and fertility. If you have northern European ancestry, it is likely someone in your line celebrated Eosturmonath (this is the ancient English version), the annual festival which honored the return of the vernal equinox. It is true that Jesus was crucified after raising a ruckus during Jewish Passover, but early Christians celebrated the resurrection on the night of Passover. It was decided at the Catholic Council of Nicaea, in the year 325, that the resurrection would be celebrated on the the first Sunday after the first full moon after the equinox.
So where do egg rearing bunnies come in? In the middle ages, eggs were painted with the blood of humans and animals. The Easter Bunny is a 17th Century German thing. Why rabbits? Because, my friends, at the dawn of spring, they are fruitful—they multiply.
I did not take the Bible seriously until one day when I was maybe twenty-four, and I decided to hike Mount Yonah by myself, a huge granite formation in north Georgia with cliffs that rise hundreds of feet up from the valley below. It was a week day, which meant there were hardly any other people on the trail, and I did not bother to check the weather forecast. For some reason that day, along with a joint and my water bottle, I threw the Bible into my backpack. I don’t remember why. Maybe I was hoping for a spiritual experience.
About halfway up the mountain, I could see dark ominous clouds in the distance. The tops of huge poplar trees started to sway and the air turned cold. Within minutes the entire sky above me turned dark blue and lightning began to pop and sizzle across the horizon. Terrified, I searched for some kind of natural shelter (much of the upper half of the mountain is exposed rock). I ran up the trail a ways and found a shallow cave-like indention under the overhang of a large rock wall. I ran inside and huddled down on the ground. As soon as I did, a torrential downpour came from the sky. Rain in thick beads drenched the mountain and lighting struck where I had just been walking. I sat there for a moment amazed and grateful for the overhang. I remained dry and safe while nature raged around me. I smoked a little of the j and opened the book to a random place. I landed in Matthew with Jesus preaching to a flock of people who had followed him up the side of a mountain.
This was the first time I had read the Sermon on the Mount, and at that moment, watching the storm pass, high in multiple ways, I felt the words of Christ deeply and was moved. Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? As I read this, shivering in the cave, as a mighty wind swept over the mountain, I wept. This was poetry; this was real, and no matter if I believed in the divinity of Jesus or not, I knew these words to be true and meaningful. After a while, the storm passed. The sun shown through the clouds and into the cave and warmed me. When I emerged, I felt, in a sense, born again.
I tell you this story to admit that even this experience did not make me a true believer. I tried, honestly I did, but I am endowed by my creator with the same kind of wayward spirit that Genesis says Adam was given. It is a spirit of good intentions but haphazard ways—one that is always skeptical, at times irreverent and at times respectful. I hope that if God is watching, he/she/it understands.
I have since that day on Mount Yonah had a deeper and more meaningful relationship with the teachings of Jesus, and I might say a love for the person of Jesus, for Jesus as a teacher with a practical message on how to live. His message itself is universally beautiful—avoid judgement, avoid materialism, do what you can to forgive and move on, live as a servant of love, not as a servant of yourself. Who can’t get behind that?
But I found meaning even in the passages that I can’t relate to genuinely, and I am writing this to encourage the study of those passages as a work of literature even by people who reject the faith completely. Nature is of course, every spring, born again. We as humans who seek wisdom must die many deaths—hopefully the slow killing off of egoic tendencies—before the death of our natural bodies. We must be resurrected again and again if we hope to have a decent impact on the world. As I was driving to south Georgia to visit my family a couple days ago, I saw this verse from the Book of John on a billboard beside the interstate: “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Believers tend to make a lot of assumptions about what the kingdom of God is. In Luke, Jesus says clearly (pointing definitely to metaphor) that the kingdom of God is not a place, not a destination—the kingdom is within you. My prayer is that I will be born again many times before I die so that I can see the kingdom of God within me.
Since this has gone much longer than I intended it to, I will end here. I would love to hear your thoughts on all of this. As always, I am grateful for you reading. Much love and happy Easter to you and your family. God bless.