|
Written Summer 2010
Original Sin, Immaculate Conception, Vicarious Atonement In the beginning, our parents united themselves together. Each one of us is both an expression of that conjugal love, as well as the fruit or embodiment thereof. For some nine lunar cycles, we are totally dependent upon our mother for nourishment and shelter as we take shape and form within her womb. Then, as a great sacrificial offering of herself, she exiles us to an environment which often appears to be at war with the very breath of life which we now possess. For some six to nine solar cycles, we remain almost completely dependent upon our parents for everything. This includes not only nourishment and shelter, but especially the formation of the values, ethics, and morals which will shape our mental and personal development throughout the course of our lives. Indeed, that which we call personality or individuality is intimately intertwined with these formative years which are often characterized as being a time of innocent bliss or perhaps an age of awe and wonder, for the world is, to us, full of mystery. But alas, a serpent roams about questioning the intentions of our creator towards us. The age of reason now dawns upon our minds as we begin to question everything. Why? Where? When? How? These and other interrogative words become the main driving force behind our lives. No longer content to simply experience and accept the world around us for the mystery that it is, we start making the decision to judge and evaluate everything according to an ever-elusive standard of rightness or authenticity. But by what authority are we to make such evaluations and judgments? Lucky for us, we have been immersed within a world that is full of authority figures. Our parents will continue to be among the most influential, but now we have neighbors, teachers, clergy, politicians, and a seemingly ever-increasing number of both individuals and groups which all compete within a marketplace concerning what is right, what is wrong, what is authentic, and what is false. This marketplace appears to be external to ourselves, but close examination reveals it to be located between our own two ears, for most of us now live within our heads rather than from within our hearts. Everything is now judged according to personal and individual standards that are themselves shaped according to collective or communal standards which have been shaped according to a rich cultural history of both perceptions and interactions with others. But even these are rooted within a dualistic world which is informed and governed by the five physical senses of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. And so it is that each of us has had an upward fall from the heart into the prison house that is our head. We have partaken of the fruit from the one tree which has been said to be forbidden to us. Lost and immersed within a world of our own making, we now evaluate and judge everything according to standards which we have adopted from others all the while calling them our own. Life after life and year after year, we wander aimlessly with little hope of ever recovering that sense of innocence and purity which each of us intuitively feels deep within ourselves. But wait, an ever-virginal woman has given birth to a son whose name embodies this very hope which we carry within ourselves. This maiden, untainted by the multitude of misperceptions around her, seems to somehow predate not only our own births, but even the origins of those authority figures by which we judge and evaluate our lives. Long before the printing press gave birth to an endless supply of books wherein an ignorant multitude has appointed itself as individual gatekeepers of personal truth, there was a small collection of handwritten texts wherein enlightened communities had appointed themselves as collective guardians of eternal truths. But even before these came into being, there were oral traditions which had consisted of both myth and ritual. Parallel to all the confusion surrounding our textual traditions, there is much confusion pertaining to the oral traditions which continue to be handed down to us to this very day. No matter how hard modern-man attempts to rid himself of myth and ritual, he finds himself completely immersed therein. All of our lives consist, to one degree or another, of an endless cycle of patterns and repetitive actions that result in fairly predictable outcomes. Raging against this ritualism, we denounce and deplore anything and everything that even appears to be ritualistic all the while failing to acknowledge how utterly inseparable we are from that which we rail against. So we run to and fro, this way and that, relentlessly searching for something new, something exciting, something which can somehow get us out of our rut. We quite literally live upon and are consumed by this craving and pursuit of both creativity and spontaneity. After all, we are created in the image and likeness of one who certainly has no lack in this regard. All of creation is a divine expression which has been designed to show us, the maiden’s son, our own potential and birthright. But if we are to escape from this nightmare, we must awaken to the dream given to the master-dreamer himself. We must learn to evaluate and judge everything according to the standards imprinted within our hearts rather than according to external ones which now pollute our minds. This can only come about by recognizing ourselves within the divine drama being played out across the great stage of life itself. And to this end, we must learn to live vicariously through the maiden’s son. Only by rediscovering our true identity can we truly be free to be ourselves, wholly authentic, transparent, and vulnerable before our creator and one another alike. This life-long journey is a process in which each one of us must learn not to hide ourselves with fig-leaves or masquerade our genuine selves with an endless array of masks or personalities by which we separate and divide ourselves from one another. But indeed, even this rejection of masks and costumes can not be genuinely accomplished apart from the complete embrace and celebration thereof. One simply cannot genuinely escape the world of shadows apart from first apprehending the necessity of assuming various archetypal symbols, roles, and personas. Within this great school-house which we call life, everything has its place and purpose. The challenge for each one of us is to discover for ourselves why even that which appears to be evil is actually good and why that which appears to be good is also evil. The imagery of a chaste virgin is nothing apart from the promiscuous harlot, so likewise that of a righteous father is meaningless apart from the beastly husband of the sacrilegious mother. Even the supreme divinity who claims to be the synthesis of two or three, gathered together within his very name, is nothing apart from the lesser divinity which, by necessity, separated and divided that which is to be reunited. It is precisely for this reason that each of us are, as it were, sons of the maiden’s son. By examining the various masks worn by him within our sacred texts, we become empowered to recognize the various masks which he continues to wear even in our own day. His voice can be heard throughout all of creation, but it is within the heart of humanity that each of us discovers the path which leads back to the garden of delight, preserved for us by our forefathers. Indeed, it is precisely by partaking of all the other trees that we partake of the one tree which is said to be forbidden to us. It is for no small reason that our father is said to have been a wood-worker, nor is it a small thing for us to do the will of our heavenly father. But if we are to make our father proud, we must always remember to honor our earthly mother, for we must rediscover, once again, the joy of living as little children if ever we are to manifest the divine life within us: the mystery of life herself. Bibliography
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous, Vintage, Random House, New York, 1996. Print Burkert, Walter. Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California. 1979. Print Campbell, Joseph. Myths to Live by, Viking Penguin, New York. 1972. Print Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With A Thousand Faces Joseph Campbell Foundation. New World Library Novato, California, 2008. Print Campbell, Joseph. The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, Anchor Books. Random House, Inc. New York, 2008. Print Shlain, Leonard. The Alphabet Versus The Goddess Penguin Group, New York, 1998. Print World Mythology: An Anthology of the Great Myths and Epics, 3rd ed. Ed. Donna Rosenberg. Lincolnwood: NTC Publishing Group, 1999. Print. |