Categories: Religion, Poetry
To the pastor interviewed on Public Radio the day before Easter who said that his church celebrated the real Resurrection, "not some metaphor of spring and inner rebirth":
I've thought often about your statement this Easter Sunday. I bet you think that you have recovered the faith of our fathers, while the Episcopal church is far down a slippery slope into relativism and compromise with Charles Darwin, materialists, and all manner of permissive liberals.
A reading from St. Paul's first letter to the Corinthians 15:1-11 includes this church pioneer's assurance that Christ's resurrection in the body was witnessed by the apostles, then by more than five hundred at one time, "most of whom are still alive" at the time of his writing.
Without doubt, Paul is sincere, but the distinction you draw between what's "true" and what's "metaphor" is something that the authors of scripture and the originators of the Church never considered. It's a distinction that Charles Darwin would make, but not the Apostles, or Jesus, or any of our church fathers.
Why, even during our Easter service, we sang a ninth century lyric by Fortunatas that turns the Resurrection into metaphor for our own experience, as we sing to our own souls, "Now feel thy own third morning." Years ago, I heard a scrap of poetry from the early middle ages that became the basis for my own Advent cantata, "Four Candles": "What use, Gabriel, is your message to Mary, unless you also bring me the promise of God growing inside of me?"
While this way of reading scripture as a metaphor to apply it to present circumstances is an old one, it also works the other way. I've adapted in verse a letter from Petrarca, early in the 1300s, in which he describes his day's expedition to the top of Mt. Ventoux (where Lance Armstrong fought a memorable stage of the 2001 Tour de France). Every event along the way, from meeting an old man, to catching in briars, to reading an apt quotation at random -- every event becomes in Petrarca's mind a metaphor for his own life, and God speaks to him in these metaphors.
Dante once entered debate over the rightness of overthrowing a bad king: both sides argued from a metaphor, that the King is like the Sun. One side argued that the King thus nourishes the kingdom. The opponent didn't point out that the metaphor was flawed or irrelevant to the facts; he argued that even the Sun can be blocked by clouds, etc. etc.
So, fact and metaphor were not separate compartments until recently, say, the 1700s. Life was an allegory, allegory was a guide to life. This was comparatively recently in history. Where were the authors of Scripture, then? Way ahead of their time?
Now, let's take something we know to be historical: Jefferson's authorship of our Declaration of Independence. We know that what he meant when he wrote "All men are created equal" was not what Lincoln meant, or what we mean. We have transformed and reinterpreted it. Neither knowing the facts about what Jefferson thought, nor learning that (as I suppose might happen) John Adams really wrote it changes what it means to us now.
For that matter, if the Resurrection was historical in our sense of the word or not, our memory of it is only a memory unless we ALSO treat it as a metaphor for our lives.
You want to draw distinction between fact and metaphor; I see blurring.
I bet you use the word "myth" as a synonym for "lie" or "fairy tale." The Episcopal Church has taught me to use it as "a story that may or may not have been factual, but that is true again and again." In this way, every child and every community experiences a Garden of Eden, and then a moment when a choice brings about the knowledge of good and evil and personal responsibility for one's actions.
Paul believed the Resurrection was real, factual, eyewitnessed, and he staked his life on it. He was not a witness; his vision was an inner vision. We hear of his experience second hand, in metaphorical language of blindness and sight.
Your emphasis on the "real" resurrection misplaces emphasis on a pugnacious distinction between you and people you scorn. Sorry, that's just not part of the Gospel message at all.
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