SON OF SPIRIT (aka SPIRIT II)
Christians object to the view that Jesus was just a great teacher and nothing more. I think they are right in this objection.
Jesus was one of those who was in touch with Spirit. He may have been consumed by it, in fact. He had an intimate sense of his own connection with the divine, which he called 'Abba (Father)." He was full of God – heart, mind, and soul.
Spirit is the "something more" that is present to certain humans at times. It is not the same thing as genius or extraordinary intellectual ability. It is rather an intuition (inner teaching) of the supernatural, not necessarily as something above nature, but as something within nature itself.
"The world is charged with the grandeur of God...." (Gerard Manley Hopkins)
Emily Dickinson thought that "the supernatural is but the natural revealed."
And, judging by his parables, Jesus loved the world around him.
Spirit is something like the blind men's elephant in the parable; each one "sees" it differently. For Siddhartha (the Buddha), for example, it came as a process of Enlightenment, and was perceived under the rubric of "Nirvana." That is, Siddhartha saw it as the extinction of earthly attachment, which he felt as the source of suffering. Nevertheless, once he was enlightened, the Buddha graciously returned to the society of his fellow men, in order to show them that they might share in the same experience. Jesus may have had a similar experience.
Both Jesus and Siddhartha walked away from their biological families in favor of a larger family. The idea of the larger family is beautifully expressed in John Steinbeck's GRAPES OF WRATH. As the biological extended family of twelve disintegrates on the way to California, a larger idea of family is born. This larger idea is dramatized in the last scene of the novel.
As an actual or potential participant in Spirit, each person is be respected and loved (not necessarily liked). To do this, it is not necessary to agree with one another.
"Opposition is true friendship." (Wm Blake)
"He who degrades another, degrades Me. Whatever is said or done returns at last to Me." (Walt Whitman)
The idea of a larger love can be seen in the Middle Eastern tradition of hospitality. The homeless stranger is to be taken in and cared for, no questions asked. This belief is illustrated in the Bible in the story of Lot, who offers his daughters to the mob at the door rather than let them violate his guests. And elsewhere in the TaNaKh. The story of Abraham 18 tells us that a stranger may be God. The movie about Dorothy Day, ENTERTAINING ANGELS, presents the same idea.
If we wait for other people to be perfect before we love them, we will never love. We have to love them as we find them.
"You shall love your crooked neighbor with your crooked heart." (WH Auden)
As with the names of God in Jewish Scriptures, there are many names for Spirit: Father, Nirvana, Holy Spirit, Allah, Christ, the Kingdom of God, the Manitou, etc. The concept cannot be put into words, which may be why Jesus, Socrates, and Siddhartha never wrote anything.
"The Spirit blows where it lists, and no man knows the movements thereof."
Most of us, alas, do not walk in the Spirit most of the time. But we have examples of men who seem to have been in touch with it at some point. In addition to Jesus and Siddhartha, we might cite Moses, Socrates, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, St Paul, St Francis – and closer to our own day, William Blake, John Brown, Crazy Horse, Martin Luther King, etc.
Francis gave us the key to unconditional love: "O Lord, grant that I may not much seek to be loved, as to love; to be understood as to understand – for it is in giving that we receive, in dying that we are born to Eternal Life."
The intensely subjective nature of the experience of Spirit is indicated by Daniel. After his vision of the Son of Man "coming with the clouds of heaven," he says, "As for me, Daniel, my soul was troubled within me, and the visions of my head terrified me." (Daniel 7:15)
Or as William Blake wrote: "The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared assert so roundly that God spake to them, and whether they did not think at the time that they would be misunderstood and be the cause of imposition.
"Isaiah answered, I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception, but my senses discovered the infinite in everything, and as I was then persuaded and remain confirmed, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote."
In Shaw's SAINT JOAN, they tell Joan that the voices she hears are only in her imagination. She replies, "Of course. That's how the messages of God come to us."
"If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite."
"All deities reside in the human breast."
"The cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite and corrupt."
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Why did Siddhartha and Jesus never write a book? Because, I suspect they knew, as Paul says, that the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. How can a book capture Presence (the Shekinah)? "Ya had to be there," we say. Yeah. A book can never capture the tone of voice, the intonations, the facial expressions – all those things that give meaning to our words. So with the Teacher gone, we have to become our own teachers.
The Spirit is always present, but we stay locked up in ourselves, shutting it out. Our knowledge and wisdom are themselves preventives, because when we know one little thing, we think we know it all. Ego is the enemy of Spirit.
"Send forth thy Spirit, and they shall be created, and thou shall renew the face of the Earth."
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It's as if we were in a lifeboat – which, in a sense, we are – and everyone is looking for the best seats, or the biggest supply of rations. Meanwhile, no one is paying any attention to the navigation of the boat to a safe harbor.
Or the old one about worrying about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
