So the other evening after a sitting, a new Center regular, a young guy in his early 20's, said that over the weekend he and his folks had been trying to figure out this whole Easter business. Seems they'd never been terribly religious, and they didn't quite know what it was all about, so they turned to Wikipedia for answers.
I found myself entering into the discussion the way an addict goes after his drug. I don't know why, but I feel some kind of internal obligation to put the very best spin on most religious traditions. In the end, I acknowledge and respect that these have at their core deep elements of truth and the ability to move people in the direction of compassion and selflessness, and I am eager to keep them from being caricatured and stripped of their power. And so, thinking I could do better than Wikipedia (not hard), I held forth, dismissing the zombie/resuscitated corpse view and steering him instead toward a more nuanced understanding of the resurrection.
Stupid me.
I should have just kept it to one line: "Keep practicing, and after you've practiced long enough, you'll understand everything you need to know about it."
I found myself entering into the discussion the way an addict goes after his drug. I don't know why, but I feel some kind of internal obligation to put the very best spin on most religious traditions. In the end, I acknowledge and respect that these have at their core deep elements of truth and the ability to move people in the direction of compassion and selflessness, and I am eager to keep them from being caricatured and stripped of their power. And so, thinking I could do better than Wikipedia (not hard), I held forth, dismissing the zombie/resuscitated corpse view and steering him instead toward a more nuanced understanding of the resurrection.
Stupid me.
I should have just kept it to one line: "Keep practicing, and after you've practiced long enough, you'll understand everything you need to know about it."
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