Resurrection Body

Breath of April in the wetland, stirring the cattails. Dragonfly can't cling to her reed, effortlessly rises, golden splendor through diaphanous wings. Which is her body, which the pure light?

Now is the time to transfigure ancient flesh. Not into a spiritual body, or a physical body, but a body of Glory, the substance of a new creation. Amalgam of opposites woven through the alchemy of Christ-Consciousness condensed into quarks and leptons, into atoms and molecules, into flesh no less “spiritual” because it is solid, no “lower” because it is manifest. Glory of the New Earth, where each unique physiology embodies the love that moves the stars.

We do not have to die and go to heaven to receive this Resurrection Body. We receive it with each breath. The grace of inhalation is the grace of the Holy Spirit, she who danced with God at the creation of the world (Proverbs 8). She pours the living milk of Wisdom into this old body of the beaten heart, so that it may be transmuted to incarnate Presence, whose sole duty is to dance with God now.

Does this mean I will not die? Of course I will “die.” But I will embrace death as I embrace the next breath; not a sting, nor a corruption, but a tremor of Glory in the continuum.

How do I accomplish this alchemy of breathing? I don’t. I merely assent to the influx of divine love, who infuses my own breath with the breath of Christ: a triune flame of love, braided into one fiery inhalation: Being (Sat), Consciousness (Chit), and waves of Bliss (Ananda).

This divine breath permeates every cell of flesh. I need not become pure or holy before this alchemy can happen. It happens to me just the way I Am, when I stop naming my pain “suffering,” and my sickness “disease,” when I embrace them as pure energy, the same energy of which pleasure is made. The separation between “good” and “bad” sensation is a conceptual division, not an energetic one; and the perpetual work of keeping “good” and “bad” sensations separate in the mind can expend the greater part of one's life.

Embrace the pain without naming it. Embrace the illness without a label. This is courage. Breathe through every atom of sorrow without resisting or trying to be anywhere else. Then you will perceive somatically, not intellectually, that what you once called pain is, in truth, a furiously condensed form of bliss.

Let breath-beams of Mary and penetrating gazes of the risen Jesus touch you as sensations, not merely as images in your memory. Melt the contracted, numb, hurting places in your body. Melt them into what? Into the luminous sensuality of the resurrection.

Inhalation rises from the base of your spine to the crown of your head. Rest in the royal space above your crown, filled with galaxies whose light has not yet arrived. Let heaven arrive now, as a new earth, where distance is an illusion because space is no-thing but awareness.

Gently hold this sacred inhalation in the space above your crown, fermenting with stars. As you exhale, let this sparkling vintage pour down your fontanelle into the cerebrum, soaking your pituitary with celestial phosphorescence, streaming into the pineal gland at the back of your brain, overflowing into the hypothalamus. Surrender this exhalation through every cell of the body. Elixir from the farthest rim of the cup of creation flows down your throat, your chest, your solar plexus, into your hips and belly, even unto the sacred black loam under your feet.

Such a breath of re-creation may happen in the stillness of prayer, or in a bare footstep walking in wet moss through your own backyard. In this silent breath an inter-galactic council of angels sings the secret harmony of the Logos, infused into Mater-matter by the grace of Sophia. This could be your next breath, if you consent. A forest path, a patch of clover near your apartment, could become the garden of the Easter dawn, where Magdalene kneels before the mysterious Gardener of your heart.

The tomb is empty. Mind is empty, clear as the blue sky at sunrise, where the old earth dissolves like mist. Thrilling from the soles of your feet to your scalp, your vagus nerve is a flame on the altar of your breastbone. Incense fills the temple. Breathing is the purest form of worship. All rituals of offering, puja, communion, are but rehearsals for this conscious sacrament of inhalation, exhalation.

But of course, you do not breathe. You are breathed. Breathed by grace, transfigured by astonishment. Now the world around you glimmers with newborn intensity, not less material, but more real. Matter is illumined from within, as if a new element, Glory, has appeared in the chemistry of each molecule. Wherever your sense of sight, smell, touch might fall, you feel the warmth, the nearness, of Jesus; yet too near to be separate from anything you see, because he is the very light by which you see it.

Do not look for his form: he is the face inside every face. He is the one who gazes back at you from the molten core of every other eye. And where will you hear his voice? Is he not the silence in your ear, deep in the spiral of your cochlea?

With each exhalation, your wounded heart opens wider, pouring out rainbow flames. These flames commingle and compound to create the environment around you, an earthly garden no less divine than pure light, but more complex, more entangled, more interesting than pure light.

You are a co-creator of this new earth, poured forth through light-bearers, light-breathers like yourself, so that God may be more than God, Christ more than Christ, Spirit more than a single all-pervading breath. We co-create the world because the Creator longs to be each of us, Christ longs to dwell in every human heart, the Goddess longs to flow through eight billion exhalations. Now, in the Easter sunrise, let us begin the inebriating dance of Spring.

When the rainbow of your world interpenetrates the rainbow of mine, what then? Is there conflict, political struggle, separation? Two “world views” contending for power? That is the way of the old earth, based on a total misunderstanding of this truth: Both rainbows are made of the same pure light. One light entwining billions of rainbows, whirling in exuberant complexity, incarnating a perfect planet in the freedom-dance of countless unique imperfections.

The rainbow flames that pour through your heart-center and mine are ignited from the same spark, struck by the power of kenosis, self-abandonment. As Jesus said, a seed must die to take root and bear a flower. So the more this little “i” is crucified and willing to be no-thing, the more richly and wildly earth is adorned in her April splendor.

Isn't it time that we surrender to the one whom scripture calls, "Christ in You, the hope of Glory?" (Colossians 1:27) And again, "Not i who live, but Christ who lives in me? (Galations 2:20) For as deeply as we surrender to this dark sweet bewilderment, the more radiant the sunrise of God.

Yet this sun of God pours not from above, but from within. This dawn streams forth from our own Hridaya, the heart center, condensing into photons, whorls of DNA, the elements, the emerald sheen of a hummingbird's throat, the hidden moonbeam pearled in a mud-caked dahlia bulb, the viscous chrism of tadpoles clinging to a bright swamp lantern.

In wonder I look all around me for the risen Christ. Where is he? I am the garden, He is the Spring.

 

Image: Genesis, from the Oxford Book of Hours