It takes time to understand the meaning of the phrase Lamb of God. A lot of time. It embodies the very essence of Christianity and reaches deep into Christian mysticism. It took me a long time to reach into this profound mystic seed of Christ. There is a popular notion that one should not approach the Kabbala before the age of 40. As a young man these sorts of prohibitions were always perceived as arbitrary and irrational, but as you gather experiences traveling through life, you slowly learn to understand that deep ‘knowledge’, mystic knowledge does take time. You need to have experienced joy and you need to have experienced suffering. You need to have quenched your longings and you need to have despaired over your unfulfilled desires. You need to have collected victories, and victories only come after many losses. You need your wounds be mended. You need partake in the cycle of life, having cared for your young and your elders. You need be able to look at your scars, those on the surface as well as those deep inside, remembering each and everyone of them, without feeling the pain. You need travel down the path to the soul and unearth humanity’s common roots. You need to learn to see yourself in others, understand their battles, their longing, their joy and their pain. You need to love without attachment.
It is not easy. It takes time, time to heal, time to grow, time to let go. There are many things that bothered me when I was young. The notion of Original Sin bothered me. Why were human beings subject to a stigma inherited at birth even before having done any harm to anyone? The notion of Faith bothered me. Why abandon rational paths, what value could there be in notions that could not be contained by reason? The problem of Evil bothered me. How can God be omniscient, almighty and all Good at the same time? Either God is omniscient and almighty and thus willingly allows for Evil to occur, in which case God cannot be all Good; or if God is all Good, He can neither be omniscient nor almighty. Slowly, with time, through experiencing joy and experiencing loss, I have come to understand how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together. God cannot exempt us from sin, so that we may exercise freewill, and it is this unique human achievement of being able to master freewill that allows for the separation of Good and Evil. In Christ though, God provided humanity with an extraordinary breakthrough in guiding our freewill towards Good and steering away from Evil.
Ever since humans could begin to reason, we have been consumed by the desire to rationalise and unveil the 3 existential layers of this Universe. We know there is an underlying unity where all things are generated and converge, the Greek Apeiron, the infinite source from which all things are generated, and later return to, after they perish. We also know that we cannot escape duality. We cannot escape the reality of pain antagonising pleasure and suffering succeeding joy. Every action ripples through waves of duality, and there is no emotion, state of mind or adjective that does not have its exact contrary. Finally, we also know that we are endowed with a unique individual nature and character. We know that each and everyone of us is utterly distinct from everyone else, and the choices we make amount to an infinite array of possibilities. Plurality is the third layer of the existential puzzle laid before us, and the realm where freewill is expressed. But today is Easter, where we celebrate the Resurrection of the Son of Man, having 3 days prior died on the Cross for our sins as the Lamb of God. Why? To what avail did Christ sacrifice Himself, and what benefit do we humans derive from His sacrifice. Simply put, by dying on the Cross for us, Christ has freed us from duality. Good and Evil continue to exist, but we no longer need worry about Evil for He has, through His sacrifice, absolved us of our sins.
When Columbus first sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, ushering the current Planetary Era, where the destiny of all human beings is genuinely interdependent, the continent he discovered widely practiced slavery, animal and human sacrifices, and genocide was categorically the inevitable conclusion of political conflicts. Later when only 18 of the 265 sailors and only 1 of the 5 ships survived the voyage Magellan led to circumnavigate the globe for the first time, the variety of habits encountered along the epic voyage, as recounted by its survivors, would baffle European minds. The tales of luscious tropical paradises where natives lived in rich sensual delight, foreign from sin, were riddled by stories of cannibals who tore the flesh of human beings as easily as that of a rabbit. Many of Magellan’s men had been killed by cannibals along the way, and Magellan himself was killed by natives in an ambush in what is today Mactan, in the Pilipino island of Cebu. For millennia religions around the world required blood sacrifices to appease the heavens. A holocaust was practiced, as was customary, even to celebrate the birth of Christ. Two doves were killed when Joseph and Mary presented the 40 day old Christ to the temple. Prior to Buddhism and later Christianity, religious practices around the world recognised the need to make regular tributes to the forces of Evil. By virtue of His sacrifice on the Cross, Christ put an end to this requirement. Henceforth humans no longer needed to slaughter other humans or animals for the sake of abating divine wrath, Christ had already made that sacrifice for all of us. We need no longer perpetuate cycles of sorrow to extinguish evil, introspection now suffices because that blood sacrifice has been made once and for all. Whether it be evil that we have endured or evil that we have caused, we no longer need further blood offerings to appease the heavens. All that is left for us to do is an inward journey of repentance and forgiveness. No other lamb need be slaughtered for human sins. From the day of the Resurrection, we are just required to repent of our sins and forgive those who have sinned against us. Love one another, repent your sins and forgive those that have sinned against you. These three practices, the three virtues of Love, Repentance and Forgiveness, are the only ingredients we will ever need to reach Heaven. The Lamb of God has taken care of the rest, and we need not bother any longer with this world’s duality.
There are many lessons humanity can learn from the different stages of human evolution and from the many expressions humanity has evolved into in different regions of the world. Today, in our complex and sophisticated modern societies we long for the more simple life of our ancestors. We have lost the cohesion and kindness of earlier civilisations, and we have also lost that vital understanding of Nature and our divine origins that indigenous people nourish around the world. Especially at a time when the great achievements of our science and our technology have been ridiculed by a tiny virus that has brought all the developed nations of the world to their knees, we must rethink many of our dogmas. Thus, if there is one message worth rescuing from our most advanced societies, it is the message of Christ, the Lamb of God that died on the Cross for all of us and the Son of Man that through his Resurection showed us the infinite power of the triune virtues of Love, Repentance and Forgiveness. It is these virtues we celebrate at Easter. With every cycle of rebirth, shedding the slumber of Winter and welcoming the blooms of Spring, Easter celebrates the engines of Resurrection: Love, Repentance and Forgiveness. Love one another, repent your sins and forgive those that have sinned against you, thus we shall all be free.
Copyright © Carmelo Pistorio 2020