The Good Book

Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time:  the Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith by Marcus Borg is the Good Book for now.  

Borg like many of us first met Jesus in his family's church (Lutheran for him) but has evolved his awareness and relationship through out his life.  And his 30 years plus as a scholar of early Christianity and the Bible have helped.  

Borg sketches Jesus in a manner very different than we learned in Church or that we routinely hear even now among mainstream discussions.  No longer to be found are images of Jesus as divine or as savior by atonement for everyone's sins.  There are no indications he spoke of himself as the son of God, or planned to start a new religion.  He is not the judge of right and wrong and does not insist on believing. 

Instead the Jesus we meet is a "Spirit Man," one of those people who relates to Spirit (and in his Jewish culture this is Yahweh) and can communicate this relationship to others.  And he invites others to relate to this Spirit too.  He stresses a resistance to the prevailing cultural worldly powers as a means of transformation and liberation.  An interesting irony is that even the current church culture can become an oppressive power.  Compassion is the overriding current in Jesus' ministry.  

There was nothing on Easter morning that could have been video taped.  For Borg, the idea of an empty tomb is irrelevant.  What was being described were experiences of the early followers who continued to feel Jesus' presence and influence in there lives.  They could say, "he is Risen and he is Lord."  

And much of what we read in the Canon is the post-resurrection community's efforts to metaphorically express their feelings and experiences of Jesus.  So they saw him as  someone they could hear and see.  Some thought he must have had a special birth.  Perhaps he was even present from the beginning.  

   

Borg easily merits the title of author of a Good Book.

                                                                           ------ the Bishop

                

A New God?

         

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh-- I had forgotten him.  But then I recalled those turbulent, controversial days in Oregon in the early 1980's.  He came out of India to settle in central Oregon with quick confrontation with the authorities.  His followers were moving there, buying property and voting.  And then there were his counter culture teachings of sexual liberation and love.  I remember him as the Cadillac Guru who drove around his compound in his  sedan with followers throwing flowers on his hood.  His Ashram came to an ignominious end in the mid 1980's when his private secretary and a small cadre were implicated in heinous crimes including plots to murder local and federal officials and poisoning a local restaurant salad bar. There has been no substantial evidence that Rajneesh himself was involved in the crimes but he did plead guilty to an immigration offense and was deported.  He eventually returned to India where he has become more popular than  before and has even undergone what some have called an apotheosis. 

In autumn 2002 I went to a retreat in the NC mountains with a group of Osho followers.  I didn't know Osho but learned he was a new incarnation of a guru who had died in the 1990's.  Previously he had been Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh! What I went too I would call a dance meditation--not being into the language of the group.  A free style movement, present in the now was what I experienced.  They were a pleasant group with many having Eastern names in place of their Western birth names.  They emphasized love and basically emanated peace.  All this along with hikes in the mountains added up to a very nice weekend for me.  I've had no further contact with the group.

All this came back to me today when I read an article from a researcher at the University of Oregon who conducted research on the group in the 1980's in Oregon and later into the late 1990's with members who had moved on to different locations.  

The researcher pointed out that members continued to hold faith in Rajneesh (Osho) into the late 1990's and saw him as a great force in transforming their lives and helping them live comfortably with their goals and balance the many difficult conflicts of life and career.  Two thirds of the Oregon followers had college degrees and/or lucrative careers.  More than half were women.  And many of these had left successful well paying careers because they still felt lonely and anxious and thrived in the love and affirmation of Rajneesh.  

As mentioned, Osho has been undergoing something of an apotheosis.  So perhaps we are seeing formed now, a major religion of tomorrow just as Christianity formed in the first and second centuries.  I imagine most contemporaries never even heard of Jesus and his followers and most who did found the whole idea as absurd.  Jesus in his day was  a Roman criminal and had his own counter culture movement.  And even so the movement changed with time and came to dominate the Western world.  

Also today I read the basic "Ten Commandments" of Osho.  They really don't seem such a bad set of principles to live by:  

1.  Never obey anyone's command unless it is coming from within you also.
2. There is no God other than life itself.
3. Truth is within you, do not search for it elsewhere.
4. Love is prayer.
5. To become a nothingness is the door to truth. Nothingness itself is the means, the goal and attainment.
6. Life is now and here.
7. Live wakefully.
8. Do not swim—float.
9. Die each moment so that you can be new each moment.
10. Do not search. That which is, is. Stop and see.

                                                                                 ---- the Bishop