I said I had further thoughts about Easter and here they are. What I realized was that I have been trying to make a very basic decision for years and have been unable to make it.
The decision has been an answer to a question: Where does the power lie? Does it lie in pure, pristine, perfect goodness, the kind I associate with Jesus and the Course, or does it lie in the egotism of the world, the kind I see all around me and, I hate to say, within me? My journey through this life has really been one of getting increasingly in touch with both, which has left me continually torn between the two.
I increasingly understand the pure goodness. I get it conceptually. I feel it within myself. I see it peeking through in people’s behavior. And I see it at work in the world. I see it do things that really are miraculous. I see it speak to us. I see it make itself heard and make itself known.
Yet in the big picture it seems frankly weak. It seems like a still, small voice rather than a mighty hand. As I observe the world, the rude, senseless game of the ego seems like the real game in town. The jostling for advantage and position seems like the real activity here. It seems to have the real power. It has the floor, while pure goodness is weakly trying to get in a word edgewise. On paper, then, pure goodness is better, truer, more attractive, more important. It looms larger. But experience tells me that in the actual rough-and-tumble world, the other side has the real power. I see this on every level, from the personal, to the joint, to the group, to the national and international.
That, I think, is my basic issue in life. Which side is really in charge? I tend to be sarcastic and pessimistic and sometimes just cranky, because a whole part of me is answering, “You can see which side has the power. It’s as plain as day. Get real. Acknowledge how things really work down here.”
This is where Easter comes in. Easter was not on paper. I believe it really happened. And I believe it was the perfect demonstration of what actually happens when pure goodness meets the egotism of the world. What happens? The world’s egotism seems to run over and flatten pure goodness. But that is only the appearance. That is the Good Friday illusion. The reality is Easter. That pure goodness emerges intact, unscathed, and it has the final power. It has the final say.
These thoughts caused me to look up a speech from a movie I saw years ago called Second-Hand Lions. In it, an old uncle gives a speech to a boy on the verge of manhood. It’s just a part of a speech he has given for a long time to boys becoming men. Here is how it went:
There’s a long speech I give to young men, sounds like you need to hear a piece of it. Just a piece.
Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things that a man needs to believe in the most.
That people are basically good;
that honor, courage and virtue mean everything;
that power and money, money and power, mean nothing;
that good always triumphs over evil;
and I want you to remember this,
that love…true love never dies.
You remember that, boy. You remember that.
Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in.
Now I do believe those things are true (though I would take out the honor and courage part, as I think those are egoic values). But I also feel very much like the man in this speech. I have a will to believe those things, because, in the end, “those are the things worth believing in.”
But how sad it would be if we had to believe in them even though they weren’t true. That would be so sad. It would make life such a tragic exercise. So I have decided to do what the Course says, to take Jesus’ resurrection as “the final demonstration,” as the definitive experiment that shows the real relationship between God’s pure goodness and the world’s blind egotism. I have seen countless thousands of demonstrations of their relationship, but most of those other demonstrations have yielded false results. This demonstration is the one I take as the real one. As Jesus says in the Urtext, “If you can accept the one generalization now, there will be no need to learn from many smaller lessons.”
What did the resurrection demonstrate? Jesus captures it perfectly in these words:
The Resurrection demonstrated that nothing can destroy truth. Good can withstand any form of evil, because light abolishes all forms of darkness.
These words give voice to a current that runs very deep in us. They represent what I’ve been dwelling on lately. I want to believe that, in the long run, good has the power. Good, truth, light—they cannot be destroyed, and in the end, they will abolish their opposite. Isn’t that what we all want to believe? If I can really come to accept that, then I am convinced that I can approach every situation, every person, every tiny detail, with a completely different attitude, an attitude full of brightness, confidence, and certain hope.
