Jesus Archives - Patricia Pearce

Cruci-Fiction: Awakening from the False Story of Judgment, Sin and Separateness

April 1, 2021 by Patricia Pearce

The resurrection is a proclamation of the impotence of the ego story.

I recently had the great delight of being interviewed by a couple of wonderful young women, Amy Breeze Cooper and Lauren Coglianese Keck, who host the Soul Path Parenting podcast. They had invited me back on their show to speak about the themes of the crucifixion and resurrection as I understand them.

You can listen to the entire interview on the Soul Path Parenting podcast. Below are a few edited excerpts.

If we think about the cross symbolically, it’s a symbol of that whole egoic story, that is, the idea of the other, the idea of enemies, the idea of dominating, controlling, attacking, violence. The cross was a tool of the empire, which is all about domination and control. So if we look at the cross symbolically, it is a symbol of that story of separateness, it’s a symbol of the ego mind.

I might have talked about this when I’ve been on the show before, but in an awakening experience that I had, it culminated with this realization that we are in a dream, that this world we are enacting is a dream, we are enacting our unconscious beliefs. And so things that are happening in the world have a symbolic content, a symbolic meaning.

So in the case of Jesus, someone who saw through the dream, he was like a lucid dreamer on the planet I guess you could say, he’d awakened from that dream state. So how do you snap people out of the idea of of separateness? How do you show them that it’s just a story?

Well, one way is you experience the cross. You go to the heart of the symbol of that story. You enact that story and something happens on the other side of it that totally negates the whole story, which is the resurrection.

So the resurrection is the evidence that the cross is our own fiction, and that separateness and judgment and sin is our own fiction. It’s a story in the human mind, that’s all it is, and he was attempting to help us awaken to our own divine nature.

What happened, though, is that when you’re working with dreams you can interpret them in many different ways, and symbols can be interpreted in many different ways.

So this event of the crucifixion and the resurrection became interpreted by the egoic mind as evidence that we are sinful. Look at this, God’s son had to die because we’re so sinful.

So it got twisted and interpreted according to the consciousness state that Jesus wanted to dissolve. . .

In a sense, you could say that the resurrection is a proclamation of the impotence of the ego story. It is impotent. It has no ultimate power.

I’m remembering this dream that I had a few years ago, where I’m visiting this convent that is closing up. It’s like all the sisters are passing on, the convent is dying, and I think it’s going to be turned into a restaurant. . .

I walk into this room—it’s part of the convent—and this room has grass. It doesn’t have a floor, it has grass, and the grass is covered and the room is filled with butterflies of every conceivable color.

Now I know that the nuns have kept this alive all this time, like at the heart of this tradition is this profound transformation. And it was hidden away. It was nurtured. It was kept safe.

And now I feel like the time is coming when when the butterflies are coming out of that room.

At the core of it all, there is something deeply transformative. And what what can be more symbolic of complete transformation than a butterfly, the total metamorphosis of a creature?

That deep, absolute transformation is at the core of this message, and it has not been understood. It has been misconstrued, again, because it was seen through the lens of the ego mind. But it’s there.

And I feel like more and more people are pulling back the curtain, pulling back the the misunderstandings and the misinterpretations and discovering what is really there, which is absolute transformation.

It is the emergence of really a new human. That is what Christ Consciousness is about. It’s about the emergence of a new humanity. And we’re in the time when this is happening, this consciousness is arising.

Listen to the entire interview here.

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A Pandemic’s Good Friday

April 10, 2020 by Patricia Pearce

Without the benefit of hindsight, could anyone deem it “good”?

Today is Good Friday, and in my journaling this morning I was contemplating how strange and subversive the name given this day is:

Good Friday.

It’s hard to see how a cruel, torturous execution at the hands of imperial forces could be called “good.”

It’s easier, of course, with the benefit of resurrection hindsight. But without that, without the advantage of remembering this day from the other side of the tomb, could anyone ever have deemed it “good”?

I know all about the historic interpretations that Jesus’ crucifixion was the atoning sacrifice that reconciled humanity with our divine Source. But I don’t buy it. In fact, I would go so far as to say it is one of the greatest misconceptions ever told.

Why? Because Love is indivisible. Love is all there is. Humanity could never be alienated from our divine Source (aka Love) except in our own minds and fantasies. Nothing was ever broken, and no sacrifice was ever needed.Continue Reading

The Cross Is Empty and Always Has Been

April 17, 2014 by Patricia Pearce

Every summer growing up I attended Vacation Bible School at our Presbyterian church in downtown Denver. We would do crafts, sing songs, memorize scripture verses about God’s love, and try to cream each other in games of dodge ball in the church basement.

One summer one of our craft projects was to make a cross out of matches. We took partially burned matches and pasted them onto a cross-shaped piece of cardboard. Then our teacher had us glue the cardboard cross to a piece of contact-paper-covered plywood and told us to find an appropriate scripture passage to write on it.

I loved doing crafts, and this project was right up my alley. Painstakingly, I pasted my matches onto the cardboard, lining them up neatly, then glued the cross onto the backing. Then I thumbed through my Bible to find just the right scripture verse.

I was excited when I landed on the perfect verse. I carefully wrote it out, and proudly took my project to my teacher to show her.

As soon as she looked at it I could tell by her expression that I had done something wrong. She didn’t say what it was, but there seemed to be a problem with the verse I had chosen: “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.”Continue Reading

Scandalous Halos and the Incarnation

December 11, 2013 by Patricia Pearce

Nativity icon — What a difference it would make if we asserted the sacredness of the entire cosmos.

A couple of years ago, while sitting in the balcony of a church waiting for a concert to begin, I was pondering a mural of the Nativity that was painted on the back wall of the chancel.

In the painting Joseph and Mary were kneeling beside the infant Jesus who was lying in the manger. Nearby were a donkey and a cow, and off to the right the magi. But more than the figures themselves, it was the halos that caught my attention, halos that only appeared around the heads of Mary, Joseph and Jesus.

“That’s exactly the problem,” I thought to myself. The mural, placed in the position of the holy of holies, was inadvertently broadcasting the very belief that has led to so much devastation and suffering on our planet: the belief that humans alone carry the divine light, and not just that, but only certain humans.

Christmas is the season in which Christians celebrate the Incarnation, the Divine breaking into our earthly existence, taking on human form and the fullness of human experience. Yet over the course of my life, as a result of my own spiritual explorations and experiences, I have come to believe that traditional Christian understandings of the Incarnation obscure its radical implications.

The Philadelphia Love Experiment: Bridging the Cultural Chasm

July 2, 2013 by Patricia Pearce

One Sunday I was getting hot under the collar reading an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer about an ongoing budget battle in the Pennsylvania legislature. The article cited one state representative from rural PA who was talking about our mass transit system as a fiscal black hole. He said our buses don’t do a thing for his constituents.

Another representative from one of Philadelphia’s suburbs went on the counterattack, citing a study that shows that the Philadelphia region generates 40 percent of Pennsylvania’s revenue, even though we have only 32 percent of the population—and we receive only 27 percent of the transportation funds.

I looked up from the newspaper and said to Kip, “Philadelphia ought to secede from Pennsylvania!” It was not my most spiritually enlightened moment.

But the frustration was real. Our city’s public schools are on the verge of collapse. Our roads and bridges are deteriorating. We need gun control laws to keep illegal handguns off our streets. And without SEPTA—our mass transit system—the city would be paralyzed by gridlock. Thousands of people who don’t own cars would be stranded, unable to get to work to help generate that 40 percent of Pennsylvania’s revenue.

Yes, our buses do do something for rural constituents.

But at every turn, when Philadelphia tries to move legislation to address our urban problems and improve the quality of life here, we are thwarted by legislators in Harrisburg who see the city as nothing but a cesspool of welfare leeches, drug addicts, and morally corrupt hedonists.

Not surprisingly, most of us who live here see things differently. We see the brokenness and challenges of the city, sure, and sometimes it breaks our hearts. But we also love the vibrant tapestry of cultures and traditions here. We love the spunky innovations, the world-class orchestra, theaters and art museums, historic Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell that people travel from around the world to see. We love the visionary steps our city is taking to make Philadelphia a green, sustainable city. The list could go on and on.

Just think, if we seceded, we could keep that 40 percent of revenue to ourselves, and we’d be golden.

Deep down though, even as I said it, I knew that seceding wasn’t the answer, even if it were legally possible. There’s enough division already in this country, and the way forward isn’t to create more, but to find ways to bridge the chasm that divides us.

Loving Enemies

Yesterday morning, as I was reflecting on this sad state in Pennsylvania I wondered, what is the answer? We seem so locked into this us-them frame of mind. How can we stand down? Soften the lines in the sand? Lay down our swords and shields and find some common ground?

I feel a sense of urgency about this because I know these divisions aren’t just plaguing our region. They are the greatest obstacle to our nation meeting the many formidable challenges before us.

It doesn’t help that our differences have been christened “The Culture Wars.” (Does everything have to be a war for us? War on Poverty, War on Drugs, War on Terror, War on Women?) And yet I don’t think I’m overstating it to say that many people in rural America and many people in urban America see each other as enemies.

Kip and I co-pastored for nearly five years behind “enemy” lines in a small, rural Missouri town, 65 miles south of Kansas City. One of our parishioners laughingly told us a story of when she was a child growing up during WWII. One Sunday the pastor asked one of the church elders to pray for their enemies. The elder got up and prayed, “Dear God, please remove our enemies from the face of the earth.”

I don’t think that’s what the pastor meant, but I bet a lot of us would pray pretty much the same way given the chance. Life would be so much simpler if our enemies just, oh, I don’t know, got raptured up one day.

Living in that small town was a cross-cultural experience, and like all the other cross-cultural experiences I’ve had I’m very glad I had it. I got to see up close, through the eyes of people who had lived there all their lives, the struggles they were facing:

Farms that had been in families for generations were being foreclosed on because small farmers couldn’t compete with corporate agriculture.
With the influx of corporate retail stores, family businesses were going under.
Job opportunities were scarce, and mostly minimum wage.
Towns throughout the region were decaying because their young people, seeing no future for themselves, were moving away never to return.

People were feeling powerless before cultural and global forces they couldn’t control. They were watching a cherished way of life slowly dying. And yet in the midst of it all they kept the faith, kept taking care of each other, kept holding potlucks, and kept trying to think of ways to protect and resurrect what they once had.

When you know what other people are dealing with, it’s really not hard to pray for them. Love them even.

All of this got me thinking about our current situation here in the commonwealth. (By the way, I love that Pennsylvania is a commonwealth. It just kinda says it all.) What if people in Philadelphia started praying for people in rural PA? Not because we want to guilt-trip them into being nice to us, nor show them that we can take the moral high ground, but because we have listened to their struggles. We sincerely want the best for them, as much as we do for ourselves.

I can’t help but believe such a movement would help repair our relationships and open a path forward in a way politics never will. We are Philadelphia, after all, the City of Brotherly/Sisterly Love, and brotherhood and sisterhood don’t stop at municipal boundaries.

Can you imagine if congregations all over the city started a prayer movement for our rural siblings? Maybe it could be called The Philadelphia Love Experiment. Maybe we could make animosities vanish into thin air.

Somebody has to take the first step—refuse to participate in the warmongering anymore and reach out the hand of friendship. Why not us?

I also think about how Pennsylvania is known as the Keystone State. Take that in for a moment. A keystone, that one crucial stone at the top of an arch that keeps the whole structure from collapsing in on itself. It sure seems to me this tottering, torn country could use something like that.

A very famous declaration came out of Philadelphia once that completely rocked the world. We could do it again if we wanted to, but this time we wouldn’t be declaring independence. We would be honoring the reality that we are all, like it or not, interdependent.

Let’s we the people just do it.

Of Crosses and Crocuses

March 28, 2013 by Patricia Pearce

Last week on March 21st Kip and I celebrated our 21st anniversary. These last couple of weeks I’ve been recalling our wedding, which was a small, intimate gathering of immediate family and close friends. The ceremony was nontraditional. We wrote our own vows, friends and family members sang and played music, read poems, did liturgical dance and at the end of the ceremony each person came forward and gave us a blessing as they placed ribbons across our shoulders.

It was a wonderful gift to be showered with the well-wishes of our loved ones, and later Kip wove the ribbons of blessing into a wall hanging that hangs in our home to this day.

Of the many blessings we received that day, two stand out clearly in my mind. The first was, “May you have many crosses to bear.”Continue Reading

Shedding Light on Our Limiting Beliefs

January 22, 2013 by Patricia Pearce

Salt can’t lose its essence, and neither can you.

The other day, while I was salting my eggs at breakfast, I had an insight about one of Jesus’ teachings that had always eluded me. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is quoted as saying: “You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.”

Even though in our day we take salt for granted, in ancient times it was precious for many reasons. It had purifying qualities, was frequently used in religious rituals and sacrifices, and it was used to preserve food, which in the days before refrigeration and canning could mean the difference between survival and starvation. Salt was so highly prized, in fact, that Roman soldiers were paid in part with salt, which is how we ended up with the word salary.

Jesus was speaking to uneducated Jewish peasants who struggled to survive under the brutality of Roman imperial rule. By saying, “You are the salt of the earth,” he was telling them they were precious, sacred, valuable beyond measure, which was probably not the message they got from the elite of their homeland and certainly not from their Roman occupiers.

Okay. That makes sense, but it’s the next part that’s puzzling. “But if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.”

That’s the part I never understood. How could salt ever lose its taste? Salt is a stable mineral, and it just doesn’t go bad. If you’re like me, you’ve had to toss out plenty of seasonings in your day, jars of herbs and powders that have been sitting in the spice rack for years, but never have I had to toss out salt because it wasn’t salty anymore.

As the salt tumbled from the salt grinder onto my eggs, though, it started to make sense.Continue Reading