Of Metaphors, Demons, Gods And Men

Of metaphors, demons, gods and men By Franklin Mukakanga

Background: Having been raised in a Christian home, and having, for many years been a born-again, practicing Christian, I often meet people who, for many years, saw me live under the structure, form and umbrella of Christian religion. They want to know what’s going on with me, seeing as I am no longer doing many of the things I used to do, going where I used to go, etc. About 5 years ago, my journey through life took an unexpected turn. I weaned myself off the fundamentalist Christian mindset that had been my comfort zone and entered a fascinating limbo in which I realized, acknowledged and embraced my personal responsibility for the finding and fulfilling of my life’s purpose. Over the years since then, as I have evolved in my understanding and practice of living and being, I have found myself in a curious position: holding to no particular religious system, peaceful, serene, more balanced and centered than I have ever been; knowing my place in the universe and loving it. To some who knew me in my former form, the space in which I am is ‘confusing’ or ‘obvious’ , depending on whether they choose to wonder or assume the worst. One question I have been asked on more than one occasion is: what about Jesus? The following, though not specifically written for those who ask me, summarizes my understanding of the Christ’s person, purpose and mission. …… For me, the nature and mission of Jesus Christ go beyond the establishment of a dominant world religion based on the worship of the Christ. I refuse to be drawn into debates about the Christ’s divinity or humanity. I refuse to engage in talk that divides between people whose time would be better spent celebrating their shared humanity and loving and giving and growing. What the Christ was becomes immaterial if it fails of fulfilling its intent. “ That they might be one”. “ That they might live life more abundantly”, the making of one—at-one-ment. Various phrases encapsulate the mission of Jesus Christ. One thing remains true: The mission of the Christ was to bring about reconciliation in the estranged mind of humanity between mankind and God, who had never left or forsaken humanity, but was thought of as cold, distant and vindictive.

That some called Him Lord, or that there are allusions to actual worship of the Christ, or even that a worldwide movement derives

its name from His title, does not or should not detract from the fact that his mission was clear: to eliminate the illusion of separation from God and man’s attendant dis-ease with, and constant attempts to appease, the Divine. The former by a barrier of not-goodenoughness, watered, nurtured and matured into a crippling, debilitating concept called sin, and the latter by ritualistic acts of servile homage, which served to start the perpetual cycle all over again. The Christ manifested to bring an end to the misery that was man’s lot because of the superstitions, beliefs and practices that had eroded his self-confidence to the point of enslavement to base passions and demons of various shapes, numbers and sizes. Man was a prisoner of his own mind. Caged by fear. Unable to appreciate, let alone perceive the love of God, man needed a Peace maker.

The story was well known. For as long as they could remember, there had always been a ‘once upon a time’. Tales of a time when everything was ‘perfect’. It was hard to accept that this ‘hard life’ they were living was what they were meant to be living. Man’s lot was somebody else’s fault. It had to be. Someone other than man himself was responsible for the mess he suddenly realized he was in. As the story went, man hadn’t always been a dichotomy. Man was created with a nature that defied the nature of everything else in the universe. Man, when created, enjoyed only good, positive emotions, and could not get angry or sad. He had sweat glands and arms and opposable thumbs, yet was not required to work, toil or sweat—God forbid! Man was always right and never erred in judgment. Nor did he ever reap the consequences of violating the laws of nature. If he climbed up a tree and fell down to the ground, he could not feel pain and cry. Could he even fall?! Man was favored by his maker, living an insulated existence where all was peachy, and easy-going and good. He was put in a beautiful garden whose trees did not need pruning and whose fruit could be enjoyed without ever breaking a sweat. He would remain in this favored state only as long as he did not develop a curiosity for the other, heretofore unknown, side.

But there was an enemy. A loathsome creature jealous of mankind’s favored status, that deliberately and maliciously tricked man into disobedience in order to separate mankind from the blessings of the divine linkage. Determined to keep man in misery, this enemy caused the female of the species to eat a fruit—or desire sex—

depending on the version, which, consequently, made man suddenly aware of the fact that everything in the universe has two sides! And that was rebellion at its worst. From then on, the battle raged. Good was of God. Bad or evil was of the enemy. Acts of good brought the Divine closer, acts of not-so-good caused alienation and separation.

Because man’s desire to know what was kept from him had caused such a terrible rift between mankind—now living in dejection and dichotomy—and the Divine, appeasement of the enraged Deity was necessary, by way of sacrifices; and securing of Divine favor by more sacrifices and worship became a top priority. Blood was spilled periodically, both animal and human, as the life of the sacrificed took the place of the life of the penitent. One day, one big sacrifice would be made, the value of which would outweigh that of ‘all the blood of bulls and goats’, and that would reverse both the separation from the Divine and its effects on the nature of man, eliminating the bad, and restoring the good to pristine, universe-defiant glory.

This sacrifice would involve the death of someone really special. One from among us, or our god-warrior, who would stand for us all, die for us all. The story was told for so long, it became a part of the fabric of humanity’s collective psyche. In various cultures around the world, the story was told and retold, and naturally, took on a local tinge and flavor, using various names, specific details and idiosyncratic embodiments or incarnations. It was a great story. It explained everything.

It was a metaphor for the quest for reunification with our Source, a virtual solution for a virtual problem. In seeking to understand the duality and meaning of life, we had imagined ourselves into separation from God. And we now imagined ourselves a solution to what would have been an endless cycle of misery and futility, brought into being by our own imaginings. Hence, “in the fullness of time” the manifestation of our desire: the Christ appears. A god-man, born to be the doorway back into rightness or righteousness with God. The one to die so we won’t have to. The one to carry our responsibility, so we don’t have to. A living— and dying—metaphor to reconnect us with the Source.

In Palestine, Jesus of Nazareth is born, and lives out the metaphor. He enters into our belief system. Fulfills our expectations of a Savior. Lives the virtuous life. Becomes the reconciliatory blood sacrifice, since we believe that we are so bad that someone has to die in order for us to get back in good books with God. Jesus dies for our sins, those mental abstractions that demonize and represent our least desirable elements. Jesus dies for the things we collectively and singularly detest about ourselves, or the things that we or others say we shouldn’t do or be. (When you think that design engineering and sometimes simple willpower can allow us to remake ourselves without Divine intervention, it kind of makes you wonder whether we’ve been much ado about nothing, doesn’t it?) But, because he is special, he’s resurrected, leaves the earth, sends His Spirit, after commissioning a handful of disciples to tell the world what they have seen and experienced—to teach the world His message and way.”Freely you have received. Freely give”

But guess what? A few short years later, true to form, succeeding generations of teachers begin to hoard the teachings of the Christ and institutionalize them, making them the preserve only of the initiated, and we’re back to square one. In order to be right with God, you now need to be initiated into fellowship with the Christ, conferred by a special ritual, in turn administered by an institution that the ritual gives you membership into. After this you have access to God’s blessings. Without joining the institution, you cannot have access to God, His blessings, or the relationship you crave. One form of control, substituted for another, in effect recreating what the Christ came to destroy: a barrier to the Divine. “He is our peace, who has broken down every wall”.

Our metaphor led us to its logical end: We are reconciled with God. We need no man to intercede with the Divine, to present our petitions or appease its wrath. We have free, unrestricted access to all wisdom, knowledge, understanding, love, joy, peace and light. We are free! Yet we can’t seem to handle the implications: We owe no one any explanations. We are totally responsible for ourselves from here on out. God is within us. We grok God. Our metaphor has done what we had failed to do for ourselves. It has rid us of the illusion of separation and reconciled us with our maker. But, not knowing what to do with our new found freedom, we substitute our old masters for new ones. This time, willingly placing ourselves under them, and expecting them, again, to lead us to God—who, by the way is within, wondering why we are looking without all over again—and expecting these teachers/gurus/masters to break down the newly reconstructed, non-existent, barrier by intercession or instruction meant to lead us to enlightenment.

When we needed help, our maker indulged our capriciousness and joined us in our reality in order to free us from a slavery of our own making. We were here. It was confusing. We needed answers. We created a problem whose solution would allow us to accept that there had been no problem to start with. Just a state of being that we had had a tough time accepting. This state of being—living and dying, thriving and suffering, fair weather and natural ‘disasters’— could only be explained by a separation of the good from the bad, of God from ourselves. We needed a divider. We needed sin, and so we created it. We needed salvation from the sin we created. A Savior came.

God joined us in our delusion. The universe played ball with its belligerent children. Not because we would have been unacceptable to God without the awful things that subsequently befell the Christ, but because we would never have believed that God was not mad with us any other way. Not with our polarization of our consensual reality. To our minds, we had broken Divine law, and justice had to be served. The Christ was manifested in order to serve that justice. There was something wrong with us. We deserved to be punished. We did not deserve to live. We should be blotted out of existence. Wait! We can’t be. Let someone else take responsibility. Let someone else bear it. Our metaphor. Our Messiah. Only when our affront to Divine law was punished and Divine justice satisfied could we feel worthy of God’s attention. Only when we absorbed the wrath of God against our errant ways could we feel we had done something to earn the trust and love of God anew. Even if vicariously. Only then could our God and our selves get on with living.

This is why the death of the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth shifted the thinking, feeling and being of the whole human family. It was the culmination of our universal collective metaphor for our then present state, and what would become the doorway to our destiny. It set us free from the impediment to our fellowship with our maker, and, whether its individuals were consciously aware of the occurrence of the event or not, allowed the whole world to walk out of a prison of superstition and fear. Free from the collective guilt that had held us back from realizing our full potential, mankind could begin to aspire to be more, do more and experience living on a whole new level. The illusion of separation gone, man could ‘approach God’ and even enter into relationship with God. While people may dispute the authority or even the facts of the story of Jesus, and even though debates will rage forever about the nature and person of the being we call the Christ, no one can dispute the

fact that this one man has had a greater impact on history (and mankind’s subsequent evolution) than any other.

A shift in consciousness took place the day the metaphor became the man, and the man became the Spirit. The way was paved for every individual spirit coming after him to be able to reconnect with its Source, completely free of the illusion of separateness, free of guilt. Peace between Man and God was made ‘once for all’. And humanity just needed to pay attention in order to be able to see God, right where He’d always been.

The growth of spirituality and the proliferation of paths, through which millions are ‘finding God’, in many varied disciplines over the past two millenia attests to the fact that, since the manifestation of the Christ, the “way to God” is open. The Christ brought about a reconciliation with God in the collective unconscious for all, not a select few. “My peace I leave with you. My peace I give unto you”.

Thus, wherever a man ceases to struggle with the Divine and finds unconditional love and acceptance, wherever love and joy and peace abound in the heart, there the Spirit of the Christ is finding expression, and there is it made manifest. Dogma or no dogma, offerings or no offerings, pound for pound, blow for blow, of the beneficiaries and exemplifiers of the spirit of the Christ it is said, “Ye shall know them by their fruits”. If the “fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, selfcontrol”, then wherever, and in whomever, they are found is a place where the Spirit of the Christ is alive and well.

Statements like “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life” “No one comes to the Father except by me” show something other than an egotistical desire for homage and worship on the part of Jesus Christ. They point out that God did something radical in the gift of Jesus—our manifested metaphor—to show that the separation that man had created and propagated through religious systems between man and the Divine was artificial. That the veil that separated was a human creation that needed to be torn down.

If God became flesh in the Christ, it was not in order to tear down one blinkered system and replace it with another. It was in order to tear down the illusion of separation from God, propagated by a

myriad of religious systems the world over and the tyranny that came with controlled, regulated access to the Divine; and to open our minds to the liberty that has always been ours to access and connect with God. To remind us of our true roots and destiny. “Greater things than this shall ye do” (words of Jesus), “That he may be the firstborn among brothers” suggest something that many Christians acknowledge, but only as a future event: That what the Christ was, we are to be. Some call it Christ consciousness. The reaching of an elevated plain of knowledge and understanding that allows each willing human being to live out the essence of his being as exemplified by the Christ. It is our destiny to come to the point of realization expressed by the Christ: “I and the Father are One”. A truth so simple, so sublime, that to the disillusioned and unenlightened, it sounds like blasphemy.

Jesus did not come to be worshipped. He came to show his brothers the way back home. How to worship, not from a hill or building, but to worship—to reverence and adore—God “in spirit and in truth”. Any one of us can become as Jesus is. Not in some sweet by-and-by, but right now. On this earth. In this lifetime. Yet to be like Jesus does not mean to become a clone of the man Jesus, who walked the streets of Galilee. It means coming to maturity as the individual you were created to be. Just as the Christ did. To be fully aware of your Divine heritage. Of your oneness with God. Aware of your unique relationship with your maker that gives you a unique expression and mission. An awareness that allows you to fulfill the reason for your being here. “To do the will of my Father” is what Jesus called it.

The “will of the Father” is etched on your genes, your chromosomes, your conscience. It is manifested in your likes, dislikes, personal leanings, desires and aspirations. It is encoded in your finger print. No one can tell you what it is. It is within you. With trust in your Father’s special role for you, you can find joy in your singularity, celebrate living in boundless love, and sharing all the good that comes to you with everybody around you. Jesus came to make one of the many. To end the division that was the natural consequence of claims of exclusive access to God. To bring the illusion of separateness from God to an end.

In many aspects, following the manifestation of the Christ over 2000 years ago, the world can be seen to be moving towards that oneness that was his stated goal for mankind, in ways that seem to terrify many of the people that claim to be holding on the most steadfastly to His teachings, causing them to go into a tailspin of

‘panic division’, which seems to happen spontaneously in some cases as a last-ditch effort to preserve the purity of ‘ the truth’. If the spontaneous division is not based on a difference on opinion regarding which day is the right day to worship on, it’s about who the fundamentalists or the liberals are. And who between them is on the right track. Which denomination constitutes ‘the true church’ and which one(s) is/are the harlot of the Revelation. Within each’ true church’, are the true believers and the compromised and lukewarm ones. Among the true believers are those who are ‘contending for the faith once delivered to the saints’ and those who are on a ‘slippery slope’. Among the contenders for the faith are the traditionalists and the modernists. Among those, the conservatives and the charismatics. The permutations are endless.

A cancer tumor is a great example of division gone awry. A malfunctioning cell divides itself. And the newly created cells—and the original cell—divide themselves again. And they go on and on, dividing and mutating, forming a tumor and, having done that, replicating the out-of-control cell division over and over again. Cancer cells do not know when to stop dividing and mutating. Likewise, divisions divide the body of Christ ad infinitum. There’s always a them. There’s always an us. “That they may be one” only applies to the denomination to which one belongs, and, like a cancerous tumor, the unending mutations of these endless divisions sap out the vitality of what is, arguably, the greatest movement this world has ever seen. A movement which could benefit from unification theory just as much as science could. When will they learn that there comes a point when the divisions must stop in order for healing to take place and the oneness that Jesus Christ prayed for to become a reality?

“That they may be one”. One of the Christ’s last recorded requests to the Universe, and one that seems to be finding fulfillment more outside than within the group dubbing itself ‘the body of Christ’. The demonized New Age movement, Pagans and natural religionists, the Buddhists and Hindus, etc., seem to have gotten the gist of the mission and message of the Christ. The love, acceptance and genuine compassion that are found in certain among them, while not proving or disproving the inherent superiority of their systems of belief , seem to manifest the pervasiveness of the Christ Spirit.

You. Whoever you are. Are you making one, and unifying? Or are you dividing, splitting hairs, separating, criticizing and living in a tunnel that allows for no way but yours to be ‘the right way’?

Some people must define the scope of the work of the Divine; it is not enough that they have found a path. They must clone themselves in everyone they meet. Some have written rulebooks, creeds and models, which they believe every seeker must follow, while others spend their time in endless arguments with anyone that doesn’t see eye to eye with them, trying with force of zeal and fervor of heart to win people over to their preferred religion or belief system.

To them I would say: Get over yourself. Your metaphor is your own. What makes sense for you may not make sense for another. An orange tree cannot yield pears. If a life is yielding the fruit of the Christ spirit, it is of Christ’s spirit. Enlightenment comes not from without, but within. Seeking to bring enlightenment to others is noble. Allowing people to come to it in their own time, of their own accord, in the form that works for them, is wisdom. “The word became flesh”—the metaphor became a man: “full of grace and truth”.