This year in the Western Christian calendar today is Holy Saturday. A powerful moment in many ways. As a Zen Buddhist of a liberal sort, but raised and as it turns out inescapably culturally Christian, I find my mind goes to these big festivals of the church. And this week is filled with them.
However, I also notice there is a strange confluence here on this particular day, where in the Eastern churches, who will not be observing Easter until the first of May, today is the Synaxis of the Archangel Gabriel. Gabriel is one of those wondrous mythical beings mentioned first in Zoroastrianism, and then fully embraced by the religions of Abraham, that serve as emissaries from the divine to the world.
When I was a child I was told we each of us have an angel assigned to us as protector. I also was led to understand they kept an eye on our behaviors, sort of our own personal secret police. I stopped believing in them a year or so before I stopped believing in the deity as any sort of projection of human ego into the sky.
Still angels remain fascinating things. Three, well, four if you count Satan, are considered premier, Michael, Raphael, and Gabriel. In addition to angel, or in their case at least from the writing the book of Enoch, archangels, they are also given the title “saint.” There are various legends of their actions.
But Gabriel is the great messenger, among other things foretelling the births of both John the Baptist, and of Jesus himself. In Islam it is he who dictates the Koran to Mohammed.
For me he has come to stand symbolically for the great disruptions that reorient our lives. I’ve tended to think of these moments as kensho, the Japanese word for awakening into reality.
Somewhere along the line I learned there are other ways of engaging our collective stories of the deep and true than simply as history to be proven true or false. There are universal currents of the heart and mind given explanation through some of these stories. And here with Gabriel we get kensho in a Western telling.
So, with Gabriel we get something quite rich. He brings revelations. Of course, most humans get these experiences from time to time. We believe the world is one way, in a moment we find it is some other way.
And. There are in addition to revelations of reality, revelations of ego, confirmations of what we have always believed, but now sealed with the dream of an external authority. So. Dangerous stuff these moments of revelation, and it is critical that we find ways to discern between the authentic and fool’s gold.
For me today of all days we get an invitation from the Western traditions into how to do just that, how to discern the authentic revelation of the real from the seductions of Mara.
Today is Good Friday. Today God is dead. We on the Zen path who are also interested in Christianity find a tiny passing passage in Paul’s epistle to the Philippians, second chapter, verse seven really, really interesting: “(Jesus) made himself nothing.” Or. “He emptied himself.” The nothing or the emptying is the word kenosis.
While it isn’t critical, I like that this letter is generally believed to be by the “real” Paul, the crazed, ecstatic mystic as opposed to the author or authors of those various bits and pieces of the New Testament that call on slaves to be obedient, women to be silent, and bishops to have only one wife. Kenosis belongs to that crazed ecstatic.
The conventional understanding of the term is self-sacrifice. Which has merits, although it also has a very unhealthy side. And ultimately it is not how I find the term most useful.
Rather I find kenosis the moment of seeing through.
The world and everything in it, including you and me, we have no essences, nothing special about us distinct from the great play of cause and effect. Our ego is a very important thing, it keeps us together and as animals on this little planet it allows us to survive for a time. But, it has a very unfortunate side effect. It makes us think we are something special. Or, at least we carry something special inside of us that is not part of the great mess that includes life and death. And protecting that specialness we often do bad things, particularly we do bad things to protect our fondest illusion, that one that we are special, when somewhere deep down we all know in fact we are the stuff of each other, unique yes, beautiful yes, but also woven out of each other, a moment in a great play of moments, a wave on the surface of an ocean.
Kenotic moments are those moments when we see through to the reality of things. We are. And we are empty. Kenosis is that moment when we see it for ourselves, not as words in a book, but as the revelation of Gabriel himself blowing that horn into our ears.
And for those who have the ears to hear it, the eyes to see it, today, Holy Saturday, even God himself, herself, itself empties.
It is the way of what is, the great play of all things, always special, but also, always empty, or, as I prefer as perhaps just a little less misleading, boundless.
And so today is a feast of sorts.
Today, in the confluence of East and West, at least in the Christian traditions, there is a great blowing of Gabriel’s horn, and a pointing to the great emptying.
The gift of seeing through.
The gift of setting down all our illusions about ourselves and the world, and instead, becoming one with.
Or, to use that other image. It is that moment, or can be, when the wave realizes it is the ocean.
There’s an announcement.
May we hear it.
May we see it.
May we live it.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In