How to Come Back to Life

The message of Easter.

In the Bible story, Mary Magdalene is up before dawn. Jesus has been executed for no crime. Distraught, she wanders among the tombs, seeing that the stone has been rolled away from the entrance of Jesus’s grave. Finding a gardener, she asks him if he knows what has happened to the body of Jesus? The gardener turns and smiles at her.

Does she not recognise him?

It’s a lovely micro-fiction - and I don’t mean that disrespectfully to believers. One of the reasons I had to leave the Pentecostal church, where I was raised, was the insistence on literal interpretations of everything.

I an evangelist for the power of stories, not because they are docu-dramas, but because they are not.

Story-power works on us mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and eventually, physically, in that we are able to make changes in our material world. But stories don’t start in the material world - they start in the imagination. Even a ‘true’ story is not a snapshot of ‘what happened’, not least because of what is left out of the frame.

And the strange thing about the past is that it changes as we do.

The facts don’t change. A firm hold on reality matters. We’re not gaslighting ourselves or anyone else. We are not in denial. We are not liars. What changes is how we understand ourselves in relation to the facts. That was Freud’s discovery. It’s what therapy is doing today. Sometimes we harden, sometimes we soften, sometimes we get free, sometimes we get caught again and again. Sometimes, when we tell a significant part of our life story to another, they see it completely differently. This can be rejecting or liberating.

The Bible story of the Resurrection is one with its roots in ancient religions the world over. The dying god is the sacrifice of the old to make way for the new. Such rituals typically happen in spring, to create sympathetic magic with the earth and the sun. The soil will warm, crops will grow, winter is over, for now.

In the Graeco-Roman world, the cult of Cybele, the mother-goddess, and Attis, her rough, man of the woods, consort, happened around the spring equinox in March. It wasn’t a pretty sight, including castration, dismemberment, and death. It was an act of male sacrifice.

The return to life that follows ritual sacrifice is significant. If there is no renewal of life, then the sacrifice is a terrible waste. In the Christian story, Jesus dies on behalf of the future - to redeem that future, once and for all. It’s billed as a new beginning.

So, what can we learn?

We’re all attracted by the idea of new beginnings. Of starting over. Of living our best life. We are less interested in what it will cost. There’s a crazy idea that when you get on the right track for you, everything will be fine. It won’t be fine. It will hard, it will be demanding, it will be riddled with self-doubt. It will involve sacrifice.

Sacrifice is slaughter. It’s the death of the old. That’s brutal. That hurts. We often imagine that we are staying in a situation because we are good people putting others first. Maybe so. Or maybe we can’t make the sacrifice that change involves. We might say, ‘I want to leave but I can’t sacrifice my children.’ That fear of ours asks for more investigation, because a loveless home, an angry home, a depressed home, has already sacrificed the well-being of the children. This isn’t about blame. It’s about understanding.

For a young person, leaving an impossible home situation is frightening. It’s all you know. It’s a roof over your head. I left home at 16 and it was awful. Also, it was the right thing to do. I am still living with the consequences of it half a decade later. Consequences good and bad. I have a wonderful home, welcoming and all mine. There’s always the best food and enough to share. The garden is beautiful. And yet, every time I go away on a trip, which for work is often, I have to leave it pristine and perfect, will be doing the ironing at midnight, fixing a dinner for the house sitter, and it’s partly because I prefer order to chaos, but it is also because some part of me believes that I won’t return. When my biological mother gave me up for adoption, I didn’t return. When I made my choice to leave Wintersonworld, I never returned. In the first leaving, I was the sacrifice my mother had to make. In the second leaving, I made the sacrifice, and it took all my courage. I was scared of losing home and church and striking out by myself - especially when everyone was telling me it was selfish, stupid, and wrong.

Remaking your life starts with unmaking what is there. It’s a loss. A death.

Not all choices are so dramatic. Yet, any significant change is first the willingness to let go of already exists. Whatever has served us in some way - even if we moan about it all the time, even if we hate it - but stay put. It might have been right once, necessary once, and now it’s making us ill.

Please be aware that sacrifice and renewal is not to be confused with being endlessly dissatisfied what what you have in this life. Some people are selfish narcissists. It’s never enough. Usually, they get others to do all the sacrificing for them. Don’t be dragged down by people like this. Don’t waste time on their problems. Sacrifice and renewal is a deep matter. It’s personal.

I think it’s important to learn what we can from stories of religious ritual sacrifice. Often, in this life, we fail because we don’t have enough knowledge, or self-knowledge. Sacrifice has religious connotations, because it is something we do for others, or for the greater good, and we understand that interpretation, in spite of the efforts of neo-liberalism to make everything about self-interest. Yet, now we are mostly a secular society, we have no-one one to teach us that sacrifice and renewal is a question for our own life directly, as well as what we can do for others. That’s because the idea of ‘sacrifice’ in a secular context is decoupled from what should follow: Renewal. We have new-age self-help stuff that is all about change and renewal and new life, and nothing about sacrifice. And then there’s religious/duty stuff that is all about sacrifice and nothing about renewal.

In fact, the two things belong together. Sacrifice followed by renewal.

So, if we look at religious sacrifice/renewal templates, what do we find? We find that there’s a plan. There’s preparation. There’s a set of rules. A How To Manual. In other words, the thing is carefully set out before it happens. If you don’t have to flee in the night - don’t. If you don’t have to quit your job tomorrow, don’t. If you are miserable at home, write down what it will take to be gone. Get the money together. Be mentally ready. Fix the date. Keep the appointment.

We find too, that nothing happens alone and unsupported. It’s a group thing. We may not have a group, but it helps if we have someone who can see us through, and if we don’t have that person, we need intellectual resources. We can read. We can find help in what we read. Books are there to give us strength. We can create a structure, psychically and emotionally, to hold us when we would waiver or fail. To stopper up our mouths when we look at the bloody mess, and say, ‘what have I done?’

Coming back to life never happens without a sacrifice of the old. Knowing what you will sacrifice, and yes, mourning the parts of it you will miss, or that you did love, once, will help with the self-doubt. Knowing there is a price to pay will give you courage to do the calculations. But here’s the catch - or at least, something to think about. Are you avoiding the real sacrifice by substituting other, more bearable, more acceptable sacrifices? Something you can manage. Not something that will trigger the change you really need?

We are used to expecting women to make sacrifices in this life - give up their careers, look after elderly parents, as well as the kids and the house, manage things for their man. Accept a lower-paid job for quality of life (always worth asking, whose life?) Turn down an opportunity for the sake of the family, put up with being treated as second-best.

What if the sacrifice is to refuse to be the sacrifice?

What would you be giving up? Self-image? The approval of others? Your own guilt? Your own feelings of worthlessness? Your femininity?

It happens to men in other ways, usually around status. There are many men who find themselves in meaningless work that pays well. Men who feel they have to provide for their family, when what the family really needs is a conversation about what the family really needs. Being a man comes with advantages, but it is loaded with rubbish about gender essentialism. Why shouldn’t a man be emotional and gentle? Those are strengths, not weaknesses. Why should a man assume he can have a family life, but never be home? Maybe the sacrifice is the sacrifice of those norms - and will the pack turn on you? Yes, for sure. There are terrible penalties for refusing to live as others demand. Be prepared for the backlash. It doesn’t mean you got it wrong or that you are crazy.

When a person feels dead inside, or feels that part of them has died, and when this distress begins to stain the outside - it might be drinking too much, being reckless with what you have, behaving like a brute, yelling at work, or sinking into depression, then that is the call to renewal. And it won’t be cheap and it won’t be easy.

When we are more or less healthy, the changes we need to make tend to be more like micro-dosing. We are on the right path. Adjustments happen without too much stress. When we are not healthy inside, the choice is for things to get worse, or to change.

Note. I didn’t say the choice is for things to get worse or to get better. Better will come. But not immediately, not every day, and there will be regrets. I don’t think this is about living your best life - WTF is that, anyway? It’s about creating the conditions to thrive.

You know, when little babies used to die, and there wasn’t a clear cause, the doctor would write: Failure to Thrive. Poor kid, like it’s your fault you didn’t get the care you needed. As an adult, we are our own best chance at getting the care we need, but as an adult, with all kinds of obstacles on the path, we have to clear a way to our own front door, before help can reach us.

Life is far more than biological life - that’s also what the story of the resurrection is about. Are we prepared to enter the story of our life, imaginatively, and read what is found there? And rip up those narratives that were never ours, or that have become baleful commands and refusals? You know how it is, with certain friends, and we can see their solution so clearly, and always there’s a version of ‘yes, I would if I could.. but..’

What would the sacrifice look like? What would it cost? To live again?