The Lamb of Goodness

John. 1 Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.

This holiday season has brought me into deeper contemplation around the conception of my spirituality. I remember being four years old and writing church songs in praise of the God I knew intimately, the God that was not yet shaped by an institution. 

I remember the feeling of levity, of being so held by this mysterious ever-present friend, whose only gaze was one of kindness, and whose support was more firm and committed than I could comprehend. I had a picture of a bearded European Jesus (that's another piece of emergent writing) wrapping his arms around a young girl by my bedside. 

I have been contemplating the passages of the bible and how they can be decolonized and reclaimed for our diverse and quick-paced modern moment. How the wisdom inherent in the holy book could be offered to any human of any orientation regardless of religious persuasion.

 The passage above comes from the book of  John in the New Testament. In the passage, John is recognizing the yogi of all yogis, Jesus.

What immediately strikes me is that this all loving figure – who is called both human and divine -  is not announced as a wolf or a tiger. Not as a behemoth entity armed with lightning bolts and a  booming cry. He is called a lamb. A gentle creature that is both innocent and vulnerable. 

This lamb is an animal. An earthen carnation that is a part of the web of all life. The lamb is close to the earth, to its first mother. Like all other animals, it does not know the future forecasting or rumination of the past. It knows the present moment and does not try to be anything other than what it is.

And at the same time, this lamb is connected to something divine and holy. It belongs to God just as it belongs to itself.  There is no obstacle to the lamb's remembrance of its own divinity; it is pure and ever-flowing.

This passage hits home for me when I consider the power of our wise awareness that can tread lightly through the field of our internal experience. For myself, when I'm in a moment of suffering, the suffering can easily become all encompassing. I want to escape, to change it, to transmute or move beyond my current experience to something more enjoyable. At its worst, suffering pulls me into the belief that I am bad or wrong. That I am at fault for the woes of reality.

Yet, if I invite in the energy of the lamb, I am welcoming in softness and ease to all of my present moment. I am inviting the lamb to access the dark, the hard, the fragile, the scared. I am inviting it to remind me of both the human and divine reality that I belong to. 

It might even nuzzle into my belly, letting me feel the blanket of warmth it brings. The lamb does not seek to devour or persuade, it joins me in the moment I'm in and whispers “it's safe to be here. It's safe to feel.

“Sin” is an important word to deconstruct here, as religious dogma connects it to a transgression against the mighty law of God (translated by humans – namely men in positions of religious authority). Yet, what if sin was reclaimed so that it isn't reflection our own innate lacking nor a evocation of shame and guilt?

 
What if sin is the perception of being removed from our goodness, and forgetting that right here and now without needing to do anything at all are loved beyond comprehension. What if sin is the perception of moving away from God, from love, from our belonging to life?

 
The lamb, with its gentle presence, goes into the places of pain and takes away the sin. Compassionate awareness moves into the parts of us experiencing this forgetting and softens us around the pain until we can include it in the gaze of love.

 
I believe Jesus was not someone who came to be worshipped and to be the savior of humanity by offering us cleansing for the wrong-doings that emanate from an original badness. I believe the story and teachings of Jesus are an invitation to remember the power we all have to forgive ourselves for our forgetting and rest back into the ever-present arms of a benevolent reality bigger than the mind is designed to understand.

 
I believe Jesus is a teacher in the truest sense. Offering us access to the wisdom we all carry and a pathway to clear the lenses of perception in order to ground our reality in the wide open field of the heart.

I believe Jesus invites us to the know and trust the lamb within. 

We are human and we feel. We are human and we suffer. We are human and we feel pain and that pain can infiltrate into our relationships with each other, the planet, and earthen life. And, as we deepen into loving acceptance of this moment and all it contains, we become the messenger of the good news. The lamb that carries with it a reminder of our innate worth, goodness, and our belonging to the benevolent arms of divine mystery that hold us all.

Behold the lamb of God. Behold and be held by your application of kind presence and expansive compassion to the experience of this human ride.