Crucified and Risen: A Theory of Christian Reincarnation

I’ve been speaking for weeks about “purgatorial predicament” as if it were the equivalent of the Hindu concept of the Karmic Predicament.  I haven’t adequately explained what the purgatorial predicament is.  The purgatorial predicament is a “cross” we make light when we live our vocations to the fullest, and heavy when we sin.  In short, if we were to put both the eternal and immanent aspects of heaven and hell in a blender with the afterlife’s state of purgatory, if we press puree we might get a frozen concoction that helps us grasp its meaning. In any particular incarnation, the biblical laws about “reaping what we sow” and “sin being passed down to the 3rd and 4th generation” are the “purgatorial laws” that by which our state inches blessedly closer to heaven, or unfortunately close to hell. 

After Christ, some said, there would be no more prophets, no further revelations.  If it’s a fight, I don’t have a dog in it. It just seems a bit silly to claim that the fullness of time was an ending.  This post aims to explore the implications of believing that, because of Christ, the fullness of time was the tipping of chronological time into kairos time, an internalization of “now” until it becomes “fullness of being.”  God mercifully prepared the "fullness of Time" over multiple epochs, and it seems silly at best--and at worse, a limitation of God's mercy--to think that he wouldn't prepare "the fullness of being" over similarly-multiple lifetimes.  The paradigm for the fullness of being is Christ, and we’ll need to account for the rebirth of his body both in the Church (The Body of Christ) and in each believer (as an other-christ.)  The use of the word “rebirth” is purposeful: by the conclusion of this post, I hope to have laid the groundwork for a Christian concept of Reincarnation.

Even for those who wish otherwise, the bible contains no proof.  Those who misunderstand this often quote John 3:7 "You must be born again."  That translation choice is guided by protestant assumptions, in which "being born again" means something closer to "hitting rock bottom and surrendering."  A Catholic Translation of John 3:7 says "You must be born from above."  To those who feel I should attempt to prove my claims using Jesus words, I say: "Proof is not my circus. Jesus' words are not my monkeys."  (If I have a monkey, his name is Hanuman.  There, I said it.)

Instead of trying to mine what Jesus meant, let me be clear about what I mean: Lack of openness to reincarnation is a limiting of God's mercy.  Whether we're "reborn" or "born from above:" if God used human history to "reeducate" humanity in obedience, and if education fundamentally involves failure, then through reincarnation God may be giving us "multiple tries" at getting it right.  For the purposes of this post, I think "getting it right" is total self-emptying, and that Jesus' various appearances are "reincarnations." Through multiple existences, all Christians ride his coattails, progressively shedding false selves that drive them to a "success" that's full of selfishness.

First, let’s pencil sketch the fullness of time.  Humanity represented its beginnings in the myths of the primeval history.  In Genesis, this is chapter 1-11, beginning with creation and ending with the tower of Babel and the descendants of Noah.  They represented Judaism’s beginnings with the Patriarchs, Genesis 12-50.  They represented God’s manifestation of “Chosenness” through the Exodus, and the Law through Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Numbers. After the death of Moses’ Assistant Joshua, when Israel was ready, it transitioned from a strictly tribal form of governance to one of ruling Judges.  The Judges, sent when providence demanded, were replaced by the more permanent Kingship model. Samuel the priest anointed Saul.  He ruled until he fell out of God’s favor, then David and Solomon ushered in what’s commonly known in Israel as a golden age of unity.  Under Solomon’s son Rehoboam, the Jews split into the Northern and Southern kingdoms.  Lacking stable kings, and with many of their priests serving idols, the kingdoms called out to God and he sent the prophets, who counseled them to repent.  The prophetic hope was to either avoid, deal well with, or be liberated from exile.  “When the fullness of time had come, Mary gave birth to a son, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them at the inn.”  After Jesus taught, his followers gave him the title “priest prophet and King,” investing him with the most complete authority in Israel.  

I don’t want to quibble over semantics or get too heady.  The fullness of time becomes fullness of being, and it seems to me that Jesus has had 4 historical “reincarnations.”  The first was his earthly life.  The second, his appearances as a stranger.  The third is his appearance in each person, of whom Paul said their “true self [was] hidden with Christ in God.” In the 4th, Jesus is reincarnated in his body, the church.  So, quite literally, Jesus is dharmakaya, “the body of the teaching.”  Christ’s incarnations are not 4, they’re one.  By being present in each of us, and in everyone throughout the ages, he’s had innumerably more.

Christ is reborn throughout history, and in Christ, so might we be reborn.  As the fullness of being approaches completion, the believer sheds his ego and the eight evil thoughts that work together to produce it. Our life is like a dandelion flower that a man keeps with him as he drives.  He speeds toward his death, and the Spirit blows where it wills.  If he guards the dandelion flower, his ego remains the same and his life, hidden with God in Christ, remains undiscovered.  But if the bloke holds the dandelion flower out the window, so that the energies of his sins can be transmuted into virtues, the “inner Christ” to which they clung can be laid bare.  Perhaps this is what Jesus meant when he said "Because I live, you also will live."

Jesus lived poor, taught the poor, worked miracles that the poor rejoiced over, then suffered and died.  He rose, and appeared to his disciples, first under the guise of a stranger who re-interpreted the scriptures to them.  Then he began to do things like break bread with them and address them by name, and they recognized their teacher.  As I’ve said elsewhere, he was training them to part with their paradigm of how he’d looked during his earthly life—so that they could see him in everyone, everywhere.  After sending his Apostles out to baptize the nations, Jesus ascended to the Father, to appear no more in particular bodily form.  

In the post resurrection appearances, Christ certainly became a stranger to part us from our preconceived notions about his physical form.  Additionally, though, he became a stranger to us because he knew we were, in truth, strangers to ourselves.  He became what we had yet to realize we were, so we could find him in finding ourselves.  This is Christian reincarnation: just as Christ passed into and out of human forms so that we could shed misconceptions about him, so we pass into and out of human forms so we can recognize him in ourselves.  

There’s a reason for this: we have a false self, a True Self (mahatman), and a divinized self.  We will shed the first two as we progress toward the third, and in the third we will be so united to God that distinguishing between divine and human will be impossible.  Jesus “moved through successive incarnations” in his earthly and post-resurrected life so as to show us that he himself is what we are, what we were, what we will be.

Each particular incarnation is bound by 5 laws: Gospel and Vocation, Vice and Virtue, and Prayer.  The first two vary based on how God made us, the third and fourth vary based on our attachments, and the fifth varies based on how quickly grace enables us to slip the trap of spiritualizing ego and desire.

For years, the church has been arguing the need for enculturation in evangelization.  Not only not only does each culture need the Gospel tailored to them, each individual too. There are tasks proper to each vocation, all of which have the capacity to enlighten.  The trap modern culture falls into is one of Ego and desire.  We ask our kids what they want to be when they grow up, we tell them they can be whatever they’re intent on being, forgetting that identity and desire are shitty jobs we should have never accepted in the first place. 

Only from the perspective of ego are Vice and Virtue things we collect, heavenly betty crocker points with which an eternally new toaster will one day be ours.  On the level of True Self, they’re purgatorial laws, and on the level of Divinized self, since we become totally part of God, they’re unimportant.

Prayer follows a pattern like that laid out in previous posts.  Just as there are “stages of dealing with the passions,”  there are “stages of prayer.”  These aren’t a method (because all methods are traps,) they’re descriptors of a process in which each part builds on another, but aren’t linear.  The stages are Distraction, Verbal Prayer, Meditation, Sensation, and Contemplation.  Distraction’s a state of racing thoughts.  Verbal prayer is a matter of words, offered in varying unity with emotion and divine intention.  Meditation’s the stuff of mental images.  This is the level on which the great saints’ storied revelations took place.  Sensation is the next level.  If the body has stored pain, it emerges as a sensation.  The “consolations” of which saints speak—which in Hinduism is Kundalini energy—manifests here too, and can make prayer sweet indeed.  Though ego itself might be something to which the haphazard practitioner becomes attached, Kundalini energy, in another dangerous little trap, can become addicting.  Should it become more difficult to raise, learning to live and pray without it can be quite difficult.  

But that very difficulty is a chance to see our attachment to spiritual things for the delusion that it is.

I said I don’t have a dog in theological fights.  I’m writing about this not because I myself have experienced it. Rather, Catholics I trust have remembered their past lives.  An old monk I lived with had been a civil war re-enactor in pre-monastery days.  This was more than a hobby.  It was important to him, in part, because charging the field, he remembered having done so in a past life.   The Church’s theology, if it’s to describe its members’ experience, may need to become at least unopposed to a language that can accommodate the whole of it.  I believe past lives to be a real possibility, if a person requires them to negotiate their purgatorial predicament.  I have not yet experienced memories of my own past lives, if such there be. I suppose I will find out whether I’m right when I’m reborn as a moth, who lives near a lantern and has memories of writing a quite verbose blog, back when he had fingers.

Christian Reincarnation, in which I may be reborn until everything false in me yields to Christ, is not an account of extraordinary holiness.  True, there are “realized beings” whose incarnations are a way God made his influence obvious: they’re near the end, and for them, purgatory needs no heavenly elements.  They’re the ones of whom Jesus said “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”  The rest of us jerks are left, now, to work out our purgatory on earth in a gradual way.  We hunker down in sin, or are freed from it, in the way grace and our cooperation with it enables.  We work with the tools the church gives, we make a heaven or a hell of earth as our conduct and inner dispositions dictate.  If we return to the earth for another incarnation—and of this truth, I may never have direct experience—then we continue that process through myriad earthly lives. 

From age to age, our cup runneth over.  It wells up within us again and again: Creation to Abraham, Moses and David.  From Daniel, Isaiah and Christ.  The spring wells within us: the Lord is reborn.  From life to life, when we stand face to face, we will think as he thinks. See, for every last one of us, life’s letting go. We find Heaven in kneeling to drink.