Return to Resurrect

Teshuva and Returning to the Roots

It’s Easter! I mean, it’s Spring! I mean bunnies and eggs, ancient fertility festivals and the season of rebirth. It’s time for the return of color and life to a world of brown and gray. Purple crocuses and yellow daffodils stretch their petals toward the sun. Groggy chipmunks crawl bleary-eyed from their holes. Bright-eyed rabbits poke their floppy ears from their dens, and the birds dust off their wings, singing, “Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!” It’s Resurrection Day!

It seems like everything miraculously comes back to life after winter. But resurrection is a process. Before we can return to life, we have to go through “death.” We have to go to sleep before we can awaken. We have to go in before we go out. Like the plants and trees, we have to go back to our roots to gather our nourishment before we can sprout new leaves.

In Daoism, returning to the root is the primary purpose - and result - of spiritual practice. The root - or the Dao - is the source of all. The Daoists took their spiritual teachings from the observation of nature. They saw that no birth is possible without death, no growth without return to the roots.

In Hebrew, the word for return is teshuvah. It’s one of the most important spiritual capacities we have; it’s our ability to return to Source, to go back to our roots, our inner truth, God, to remember what’s real and see where we’ve gone off course. We gather our resources and start again. Without teshuvah, we cannot grow, we cannot evolve, we cannot become the people we know we are meant to be.

I believe in teshuvah. I believe in return. I believe in rebirth. I believe in resurrection. Not the literal resurrection of the dead, but the capacity to die to our egoic selves, our illusions, and our old way of doing things, and start anew. I believe that if we continue to return to the root, we are resurrected – or can be- at every moment.

My teacher, Lao, used to say that you are always only one decision away from changing your life. He meant that in each moment, we can choose if we are going towards life or away from it. We can decide if we are going towards those qualities to which we aspire, or not. All it takes is one decision at a time. That decision is teshuvah: it’s the choice to return to ourselves and what matters in order to go forward.

I believe we are resurrected — or can be — at every moment.

A few years ago, on Easter morning, I got a desperate call from a friend. Her partner was on a hard-core alcoholic binge, in deep depression over the suicide of his best friend. He had been drinking for weeks and had hit bottom, and she believed that if he didn’t get help today, he might not survive. She called me because she couldn’t convince him to go to rehab, but she thought I could, and I was the only person she knew to call.

So, I jumped in the car and drove two hours south to their home, stopping at Dunkin’ Donuts on the way to pick up a box of coffee and a dozen of the most sugar-coated donuts they had. When I walked into the house, my friend’s partner was sprawled bare-chested on the floor surrounded by empty liquor bottles, his usually perfectly coiffed long hair and beard matted and unkempt. On a good day, he seriously rocked the Jesus-look, but today, he appeared as if he had just been taken off the cross.

“Hey, buddy,” I said. “You having a rough time?”

“Yeah….” He moaned.

“Well, guess what? It’s Easter! You know what that means, right?”

“Bunnies?”

“Nah.” I poured him a cup of coffee, grabbed a glazed doughnut, and handed them to him. “It’s Resurrection Day!”

Long story short, after hours of teary confessions, the whole box of coffee and most of the doughnuts, he realized that dying from alcohol poisoning wasn’t going to resurrect his dead friend, but he could bring himself back to life if he went to rehab. Through the alcoholic haze, he started to remember who he was and who he could be. He remembered his roots and slowly reawakened to himself.

By the end of the night, he was safely ensconced in a residential facility, and I drove home beneath the stars, munching the last of the stale doughnuts. It would be 30-days before I saw him again, but when I did, he was a new man. Today, he is successfully running his own business, sober, and happy in his new life.

I don’t tell that story to profess any magical powers of intervention (I’ll thank the caffeine and sugar from DD for that), but that my friend’s partner made the one choice he needed to make to save his life: he made teshuvah. Through those hours of slurred and rambling confessions, he realized how far off course he was, and that he needed to return to himself, to his roots, to the source of life, in order to be reborn into health and happiness. He remembered himself….and chose life.

Through those hours of slurred and rambling confessions, he realized how far off course he was, and that he needed to return to himself, to his roots, to the source of life, in order to be reborn into health and happiness.

I am going out on a radical limb here, but I suspect that the story of Jesus’ resurrection at Easter is an illustration of teshuvah. Yes, we can tie it to the fertility festivals common in Greece at the time the Bible was written, but Jesus was a Jew (as were his disciples), and they knew the concept of return.

Jesus’ death was his return to God/Source/Truth, his return to the roots of being. His rebirth – resurrection - is because he returned, because he made teshuvah. In Christian doctrine, he took all our sins with him. His teshuvah gave us - and him - new life.

Whether or not you believe in Jesus’ resurrection, it’s an example to all of us: if we are willing to make that one choice, to die to our illusions and our old ways of doing things that aren’t working, and return to our true selves/God/Source of Being-ness, we can be reborn into a new life. In each and every moment, we can choose to reawaken, revive, renew, and restore. It’s just one decision at a time.

Happy Easter!

Happy Resurrection Day!