Happy Easter

A Happy Easter to all!
As in Christmas, all of us no matter what we believe or don't believe are a target for consuming things. So we get bombarded with the facades of a holiday that really only exists because of a miraculous event in the armpit of a defacto colony in the greatest and most durable empire of Power the West had ever seen. Power had put a youngish rabbi to an awful death. Stuff like that happened a lot. Romans killed people by the gross that way. And if you wanted a slice of that great and tangible entity, Power, you played up to the Latins and went along. If you were a common farmer or tradesman, you went along not becasue you wanted a slice of Power, but because you were afraid.

It was rational and sensible to be afraid, not that we as humans are always so rational and sensible. Sometimes stress makes us act so differently we barely recognize ourselves. Sometimes that sense that comes over us and changes things inside ourselves is more subtle, creeping up on us not like that nauseating rush we get from Fear, more friendly but just as persistent, like a house cat we just forgot to feed; it's a strong inclination that "there are greater things between heaven and earth then are drempt of in your philosophy" as Shakespeare said.

This was just one event, in a conquered capital in a place those powerful people from across the seas called Palestine. Three ordinary and disenfranchised and marginal women going to a tomb near dawn to do a funeral ritual. And then they got the surprise of their lives as the Gospels relate. They were afraid but this news conquered fear. They had to tell their friends, those 12 frightened men, this "impossible" good news.

Not all who heard believed it back then, nor now. Even Thomas, a guy who had seen Jesus do his stuff all over their homeland, wouldn't buy it until he got a personal demonstration Ron Popeil himself couldn't have pulled off. To believe in the event and what it means for us now is a matter of faith. To debate faith is an exercise in either futility or to provoke anger--and futility and anger are not meant to be part of the Easter experience as I read it.

But how unique a religion is Christianity! You gotta admit that. Not in all its teachings, but in a Way and Truth and Hope for Humankind that no one could have predicted until three
women came to a tomb at dawn and found a chamber in a rocky grave site--it was free of death, as the Gospels say. The women were afraid of course (and rightly so!) but they conquered that feeling just enough to run and tell their friends, the twelve men who had given up hope. They were hiding somewhere else near-by, afraid enough already.

But for them, after that event, fear was no longer such a big deal anymore. I'll bet it felt similar to how hundreds of thousands of Germans felt on that day in 1989 in East Berlin when that all-mighty and deadly Berlin Wall was suddenly not a wall anymore but just something their friends and neighbors were standing on and shouting and singing from. They probably couldn't believe the wall was a useless prop at first, an end to thirty years of fear, and then they did believe. Power does lose in the long run after all and Fear has to take the first thing smoking out of town!

Easter is an event that changed just a few lives that first Sunday morning after a Passover in a small corner of a great empire. It became the Foundation of a Faith that has endured past all the empires that have risen and fallen ever since!

And from such common people came a message that proves that Love can
conquer all, even if Power and its cousin, Fear, would prefer otherwise.


my best to all of you,


doug

(above, Easter Service today in Melbourne, Australia. From "The Age" news network. )