Eastertide

Is that a word?  It feels like it is.  My whole life I have wanted to wake up on Easter and have a party.  I mean banners, flowers, leaping, clapping, food... just... undignified and serious jubilation.  Like when there were riots on the Southside after Pittsburgh won the Superbowl and the Stanley Cup and the northside when Obama won - which all happened the year we moved to Pittsburgh.  People were running around in circles in the street yelling and cars were honking and strangers were grinning at each other.  

Easter is like news that the boys are coming home from Iraq.  (and the girls).  

Like news that the cancer went into remission.  Like the news that after ten years of negatives, this pregnancy test was positive. 

It doesn't change anything immediately.  Yet.  

If it's true, it changes everything eventually.  

Well maybe the Stanley Cup doesn't change everything.

Apparently CNN posts an article every Easter about the fairytale nature of the "traditional belief" in the Resurrection.  I read it this year and found myself strangely unmoved.  I am usually a little queasy at least when I read those kinds of articles.  I think agnostics have a lot of good points.  I don't disagree with their points, just their conclusion.  I even agree "you can't know" if you're "right."  At least, not in this life.  Not for sure.  There's a lot of guessing and hoping.  

But to me, that still begs the question... which story is the most likely?   Knowing that I have to live, have to choose, have to respond to the testimonies about Christ and what he said and did...and the people who have died to tell his story... I think there is more than enough reason to live on the hope that He did rise and that it matters to my life and to yours.  

So preachy sounding, sorry.  But this is my head this week.  Did it happen, does it matter, what difference has the resurrection made in my life?  In my family?  

So church was like a party... candles welcoming you into the halls, flowers hung in baskets like a Lord of the Rings castle hall, banners and colors and wreaths and songs and bells!  

But then by the time we reached the car, our family was engulfed in an all out episodic brawl about women's rights in church. There was yelling, there was crying.  It was Easter, damnit.  

And so we resolved to respect each other and disagree (at least, I think that's what happened) and life went on, and now I wonder.  I wonder how Christ's initial reversal of death rolls back into history, into time, into our days.  If it's all "not yet" - all about life after death and nothing here now whatsoever, I find that very suspicious.  Sounds like a coping mechanism for a sad life.  Like an excuse to not deal with things now. 

But I believe it's more than that.  I believe Jesus didn't leave us alone (John 14!) and that we are haunted by loveliness because it is real and that the flowers waking up each spring and the leaves unfurling and the earth turning are evidence of the real story.  Not a story about a King of a Religion.  No.  A King of a GARDEN.  A king who started with eden and animals and sex and waterfalls and walked with man.  A king who made lungs and clouds and lizards.  

It sounds like a fairytale.  But honestly, things are just so bad, so wrecked, so sabotaged [WHY do people have affairs? Why do they hurt so badly if ??]   that there isn't really any sensible explanation. They're all missing proof.  There's no such thing.  LIFE is crazy.  The amount of beauty and pain is crazy.  The magic of new life and the rhythm of seasons... these things are crazy.  Jesus rising from the dead?  I can believe that. 

Now to live in the power of that hope of restoration.