Beyond the Bunny and Back!

I've been thinking about the observance of religious festivals in a fraught world.  Many of us who have grown up in the West post-WWII have done so in relative peace.  Of course, relative is the important word in that sentence for there has been war and destruction enough, but still, for those of us privileged to inhabit this space and these decades, there has been a sense of "peace." Christmas and Easter are associated, for many of us, with "a peaceful and celebratory feeling."  But what about now?  Perhaps another question follows, "what good is it to celebrate events when inevitably the world slides into chaos?"  More pointedly, "Of what use are these events to human progress if the transformation they point to never seems to arrive?"

There will be time to comment on Christmas later, but Easter is indeed upon us.  Enter the bunny!  As Christianity spread into various locations and impinged upon many different cultures sometimes old religious beliefs were "re-purposed for use" by this new faith.  The English word "Easter" comes from the Germanic goddess Eostre, associated with spring and fertility, whose symbol was the hare or rabbit.  This association was a happy one for the event at the heart of Easter, the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, is one in which the idea of fertility is redefined and reapplied.

Just as Spring issues forth in a riot of life and just as the rabbit never seems to stop reproducing so the Cross/Resurrection never seems to stop issuing new possibilities, new ideas, new movements of social justice and, ultimately, new hope.  And if we remember that for most of the past 2000 years this fecund, fertile understanding of Easter has been celebrated not just when things "feel safe," "peaceful" or particularly "celebratory," but, mostly, in the midst of turmoil, war and dislocation, we're getting closer to how the Cross, that is the death of God's Son, somehow keeps sowing the seeds of new life, the Resurrection.  This because God is marvelously and mysteriously involved in it all.  

So if you feel the world is in turmoil, if you feel yourself caught up in anxiety and fear, or just confused, here's an invite: Live the rhythms of Holy Week (click here for schedule).  It is in rehearsing the unspooling of the events that lead to this great revivification project that we learn to live its rhythms personally.  I am confident that doing so will fill you with wonder, awe, and new hope.  I speak only for myself, of course, but it has so for me; and now on the cusp of another Holy Week, I can say I'm looking forward, once again, to immersing myself in a reality far more persuasive than anything I'll discover by scrolling the headlines!

So of course, the deeper meaning of Easter goes far beyond the Bunny, but then, strangely, it circles back to the symbol of new and seemingly endless new births.

Photo by Ana Achim on Unsplash (bunny & eggs) 

Photo by Mark Vihtelic on Unsplash (chicks)