The Easter Season

Easter is my favorite holiday in the Christian year. For me, it is one of the most accesible and relevant celebrations; I see it in the new flowers of spring, in the buds on the trees, in the expressions of joyful expectancy on my children's faces as they search for hidden eggs.

Describing it, however, is another matter. "Well," I tell my four year-old. "After Jesus died, he rose from the dead...."

It's just this line that finds many spiritual people not wanting to be religious--and not just from confusion! Allow me to offer one interesting interpretation of the Easter message.

Yesterday, my husband made bread. He woke early and kneaded the dough for ten minutes. We left the house for a few hours for church and he placed the dough in warm (but not on) oven, to rise. When we returned home, he went to check on the dough while I played outside with the children.

"Kids!" he cried happily from the kitchen. "Come see this! The dough has risen!"

Well, it had risen indeed. The enormous bowl was bulging with a massive round of dough, twice the size it had been when he placed it there a few hours before. Whereas the initial bit of dough could have fed ten people, this dough could feed thirty. The effects of the dough rising were expansive, abundant, evident, and exciting.

What is this thing that rises from the dead, not merely a person from a story that some of us do not believe in, and others of us do not understand, but the spirit of that dough overflowing?

For me, it is love. Love rises. You may begin with a small handful and come to find that with care it has grown to many times its size. This is the message of Easter, the gift of the Easter season, and to me also, the heart of the Christian path. Love cannot be killed; it cannot be kept in a tomb or a grave or locked down. It does not diminsh itself or anything around it. If kindness can feed ten people, Love can feed a hundred. It is the principle of abundance, a law of multiplication that ensures Love always wins, always prospers, always rises up. How wonderful when we get a chance to be amazed by it, as my children were yesterday, looking into the bowl to see the truth of our lives present before us: love grows. It grows because it is love and it simply cannot do anything else! --Rev. Sam Wilde