It’s Easter–what does this weekend mean to you?

Easter weekend crept up on me this year. But now that it’s here, I just wanted to ask all of you what it means to you, and share a bit about what it means to me.

Once I became a (sort of) committed Christian in my teens, I discovered a had a great amount of feeling around the crucifixion. I used to listen to the album (you know, the vinyl kind) Jesus Christ Superstar. At the end, after a great deal of struggle and drama, Jesus agonizingly gives in to God’s will in the garden of Gethsemane and goes willingly to his death. He breathes his last and then there is…nothing. The final piece is just a musical remembrance of the song in which he surrendered to God’s fatal will, and the title is something like “John 19:42,” which reads “And in the place where  he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, where no one had ever been laid.” I would heave huge sobs at the end. It seemed so tragic. All his struggle to heal people, accomplish his mission, and do God’s will, and then nothing.

As I got into metaphysical beliefs (centered on Edgar Cayce’s readings), I realized I felt a tremendous sense of connection with the Jesus story. I had the sense that I was back there, maybe as someone at the edges. I felt that I may have been an Essene, a member of the community that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls. I had a psychic reading from a Cayce-like psychic that said I was, that I had some interactions with him, and that I was present at the crucifixion. Another psychic (who not long ago appeared on Oprah, thus legitimizing everything he ever said) spontaneously told me his sudden impression, while we met over dinner, that I had carried on Jesus’ teaching after his death and had been deeply distressed at what the churches were growing into. I have no actual reason for believing that any of this is true. I wish I did. But it does mirror feelings that are very deep within me, and have literally driven my life.

I used to watch the movie Ben Hur and in the scenes in which Jesus appeared, I almost felt that I was back there. I felt this almost physical hunger to touch that time, to be sitting there, physically there, feeling the ground beneath me, breathing the air, seeing him, listening to him.

That hunger drove me to read contemporary Jesus scholarship and to read about the Shroud of Turin, both of which have been major involvements for me.

In the meantime, the Course changed it all. I stopped seeing the crucifixion as somehow significant in itself, as just a physical ordeal that Jesus underwent. The emotion I had felt around it slowly drained away. I think I need to construct a new appreciation of the crucifixion, one with more personal meaning. This has to take into account the incredible brutality of it. The violence of it has become so mythic and iconic that it’s easy to lose sight of the raw physical brutality of it. To attribute something wonderful to him just passing through that kind of unchecked violence is, I think, a little sick. That’s why I can’t watch that Mel Gibson movie, The Passion. That way of looking at it really strikes some of the most primitive chords in our nature, I believe.

I think what I need is to get in touch with the real beauty of how the Course sees the crucifixion. There is something sublime and transcendent about facing the absolute worst this world can dish out (and Roman crucifixion was that) with absolute peace, defenselessness, and forgiveness—because it doesn’t matter. If only I could face the tiny appetizers the world dishes up for me in a similar spirit! I intellectually relate to this new view of the crucifixion. But when Good Friday rolls around, I don’t connect with it emotionally. I want to start doing that.

That is what has happened around Easter, though. Easter has become my favorite day of the year. I really do believe that Jesus was resurrected. I think it was an event that happened in actual history. I really think there was an empty tomb. I think the fact of this empty tomb was such a powerful event for those few who saw it that its shockwaves changed the world. I consider myself a rational person who is responsive to evidence. And the idea of a corpse vanishing into thin air is an extremely mind-stretching event, one that sounds more like fairy-tale than fact. Yet I have gathered what I think are solid reasons for believing it really happened.

And over time, my mind has really united with the Course’s interpretation of it, on an emotional level. Before, Easter really meant nothing to me. Now it means everything. In trying to capture the feeling I have around Easter, I guess the best I can come up with is this:

There was a light that Jesus stood for, the light of selfless goodness, the light of a purely loving God, the light of our highest sensibilities and noblest impulses, the light of a life so pure, so sublime, that it couldn’t last long on this earth. This light seemed like the light I sometimes see on the rocks here at sunset on a cloudy day—pure, white, beautiful, but also weak and impotent. As that light hit this world, what could happen but that it would shine briefly, beautifully, and then be destroyed? For we all know what the real power is. The real power is the rude machine of this world, which goes its way regardless of whatever tiny pure candles may be lit. If need be, it will simply run over them, without even slowing down. In the end, we all can see, and one day are forced to acknowledge, that that is where the real power lies.

Easter says No. You’ve got it all wrong. That pure light that seemed so weak—it is the real power. When the machine of the world ran over it, it was absolutely unharmed. It reappeared fully intact, even more whole and transcendent than before. And now it exerts the power. It shines so brightly, on that Sunday morning, that the machine of the world will never be the same. For whereas this light could never be undone, the machine of the world is not so invulnerable. In the end, this light will have the final say, and the only say.

Thank God. Thank God.

That is what Easter brings up for me, the possibility that my highest, purest, most sublime sensibilities do not represent a pipe dream, but rather point to the only real power in the universe. The Course tells us to take Easter as the definitive demonstration of what reality is really about. That is what I try to do on Easter, to remember that his resurrection really happened, and that it was the key laboratory demonstration that for all time revealed the nature of reality. In modern science, certain key experiments have reshaped our whole picture of things. After them, we can never look at things the same again. I see the resurrection as the definitive example of that.

I tried to capture my sense of the meaning of Easter in something I wrote a few years back. I called it “The Man Who Trusted God:

Jesus’ Final Parable”

There was a man who trusted God. He taught people that they could live lives free of care, because God was always smiling on them. They need not enslave themselves to their society’s system, for the sake of its fickle and superficial rewards. They could simply rest on God’s care, knowing that even if the system offered them poverty, exclusion, and degradation, God offered them life.

Quite naturally, those in charge of the system wanted this man silenced. So they brought soldiers to kill him. When the soldiers struck him on the right cheek, he offered them the other. When they took both his coat and his shirt, he gave them gladly. When they forced him to carry a heavy burden, he did so willingly. He was not anxious about his life, for he trusted that God would care for him as God cared for the birds of the sky and the lilies of the field. So when they asked for his life, he didn’t try to hang onto it. He freely gave it. He did exactly what he had taught people to do.

Meanwhile, the people turned against him. His followers fled and wept. The authorities finished the job. His voice was silenced, his promising ministry cut short. It was hard not to believe what many were saying, that God had cursed him. In the end, this inspired preacher turned out to be a beautiful loser.

Or so it seemed, for this was not the end. It was soon discovered that his tomb was empty. His followers began having experiences of him, in which he was lit with joy and completely unharmed. From out of thin air he would appear, and explain to them that everything he taught them was true, that God is life and only life.

Nowadays, it is this bright view of Easter, rather than my former view of the tragedy of Good Friday, that makes me weep. Could it be, could it really be, that everything he taught us is true, that God is life and only life?