It could be very easy to let Easter slide by this year without learning or feeling its meaning. In America we have a war, domestic terror for ourselves, our neighbors or both, rising prices, a crumbling democracy, and diminished international standing. Church, colorful clothing, jelly beans and chocolate easter bunnies might just bounce off the surface. Even for believers the stories of this week that culminate in the mysteries of Easter might seem more like distant events that should mean something if we could just feel it. The world seems just too much a mess to absorb the meaning of Easter.

To this writer though, certain stories from diverse religious traditions are not just stories; they are valence for truth. Many of your religious traditions and stories were created by time itself to offer attention deficit, distraction prone human beings a transformative focus in lost times. Easter can be transformative no matter if you are believer, agnostic, atheist, or non-religious. Truth is out there searching for you. These days of lies and distraction are the real aberration, not Truth. The complete week long Easter narrative presents a universal template, of betrayal, weakness, brutality, knife sharp grief, sadness, complete loss and then, something you didn’t see coming, joy. And joy on the heels of sadness are the driving wheels of this season. But before you can ride this cycle of transformation, you must decide for the goodness of the full range of human experience. 

A Modest Offering for Good

This year people who want a kinder, more honest, less brutal, more welcoming world and nation may have come to Easter finding themselves locked down in anger and loss. I fight that distraction toward the dark side every day as I do the work this project. Richard Rohr talks about sadness and tears in his book The Tears of Things. Simple sadness seems to be orphaned in our culture today. Rohr describes Maasai warriors secreting to “caves of grief ” as part of their initiation journey. The great stories of the great spiritualities of this world offer caves of grief in the form of the powerful narrative stories. But those same stories offer something more profound. Perhaps, in this time of waiting and resistance in America we should let sadness and grief do its work on us as an alternative to seething. The story of Easter is not trapped inside the squares of the calendar’s days. The story of Easter is not even trapped in a particular religious denomination. Easter travels on the wings of a universal truth and is told in a thousand ways across the year and traditions. But every spring is a surprise, so this Project’s wish for you who read this: allow sadness to fulfill its mission and enjoy the joy of your Easter however and whenever it comes to you.