Easter Challenge
(Joyce Rupp)

Every year it happens:
earth shakes her sleepy head,
still a bit wintered and dull,
and feels new life stirring.

Every year cocoons give up their treasures,
fresh shoots push through brown leaves,
seemingly dead branches shine with green,
and singing birds find their way home.

Every year we hear the stories:
empty tomb, surprised grievers,
runners with news and revelation,
unexpected encounters,
conversations on the road,
tales of nets filling with fish,
and breakfast on a seashore.

And every year
the dull and dead in us
meets our Easter challenge:
to be open to the unexpected,
to believe beyond our security,
to welcome God in every form,
and trust in our own greening.

Death and Resurrection: Supernovas
(Judy Cannato — Radical Amazement)

But God raised him up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power. (Acts 2:24)

The supernova is a multivalent event: simultaneously a profound destruction and yet an exuberant creativity, (Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme)

Jesus Christ in his life and death, in his gracefilled human reality, has become a power shaping the whole cosmos. (Denis Edwards)

Death is not the opposite of life. Life has no opposite. (Eckhart Tolle)


Death is woven into the fabric of the universe, an integral part of the Mystery of life itself. When we step back and view the big picture, we know that death and life are inseparable. Both are linked to the creativity and release of Spirit that moves life along. What is not inevitable is being ruled by fear. The experience of fear will surely come, but it does not have to rule us, does not have to control our response or drain our power. When we embrace our freedom and live in a contemplative way that expands our consciousness, we can respond to fear in a way that allows us, like Jesus, to engage all our deaths and dyings in a way that is radicallv amazing. In cverv moment of death there is a release of the Spirit, and in every movement of Spirit there is resurrcction and life.

Life and death are a single mystery. That is what the Paschal Mystery teaches us. Death is inevitable-but so is resurrection. We can be sure that dyings will intrude upon our lives, and we may have some choice about how we can respond to their coming. We can be awake and watchful for the resurrections as well, for the creative ways that new life streams into our lives even in the midst of death. Like supernova explosions th.it shatter every recognizable fragment of life, we are capable of transcendence, capable of never allowing death to have the final say.

Did it Really Happen
The Wisdom Jesus—Cynthia Bourgeault

What do we make of these final chapters in the great resurrection drama? There are many sceptics who say that resurrection is a myth, that Jesus never rose. I myself believe that he did, and I stand my ground with Christian tradition when I affirm that his resurrection does indeed make a profound difference to how we live our lives here and now. I am not saying this out of blind adherence to any creedal statements, but out of my own inner work. In this work I have been helped immeasurably by spiritual teachers from other traditions who maintain that taking up one's body after death is by no means that unusual a spiritual feat. When a certain level of spiritual luminosity has been attained (which Jesus certainly manifested) it's not in fact all that difficult to regenerate physical form. And in fact, this is exactly what Jesus himself seems to be talking about in logion 22 in the Gospel of Thomas:

When you are able to fashion an eye to replace an eye,
and form a hand in place of a hand, or a foot for a foot,
making one image supersede another -then you will enter in.

Once your temporal being (the "image" in the language of the Gospel of Thomas) has become profoundly fused with its causal archetype (its "icon," according to Thomas) so that there is no longer any gap or dissonance between them (in other words, according to this logion, "when you are able to make two become one"), then the temporal form can be put down or picked up again at one's conscious volition-though always for good reason, for spiritual servanthood and not for personal glory. A whole stream of spiritual teaching testifies that not only Jesus but many others have done this, and that in and of itself it merely confirms a very advanced spiritual being, not necessarily a cosmic singularity. The question of whether Jesus uniquely rose from the dead, or whether that makes him uniquely the Son of God, is probably not the right question to be asking.

The real point is this: what Jesus does so profoundly demonstrate to us in his passage from death to life is that the walls between the realms are paper thin. Along the entire ray of creation, the "mansions" are interpenetrating and mutually permeable by love. The death of our physical form is not the death of our individual personhood. Our personhood remains alive and well, "hidden with Christ in God" (to use Paul's beautiful phrase in Colossians 3:3) and here and now we can draw strength from it (and him) to live our temporal lives with all the fullness of eternity. If we can simply keep our hearts wrapped around this core point, the rest of the Christian path begins to fall into place.

The real point is this: what Jesus does so profoundly demonstrate to us in his passage from death to life is that the walls between the realms are paper thin. Along the entire ray of creation, the "mansions" are interpenetrating and mutually permeable by love.

The death of our physical form is not the death of our individual personhood. Our personhood remains alive and well, "hidden with Christ in God" (to use Paul's beautiful phrase in Colossians 3:3) and here and now we can draw strength from it (and him) to live our temporal lives with all the fullness of eternity. If we can simply keep our hearts wrapped around this core point, the rest of the Christian path begins to fall into place.

Locked Doors
(Author Unknown)

I don't know if you're into symbolism, but try this for size: locked doors that mean nothing to the resurrected Jesus. Signifying security to the disciples, they are of no hindrance whatsoever to the power of Jesus' resurrection entering that sealed room or to that same power going out. John doesn't describe Jesus as walking through the doors. No Hollywood special effects here. He states simply that Jesus 'came and stood among them'. Such simplicity conveys clearly just how insignificant locked doors are.

So how about our locked doors? God's word is telling us that God's power can be with us even though we are locked into ourselves. We don't have to open them first for God to enter! Just think of that and what it implies! We can burden ourselves with all sorts of baggage on our journey through life. We can lock out people and events from our mind and heart to preserve our sanity or our comfort. We can circle the wagons and live in fear of life's threats and dangers. We can run from life and its challenges.

Our locked doors can be all sorts of things: prejudices, fears, neuroses, me-féin-ism, anger, whatever. Now this is the important bit of the symbolism. We don't have to unlock those doors for God to come and stand with us. In fact, we wouldn't be able to. Mission doesn't demand perfection. The disciples got their mission behind locked doors. So do we: to proclaim that God stands among us.

Easter : New Beginnings
(Michael Morwood)

In nature we see superb aspects of transformation: in supernovas
exploding and in their dying giving birth to new possibilities; in the sun giving of itself that we might have life; in seeds "dying" to produce new life. We know that several times in the history of this planet most species then existing were extinguished. There have been death, destruction, apparent annihilation, and then "resurrection" producing abundant life. Life is somehow stronger than death. Life finds a way.

Human death is the greatest mystery we face. As Christians, we look to the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus to throw light on the mystery for us. Death for Jesus was, as it will be for us, a dying into God: a transformation into a way of existence for which we have no images and no clear ideas of how it may happen. Our understanding of Jesus' resurrection must be freed from the dualistic images in which Scripture and traditional Christian teaching have presented it. God does not reside somewhere else, in a place called "heaven" that is above us somewhere. In fact there is no up or down any more when we consider our planet's place in the universe. Death for us will not be a journey to some other place where God is located: there will not be judgement as to whether we "get into" an elsewhere place.

We proclaim and celebrate Easter because it links Jesus with all life, with transformation and with possibility of life beyond our imagining. Easter offers meaning and hope to all people. We give thanks that Jesus so clearly and courageously linked our living and our dying with living on in God. We rejoice that Jesus lives on, as we all will, in the reality we call God.

Easter’s Clean Taste
(Thomas Merton)

The grace of Easter is a great silence, an immense tranquillity and a clean taste in your soul. It is the taste of heaven, but not the heaven of some wild exaltation. The easter vision is not riot and drunkeness of spirit, but a discovery of order above all order—a discovery of God and all things in Him. This is a wine without intoxication, a joy that has no poison in it. It is life without death. Tasting it for a moment, we are briefly able to see and love all things according to their truth, to
possess them in their substance hidden in God beyond all sense. For desire clings to the vesture and accident of things, but charity possesses them in the simple depths of God.

If Mass could only be, every morning, what it is on Easter morning! If the prayers could always be so clear, if the Risen Christ would always shine in my heart and all around me and before me in His Easter simplicity! For His simplicity is our feast. This is the unleavened bread which is manna and the bread of heaven, this easter cleanness, this freedom, this sincerity. Give us always this bread of heaven. Slake us always with this water that we might not thirst for ever!

This is the life that pours down into us from the Risen Christ, this is the breath of His Spirit, and this is the love that quickens His Mystical Body.

Resurrection
(Willigis Jäger)

What would happen if the thesis now argued hy sonic writers were proved to be true: "Jesus didn't really die on the cross; he wen! to India. In fact his grave was found there." What would happen if we could prove historically that Jesus' bones had been recovered? Would Christianity then be just a bad joke?

Easter was an event that took place in the disciples. Resurrection is not a word for an experience that can be integrated into the categories of time and space.Anyone who removes the Resurrection from the level of symbolism and forces it into the historical domain has misunderstood the message. The message of Easter is attested to by men and women who experienced Jesus as the survivor, as the deathless One. The empty tomb, the angel, the journey to Emmuus, are expressions of this inner experience. The Greek word ophthe (reveal) in 1 Corinthiuns 15:5 suggests that Jesus wasn't simply seen by his disciples. He was revealed or anounccd to them. Hence it was not a meeting with a physical interlocutor, even though the gospels describe it that way: Thomas laid his hand in Jesus'side, Jesus ate with them, and so on. Rather, it was an inner experience. "Then their eyes were opened." So we aren't talkillg aboutmagical, parapsychic, miraculous experiences, but inner certainty. Resurrection is the disciples' experience that this life isn’t everything, that, just as Jesus entered a new existence, they, too, would enter a new existence. Life can’t die. It will go on.

In the Upanishads we find the saying, "In rebirth it is only the Lord who is born again and again." That is, our superficial ego doesn't enter the new existence. In that existence this life of God emerges once more in a form, hut it doesn't have to be the form that we have now. We are so tensed up in our ego that we think we have to save it forever. But our identity isn't wedded to this ego. We overstress it. Our true identity lies much deeper. We can't comprehend that it's the divine life itself, regardless in what form we rise again. Basically we aren't giving God, this divine life, a chance. We are constantly trying to stem its flow and keep it in check.

These inner experiences are what the accounts of Jesus' appearances aim to exress. Paul meets the risen Christ as a persecutor and through his experience becomes a different person. At the same time the risen I Christ identifies himself with humans: "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” In the resurrection of Jesus the disciples experientially crossed the frontier between death and life. The point is to experience this eternal life, rcgardless of the form we may emerge in after death. Once we move beyond thc circumscribed limits of our ego-consciousness, we enter an experiential space to which many names have been given. These names all designate the same thing, namely that there is no death; dying is only the great transformation into a new existence. It's hard to understand why people always want to rcappear after their deaths only in their current form. And yet I don't know anyone who would really like to live forever ill his or her ego.

If the bones of Jesus were to he found today and it could be proven that he had rotted in his grave, my faith in Jesus would not change in the least. The experience of the Resurrection has nothing to do with Jesus' bones. It is an experience that we can have: that our deepest essence is divine and hence cannot die. The statement is clear: our life does not end with death. We enter into a new existence. And that existence — we hope — is a more comprehensive experience of God than our existence here and now can afford. Which is what we celebrate. We celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus, and we celebrate our own death and our own resurrection in this mysterious banquet. We clebrate what we are in the profoundest sense: the risen ones, even though it has not yet become apparent.

Christ is Risen
(Author Unknown)

Suddenly
grief is interrupted and
sorrow suspended.
The gaping grave
gives hearts
hope.

Daylight
drives the darkness
into deserved oblivion.
Life is reinvigorated and
we are exhilarated.

Joy abounds,
Jesus lives.
He is risen.
He is not here.

Alleluia! His rising,
wherever we go,
whatever we are doing.

Let us too proclaim this great story,
to every human being we ever meet.

And not just with our mouths,
which talk too much anyway.
Let us use our hands and move our feet.
Let us make bells in towers ring,
Climb to the rooftops to shout it to all!

Christ is risen!
Christ is risen!

Death, you have no sting.
Love lives!

Christ is risen!
Christ is risen!
Amen !
Alleluia !