Today is Easter, the holiest feast day in the Christian calendar. It's also the most confusing celebration to me. The whole resurrection thing has always baffled me, even when I was a nun-aspiring Catholic teen (okay, okay...truth be told, that period lasted, like, a few months; and the prospect was always made more enticing by fantasies of forbidden love involving a priest, but I digress...)
Anyway, I truly do not understand the sacrifice, resurrection, atoning-for-my-original-sin thing. So I'm a Christian Agnostic who, if less lazy, might pursue Buddhism more deeply (I think I just described Unitarians). But, I do feel very strongly that, in the wise words of a character in David Sedaris's Me Talk Pretty One Day, "He nice, the Jesus."
On FB, a friend posted this lovely hymn written by a certain John M. C. Crum. It captures something all my logical inquiry cannot:
Now the Green Blade Rises
Now the green blade rises from the buried grain,
Wheat that in the dark earth many years has lain;
Love lives again, that with the dead has been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springs up green.
In the grave they laid Him, Love Whom we had slain,
Thinking that He’d never wake to life again,
Laid in the earth like grain that sleeps unseen:
Love is come again, like wheat that springs up green.
Up He sprang at Easter, like the risen grain,
He that for three days in the grave had lain;
Up from the dead my risen Lord is seen:
Love is come again, like wheat that springs up green.
When our hearts are saddened, grieving or in pain,
By Your touch You call us back to life again;
Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springs up green.
Wheat that in the dark earth many years has lain;
Love lives again, that with the dead has been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springs up green.
In the grave they laid Him, Love Whom we had slain,
Thinking that He’d never wake to life again,
Laid in the earth like grain that sleeps unseen:
Love is come again, like wheat that springs up green.
Up He sprang at Easter, like the risen grain,
He that for three days in the grave had lain;
Up from the dead my risen Lord is seen:
Love is come again, like wheat that springs up green.
When our hearts are saddened, grieving or in pain,
By Your touch You call us back to life again;
Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springs up green.
