New life

I was feeling the easter vibe yesterday, let me tell you. Not in a savior-rises-from-the-dead kind of way, but in the more universal way - easter, pasqua, rebirth, new life. The universal celebration that humankind has always lifted up at this time of year, when green things burst forth and color blooms and birds build nests. Just as the Christmas season is another incarnation of the primal human urge to pray for, and then celebrate, the return of light after weeks of lengthening darkness, so Easter is another incarnation of the primal celebration of the return of life after a cold, dead winter.

To me, it's comforting in its universality. Supposedly Christians didn't start believing in the literal resurrection of Jesus until a couple centuries after his death, when - out of convenience, or nostalgia, or just the way beliefs evolve - the new religion began to be overlayed onto the old, lining up the major events of Christianity with the old, familiar pagan holidays. That concept freaks some people out, but not me. These holidays have resonance for me because they are so universal, so inescapable, so compelling, no matter how many new religions we humans invent.

I love that to this day, the major popular icons of Easter have nothing to do with Jesus and everything to do with fertility and fecundity: eggs, bunnies, tulips. I also love that inventive Christians managed to embody this compelling concept in a man. Some feminists see that as an indictment of Christianity's misogyny and patriarchy, but I think the Goddess chuckles.

That's not to disrespect Jesus, by any means. Indeed, the universality of the spring fertility rite, in whatever form it may take, is what makes it True, with a capital T. Deep, intuitive, mythological Truth, which is so much greater than truth with a little t - factual, literal, narrow truth. The Truth of the Christian Easter is what makes it powerful, not the literal truth (or lack thereof, depending on your point of view) of the resurrection story.

It is Truth that will, I hope, unite us all some day, helping us to overcome our squabbling over truth.

Happy Easter, everybody. Whatever it means to you.