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Dear Folks:
One of my favorite Easter season hymns is “In the Bulb There is a Flower” by Natalie Sleeth (The New Century Hymnal, #433). I love the metaphors for resurrection: bulbs bursting into flower, apple seeds soar into trees, caterpillars become butterflies, “unrevealed until its season, something God alone can see.”
Another metaphor for the resurrection that I have been living with is Easter as e=mc 2 . Edward Hayes 1writes in “A Psalm of E=MC 2 ”,
Brother Einstein’s Easter Law
delights my hopeful heart
which wishes never to die.
Further down is this,
…you who are Life could not stand to see
your beloved’s body decay,
so you carried out once again
your first and awesome act of creation.
You reanimated the matter of his body
and moved its molecules
at more than the speed of light,
and it was again transformed
into the Light of Lights,
into pure eternal energy.
There is a tangible change in the resurrection, like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. The process that occurs in the caterpillar’s chrysalis -- dissolving the body of the caterpillar into a goopy slop and then rearranging the molecules into a resurrected butterfly-- encapsulates a profound change from a squirmy little worm-like thing to a flying insect. I don’t know the exact biochemical mechanism, but the result is a major transformation. Likewise, the metaphor of the shift from mass to energy, Brother Einstein’s Law of the relative nature of matter and energy, describes a radical shift from body (mass) to spirit (energy), losing nothing but retaining life in a different form.
On Easter, we sing joyful hallelujahs and read the gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection. When the stone is rolled away from the tomb, Jesus’ body is not there, yet he lives. He visits the disciples, and later Paul, offering hope in in the face of evil and corruption. On Easter, we boil eggs (matter changing into another form), and talk about bunnies. We wonder about the how of it all. We celebrate God’s desire for life where there is death. And then we eat chocolate. And black jellybeans.
Blessed Easter to you and yours.
Peace, Pastor Tony
1 Edward Hayes, Prayers for a Planetary Pilgrim: a personal manual for prayer and ritual (Leavenworth, KS: Forest of Peace Books, 1989), p. 143
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