Easter Reflection

As the Lenten season draws to a close, I find myself reflecting not only on my life but on how "Easter" has taken a life of its own, at least in comparison with Christmas. In James Martin's Slate article Happy Crossmas! he raises some rather interesting points regarding the Western perception of Easter.

He begins with an observation:

Unlike Christmas, whose deeper spiritual meaning has been all but buried under an annual avalanche of commercialism, Easter has retained a stubborn hold on its identity as a religious holiday.

And he posits some interesting insights into modern man's tenuous hold on, for lack of a better word, "un-spirituality":

...agnostics and atheists who don't accept Christ's divinity can accept the general outlines of the Christmas story with little danger to their worldview. But Easter demands a response. It's hard for a non-Christian believer to say, "Yes, I believe that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, died, was buried, and rose from the dead." That's not something you can believe without some serious ramifications: If you believe that Jesus rose from the dead, this has profound implications for your spiritual and religious life—really, for your whole life. If you believe the story, then you believe that Jesus is God, or at least God's son. What he says about the world and the way we live in that world then has a real claim on you.

Easter is an event that demands a "yes" or a "no." There is no "whatever."

I've come to realize that it's very difficult to be Christian. From a purely rational perspective, the passion, death and resurrection of Christ seems unbelievable, and the way in which it unfolds is certainly poor storytelling. If I were to invent a story about a deity, it certainly wouldn't take the form that The Passion of Christ took. But the sense of incompleteness that echoes in the human heart about Christ's story that urges us to complete it by responding to it. It's funny. We've only recently discovered how artfully executed cliffhangers like those that make up tv series like Lost can rope in a rabid audience week after week, but it seems that Christ began cornering the market on a faithful audiences at least two thousand years earlier.

Happy Easter!