I wrote a short well-reasoned homily for this morning and re-read and edited it. Then I woke up this morning and the first thing I heard on the radio was the wonderful, uplifting hymn ‘Jerusalem’ and I had to try again. So here is perhaps a less polished, less well-reasoned series of thoughts.

First, Easter is for me religiously the most important day of the year. But to celebrate Easter requires context. It is in the context that we find the whole of human experience, but in Easter alone is only a small part of that. It’s the party without the preparation. It’s the joy of spring without the dying of fall and the in-between time of winter. It’s new life without death. It’s newness without the pain of growing into that newness. The words I used earlier this week were that Easter is an exclamation point, but Holy Week is the sentence and, for me, Maundy Thursday is a needed comma before we reach that exclamation point.

Our lives are full of death, death in all shapes and sizes. The ultimate death of the body is only the most obvious, but the little deaths are more frequent. The deaths of the spirit and the soul which come with the bully in the schoolyard, from ethical sacrifices we make in our lives, from addictions of all kinds; to work, to drugs, to having it all. We die when our whole lives start to be ruled by addictions. And we all have them, every one of us, we just may not call them by that name.

We live in the midst of death. Our lives are touched by the illnesses and deaths of friends and family, not just the deaths of the body but all the little deaths, by disasters, and by damage to the earth. And does Easter somehow make all that go away? No. Terrible things will continue to happen, things that we can control and things that we can’t. So why bother with Easter?

I have been thinking a lot about Hindu concepts of reincarnation and also about the cycle of life we see in nature and wondering just how much of those things apply to us. In conversation with someone Friday we touched on these questions. We talked about flowers and how they come up again each year as though they are the same flower we saw in that spot the year before, but they aren’t. They are the same kind, they may share the same root structure, but they are not the same flower. They are something new. They have a new life. And so, too with us.

I talked with someone else about suffering. About how as people we need to always remember how important suffering is and how real. Suffering for its own sake can be just ambient pain, but recognizing that we all experience suffering and we can learn or not, change or not is something else again. To me this involves free will. We can dig our toes into the sand of our present spot and refuse to move. We can stubbornly live in the shell of our person at a particular time and place and refuse to change. Some people are able to stay encased in a time and place or a set of behaviors for a whole lifetime. But sometimes something, maybe good, maybe bad, disrupts that firm grip on the known and the familiar. And then the individual’s ability to adapt will come into play. People who refuse to change are often unable to adapt to the unexpected. You can see them sitting, just sitting where they have always sat unable even to comprehend what has happened to their familiar world. People whose lives are a work in progress, always changing, shifting in new colors and new patterns can more easily adapt. Is it painless for them? Of course not. Do they somehow not go through the shock of change, of death, not experience the work it takes to change? Of course they do. They feel it, they suffer from it, they work at it, and they choose to go on. They choose to learn what they can, whether immediately or eventually. The pain is there, but too the knowledge that change, whether the cause is internal or external is inevitable and it is what we make of it that matters.

Resurrection is about change and Easter is about resurrection. Whether you find strength in yourself, in the earth, in some greater being doesn’t matter as much as recognizing the need to use that strength to be reborn. Holy Week and Easter are about the inevitability of death and the certainty that it can be overcome: that death doesn’t have to be the last word. You may choose to believe or not in the resurrection of a single individual in Jerusalem and you may believe what you believe about what happens after your body is dead. But Easter is not just about that, it is about all the other deaths and rebirths. It is about what we allow ourselves to do with our choices. And it is about going forward and not staying in place and not going back. You won’t be the flower you were last year. You share the same root structure and much about you is or looks the same. But when you are reborn, you are a new flower.