Osler's Razor

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Sometimes, the Lake is flat and still and cold, and still it is Easter.

When I was a kid in Grosse Pointe, one of our family traditions on Easter Sunday was to take a walk along the lake. For those of you that don't know the place, Grosse Pointe is defined by Lake St. Clair, a mile-wide glaciated sea that divides the United States from Canada. The shoreline is starkly beautiful, and perfectly suited for a walk.

That walk, though, was very different from one year to the next. Because Easter moves so much on the calendar, and falls at a time that the weather in Michigan is highly variable, you could be walking in a snowstorm one year and a gorgeous warm spring day the next. Regardless, we would set out to walk by the water. If the weather was brutal, we would suit up in coats, hats, scarves, mittens, and all the other clothes that had sustained us since Christmas. Spring was still a vague promise. If the flowers were bursting from the ground and the trees, and the warm spring breeze had arrived, we would run outside in our t-shirts, happy to feel the sun on our skin. The promise was fulfilled in all that surrounded us.

Weather aside, that's how Easter, the resurrected Christ, works. It comes to us in all different conditions, in the storm and the sun, and we have to walk out into it regardless. Last year was marked by a personal resurrection of sorts, a rebirth of my soul and spirit. This year, there is a chill-- there has been too much death.

Yet, Easter is there, in the storm and snow. We don't choose it; we do not bid this rebirth into being, and it is not a miracle of our hands. We need only to see it, to open our jammed-shut eyes, and today I will.