Sunday, April 20, 2014
Easter Sunday Reflection
There is, and should be, a certain quiet joy to Easter. Somehow, "He is risen!" resounds more strongly as that joy that swells in your heart than as something shouted from a rooftop. The message of that life after life is about renewal from within, about hope, about love. Those are all low-burning fires, coals that endure.
On Friday, I found myself in Dwight Chapel at Yale. To go to a Christian service at a chapel at Yale is a remarkable experience, but perhaps not in the way you might think. It is a thoroughly secular place. The Chapel itself has been stripped of crosses and other Christian markings. It is small, too-- and perhaps forty of us were there, in two rows facing one another, a choir of four, and three ministers. It was dark inside, and our songs reverberated in the space.
It was, I suppose, a little like the early Christians in their caves. The spirit was intense, too… as part of the service, a priest brought in a large, rough cross to hold at the front of the room. It was not arty or smooth, but it was real and foreboding, an instrument of death. Its presence was unsettling, like someone had set a gun down on the chapel rail. I couldn't bear to look at it.
But now that cross is transcended, defeated. We must have the will to do the same, to stride forward and transcend death and injustice and walk humbly with our God.
