A Celebration of Life

The Resurrection Of Christ
Carl Heinrich Bloch

I love taking my daughter to the park. She loves going too. She likes to climb, hang upside down, run, and swing. She loves life and I love sharing it with her. I love these simple experiences as well as the memories. This is Easter, a celebration of life.

As a Christian I see Jesus, a baby, a boy, a man living life, feasting and drinking, weeping and suffering. He was a man like me with sensations, relationships, memories, and dreams. But one day this living, breathing man lay still and dead in a dark and silent tomb. What happens after that is the mystery and hope of the Christian life.

I've sat alone with dying grandparents. I can't process death. Maybe I'm too young but I'm not sure any of us are ever able to process it. Being with my dying loved ones I see life in its starkest moments. I've never been so aware of breath as when I've seen the lungs that have inhaled and exhaled unconsciously millions of times strain to continue a little longer.

What happens when it comes to an end? I don't really know but as a Christian I believe that life is eternal. I choose to believe that as part of my religion. It's my faith. It also feels appropriate. Life is so large and full, too much to be contained. This is Easter, a celebration of life that is too big to be kept within the walls of a tomb. It has to break out.

Easter is a celebration of life with an awareness of the reality of death. Life with all the sensations, relationships, memories, and dreams lasts only a number of years for each of us. We can have hope that the beauty of the gift of life will be restored after death and last forever, that something about us is eternal. It's not something we can see or know for sure. But our love of life can give us faith and hope. In this space between the sublimity of life and the mystery of death is the power of Easter.