Thank you for joining us!
Before we begin our devotional, I wanted to share a Comment Highlight from last week:
On last week’s devotional,
commented:This is a good week for contemplating "holy horror". I like your reflection of cleansing: Christ knows us better than we know ourselves. The big question is--what does he know about us that we don't know, or maybe don't want to know?
Short, sweet, and powerful, Scoot! Thank you, as always, for your insightful comments! Scoot writes a Catholic-flavored newsletter here on Substack called The Peasant Times-Dispatch. It’s terrific, so go check it out!
If you want a chance to be featured in next week’s Comment Highlight, all you have to do is post a comment on any of this week’s posts or threads. That’s it!
Now, on with this week’s devotional…
For this week, I would love for you to read the poem I published with Christ & Cascadia back in January, as the subject is relevant to today’s post.
Read my original poem, called “Manna”, here.
This meditation going to be a bit more raw than normal, but I’ve had something on my mind. I hope you’ll all bear with me.
Easter weekend on social media always leaves me exhausted, which is why I tend to take BIG breaks from Instagram from Good Friday through Easter Sunday. As beautiful as all the pictures of flowers and bunnies and messages of resurrection and rebirth are, there’s always something that nags at me, and I’m never sure how to explain it.
This year, it finally hit me: between all the Easter memes and messages, I tend to lose track of Who we’re talking about. I feel like everyone is referencing Someone I don’t recognize.
The pagans and non-Christians I love and follow post jokes and memes about Christ’s resurrection, and I feel like they’re talking about someone I’ve never met. The Christians I love and follow post messages and lovely text about Christ’s resurrection, and many of them STILL feel hollow, pretty words about a stranger. And everyone seems like they’re talking past each other.
It gets very chaotic. It’s like the worst parts of being an introvert at a well-attended party, a condition I know all-too-well.
I’m not going to use this platform to go into detail about how frustrated I am about how Christ has been represented over the history of the church by us, by Christians. That would take all day, and that isn’t what this space is for.
One of the reasons I love and follow the Celtic Christian “flavor” of spirituality is because the Celts saw no issue with recognizing the God of the Bible as the God they had already loved and prayed to for generations, without knowing His name. The story of Scripture fit right in with the poetry of their lives. There was magic in the grace of Christ, a magic they well understood. To them, it made perfect sense that Christ was a living, breathing, powerful force of hope in their lives. He was not an old story; He was alive in their world, showing Himself in creation whenever He chose to do so.
There is a reason why the ancients connected Christ to the greening power of the earth. The Logos, the holy word, through which all things were made. Jesus—fully God, fully human—died and returned to life to prove that the story of rebirth and resurrection and hope is the story that God is writing in this world, no matter how dark and cold things seem.
The tomb was a womb, not a grave.
We lose so much when we lose the magic and mystery of that, the thing that so many people long for their whole lives. So many miss it. Even the ones who claim to know better.
We Christians have a bad habit of making Christ a static thing, an old story. But the story we’re telling proves otherwise. Resurrection is dynamic. Is Christ truly alive, as we like to sing? How do we prove that to those who don’t recognize Him when they see Him?
Christians, let me speak to you directly: Easter is not over. Easter is a season. What’s more, Easter is our daily breath. If we are not telling the story of rebirth and resurrection and hope with our lives, then we are not telling the story of God. If we are not lifting Christ up as the greening, living power of this world, then we are not showing the world Who He Is.
Let Eastertide begin. And with it, our stories of Impossible Hope.
Thank you for reading!
Moved by this piece (or simply feel like supporting my coffee habit) and want to contribute a one-time donation? Click the Tip Jar button below!
Did this piece resonate with you? Take a moment to share it!
If you enjoy this piece, please let me know by tapping the heart to like, comment with your thoughts, share with someone you think will enjoy it, and subscribe to get instant access to my future work right to your inbox. Blessings!
"We Christians have a bad habit of making Christ a static thing." I absolutely agree -- we are predisposed to prefer the predictable. What's more, those of us of the evangelical persuasion seem to get really uneasy around the idea of "mystery." We of the Western mindset tend to want everything, especially our faith, tidy and well-organized, and there's no room for "mystery" -- the idea just seems too unclear, too dangerous. But mystery is everywhere in the Jesus Story. The power of rebirth is just too vast for our puny vocabulary. "Behold, I make all things new!"
Yes, there is so much misunderstanding regarding Easter and the Resurrection. It can be exhausting on all ends. I eventually took to Instagram last night with my own thoughts: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cq1d-T2MLNa/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=