An Easter Manifest

“The eternity which I detect in nature I predicate
of myself also.”
--Henry David Thoreau

As the light finally gathered into day, I began to make out the source of the noise. Out on the Bay, to my amazement, were thousands of Canada geese. The water, which was becoming bluer and bluer with the dawning day, was literally covered with black patches consisting of hundreds of geese. In the lightening sky, wedges of geese seemed to be flying in every direction, though instinct, of course, was driving them due north. As soon as more geese arrived, in seemingly endless numbers, some, apparently rested, took flight again.

I’m not sure when it occurred to me that the geese had arrived precisely on Easter morning. I was not a church-goer at the time: my future life as a minister still lay before me as a dream. But I remember that I was strangely moved by that coincidence. It was an Easter made manifest.

I watched the geese throughout the day in wonderment. All through the week that followed, as I saw them come and go on their migration to the far north, I was struck by the miracle of returning Spring and the eternal round of nature. I could not escape the feeling that there was something mystical about that arrival of geese on Easter. A part of me had been deeply touched, and perhaps for the first time in my life, I was conscious in that dawning day of the tenacious hold that the Easter story had got on me. I was ready to admit that there might be something to it, after all.

Some years later, I received a call on Easter Sunday. My grandmother, Gertrude, to whom I was extremely close, had died. Of course, I thought: another Easter made manifest. A devout Methodist and lover of “The Old Rugged Cross” and other old gospel hymns, she could not have died on a more appropriate day. Besides, everything in Gertrude’s life pointed to the reality of immortality--her simplicity, her endurance, her kindness. Not, perhaps, a physical resurrection, but certainly an immortality of influence. And, who knows, perhaps she was right in her choice of religion. Life after death is, after all, what someone has called “the great surmise.” At any rate, I know that she is alive in me, and that is all that really matters.

Easter is, or can be, a difficult holiday for religious liberals, as the many ways we have tried to celebrate it are evidence. Besides celebrating it as the traditional Christian observation of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we have celebrated Easter as simply a Spring festival, emphasizing its relation to primitive festivals celebrating the return of Spring and the renewal of the earth’s fertility; or, we have concentrated solely on the connection between the Christian celebration of Easter and the Jewish festival of Passover. Still others have noted the similarities between Easter and ancient cults of dying and rising gods and goddesses. Some of us have simply tried to explain Easter away as having little or no significance at all for religious liberals.

My experiences should give you a hint that I cannot do that. There is something to the Easter story, a mystery which cannot be denied. That mystery is as much in the nature of things as it is in the empty tomb of Jesus. The Taos Indians express it about as well as anyone can:

All of my life is a dance.
When I was young and feeling the earth
My steps were quick and easy.
The beat of the earth was so loud
That my drum was silent beside it.
All of my life rolled out from my feet
Like my land which had no end as far as I could see.
The rhythm of my life was pure and free.
As I grew older my feet kept dancing so hard
That I wore a spot in the earth
At the same time I made a hole in the sky.
I danced to the sun and the rain
And the moon lifted me up
So that I could dance to the stars.
My head touched the clouds sometimes
And my feet danced deep in the earth
So that I became the music I danced to everywhere.
It was the music of life.
Now my steps are slow and hard
And my body fails my spirit.
Yet my dance is still within me and
My song is the air that I breathe.
My song insists that I keep dancing forever.
My song insists that I keep rhythm
With all of the earth and the sky.
My song insists that I will never die.

I know that, for some of us, this is simply not enough. We long for the physical presence of our lost loved ones, and we hope to see them again someday. We loved their embodied selves, despite all their weakness and homeliness and frailty. The Buddhists would say that we are too attached to the material world, and perhaps we are. If so, it is an understandable weakness.

But it is also true, I believe, as the late Unitarian Universalist minister Dana McLean Greeley once wrote: “It is not that we shall be immortal, but it is that we are immortal. Those of us who do not manifest the beauty and power and permanence of the spirit now will not suddenly make such manifestation when we become disembodied [my emphasis].”

I would dearly love to meet up with my grandmother Gertrude again. But I know that she is immortal, because I experienced the “beauty and power and permanence of [her] spirit” in this life. And as a poet [Wendell Berry] has said with truth, “We are what we have lost.”

Frederick May Eliot, a former President of the American Unitarian Association, once wrote of Easter,

When I go to church on Easter, I expect to be reminded of the elemental truth, that in this universe of ours, with all its hesitancies and timidities and tragedy, the tides of life are flowing “fresh, manifold, and free,” and I expect to find myself swept into participation in the universal chant of praise for the irresistible, shining glory of the great gift of Life, which, for a brief moment and in an infinitesimal degree, I have the privilege of sharing.

The soul’s horizon widens,
Past, present, future blend;
And raises on our vision
The life that has no end.