Spring Awakening Moon
Resurrection makes sense on a day like today; as it happens, Easter Sunday. 66 degrees, green popping out all over, pachysandra continuing its green invasion (planned) of the third tier of our perennial gardens, daffodils in bloom and many, many throwing up their green spears toward the sun. Tulips and garlic and parsnips. Buzzing bees. Dogs running and jumping. The air moved around with light, warm breezes. Who says the dead don’t come to life?
In spite of the easter bonnets, the died eggs, chocolate bunnies and marshmallow ducks this is the key event in the Christian liturgical calendar. With no resurrection the other claims are nothing more than interesting two-millennia old ethics and culture. With resurrection all the other claims take on a sacred aura, through them you too can participate in the life after death.
This is such an odd thought, once you step outside the hermeneutical circle. Not so much that a God could bring the dead back to life, I mean, God, right? Not so much that people could believe it, many strange things are known with or without philosophy, after all. No, for me, the strange thing, in retrospect, is that the club has so many convoluted rules.
A loving God who retrieves his own son from the ferry and returns him to life. OK. A loving God who promises the same thing to others. OK. A loving God who seems convinced that many won’t make it and end up either vanished or in gehenna, the burning waste dump outside the city walls? Geez. Of course, His game, His rules. Yeah. But why go through the motions for only a few, a select few. That’s not only weird, it seems perverse. We can’t understand God’s logic? Boy, is that true.
Anyhow, enough about Him. Me, I’m in for the resurrection that comes from mixing my essential elements back into the soil, providing a little food for the fungi and micro-organisms in the soil, the soul? What if that’s what the after life really is, our souls collected in the mass grave that is this earth to become food for the worms? Works for me.
It’s possible, of course, and I like to entertain the idea that death is a process like the cocoon, a time of incubation when our cells become, like the butterflies, imaginal. They reshape themselves into a new think altogether, a Swallowtail from a caterpillar. It happens here. I’ve seen it. Or, maybe we’re like water, in this shape in this state, but in a gas or a solid, something related but different. Or, and this one seems the most plausible to me, the many worlds hypothesis turns out to be true and we pass from world to world, inhabiting this body, perhaps another, on and on and on until last syllable of reported time.
Resurrection is so important a possibility, is my point, that it shouldn’t have a morals clause or be dependent on what we believe. If it is, it just is and we will be swept up into something new, something different and have another go. I like that idea.
