Happy Easter all!
Every year I reissue a reflection on Easter done a couple of years ago: Easter Song, Keith Green, and Reflections on the Resurrection. So some of you will have seen this before in earlier iteration.
It obviously speaks for itself–and to a timelessness of faith in what more than a quarter of the population of Planet Earth believes this Supreme Celebration today means: Ultimate Reality once entered History, and forever proleptically changed the very Reality of Cosmic Time itself.
As J.R.R. Tolkien expresses it:
In [a true fairy-story] when the sudden ‘turn’ [Tolkien calls this a ‘eucatastrophe‘] comes we get a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart’s desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through… The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels… and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story has entered history and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the ‘inner consistency of reality’. There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath.—From Epilogue of Tolkien: On Fairy-Stories.
This certainly has direct applicability in the midst of a pandemic: not in the nonsense of as it were forcing God’s hand to keep free from harm the faithful celebrating Easter in defiance of social distancing (God did not do that for his Son either); not as “Reality” in some kind of ugly competition with other religions (Reality is reality–regardless of what religion I have when I jump from an airplane without a parachute); not as Reality that only works for “believers” . . . But Reality as Reality! . . .
Keep well, keep safe all!
Wayne
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