April 1 ~ Sixth Week
&
The Feast of Easter
Dear old and new friends,
This Sunday is spring’s joyous feast of Easter—and one of life’s greatest surprises! From birthday parties to getting a big inheritance from an unknown Uncle who has died, life is filled with surprises. Be prepared at your own death for your personal Easter and the supreme surprise of your life!
Everyone has some kind of expectation of what awaits them after they die. If you’re an atheist or non-believer what comes next is nothing! For Christians or Muslims your reward for being good is heaven…or hell if you weren’t. But either reward or punishment ultimately requires your death. Yet we detest even to think of dying and yearn for someone to teach us how to have a good death. Flip through any city telephone directory or do a Google search, but I’ll wager you won’t find any schools that teach how to die. The preeminent school for learning how to die—without actually dying—is a faithful, good marriage! Every committed, unwavering love of another, married or not, requires a crucifixion! No nails or wooden cross required, only the dedication to dying to yourself daily and lovingly emptying yourself of self for your beloved.
Easter Sunday’s symbols of flowers and eggs are prophets foretelling what happens after death. You mean after a lifetime trying to truly love we’re going to bloom? Yes, your unseen until then exquisite internal loveliness with which you were conceived will blossom forth in cosmic splendor akin to the blazing birthing of a star.
Eggs, once forbidden in olden Lent, are now Easter treats and symbols of the gift of death—yes, a gift, to which I will return later. An Easter egg symbolizes each of our evolutionary journeys as an egg and a sperm unite to create the Mystery of Life. Slowly over months in the mother’s womb the fetus steadily evolves into a small human child who delights sumptuously in being continuously connected and securely united with another. So overpoweringly ecstatic is this womb-bonding unity with another that years after birth a person seeks the same kind of communion/connection with another and finds it in loving commitment. But back in the womb, after nine months the child is now ready for the next stage of its evolution, birth.
At birth we come forth from the intimately warm security of our mother’s womb into a hostile world feeling unconnected, alone and fearful. We feel isolated from all that is around us as a prisoner inside a large invisible egg shell and we feel permanently unconnected to anyone and so alone. As the years pass we continue to grow up, and that invisible egg shell grows as do we. We become greedy to cling on to anything that is ours and secretly competitive to be the first and best even with members of our family. This unseen enclosure isn’t on the outside of us, it’s in our brain, our consciousness that regardless of our age tells us we are separate, different from others and all of creation.
That voice of our consciousness however is rather an illusion since we are actually united with everyone and everything in the Web of Life. At the subatomic microscopic level quantum physics today informs us that we are intimately united with all that exists. Your computer or phone or tablet on which you are reading this Haystack reflection isn’t some inanimate “thing,” rather it is an invisible combination of swirling waves and packets of energy! Because of the marvel of quantum energy, more amazingly the words you are reading are alive with my quantum energy with which I wrote them that links us together regardless of the vast distances.
Earlier I spoke of the “gift of death” which comes when our heart and breathing stop. Death’s large dark hand effortlessly cracks open our egg shell with a thundering sonic boom and frees us in a brilliant blinding explosion of light. Instantly, we are intimately connected consciously with everyone, all of creation and the entire expanding universe with its untold billions of galaxies and their hundreds of billions of sun-stars…as well as with all the other universes yet to be discovered. We are gifted now to live in never-ending wonder of a perpetual Easter Communion with all that is created and is being created along with our mysteriously beloved Creator.
“Happy Easter” is a greeting with enormous personal implications we can legitimately wish ourselves and others each day.
This Easter Haystack reflection concludes our series
of the Spring Renaissance.
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