Eggsurrection

Back when I was trying my hand at writing for children, I drafted an Easter story that attempted to connect eggs with the resurrection. My theory was that while some women, Mary Magdalene included, went to the garden to visit the Jesus’ tomb, others were home preparing breakfast, and needing more sustenance than leftover unleavened bread, they were including eggs. When Mary came running in to announce she had seen and talked with the risen Christ, one wise old woman saw an analogy between cracking an egg with Jesus broken on the cross and now transformed to new life.

OK, it was a stretch and I’m really foggy on how I got to the end, but there are two things I do know. One is that we often use stories to explain what we cannot understand. The other is that regardless of your spiritual path or whatever religion you follow, at some point we cross from the able-to-be-understood to the realm of what-you-take-by-faith.

Throughout our lives there are leap of faith moments, although I’m not talking about the daily ones where we get on an elevator, train, ship or airplane and believe it will take us safely where we expect to go. Those are so common we don’t think of them in terms of faith, we simply expect the science that built it to play out as it has hundreds of time in our own experience. What I’m talking about are the faith moments that come when we’re at the bottom or at the top, when we’re desperate and grieving or jubilant and grateful.

Whether you now practice some religion, consider yourself more on a spiritual journey, or find that such beliefs, customs and traditions have no place in your life, I’ll bet there have been times where you have indeed had a take-by-faith moment. Perhaps it was when a parent died, when a good friend was in an accident, September 11^th, when you held your child the first time, had a great success or saw a whale. You were face with one of the bottom line scary questions, the ‘why?’ and the ‘how?’ and the ‘what?’ Such questions often come to me when I’m out in nature or awake at 3 a.m.

We’ve gotten away from talking about how we answer those questions, often because we’re afraid we’ll be laughed at or someone whose answer is different from ours may tell us we are wrong. I wish in our society and daily interactions we had more conversations about the questions and the answers. Then instead of being scared and alone in facing them we would remember that everyone tries to make sense of life’s mysteries, be it an egg hunt on Easter or what’s behind terrorist attacks.

Marilyn