By As someone who was at one time an Evangelical Christian, my relationship with Easter is, at best, problematic. At one time in my life, I considered this to be the most sacred of holy days. Today, it represents all that I came to despise about Christianity.
Unlike Christmas, which I can sink into as a family holiday, a secular celebration of the ones I love, I can not reconcile a secular Easter. Sure, here in the US, Easter is at least as much about candy and bunnies and such as it is about the resurrection of Christ, and there are a fair number of Pagan roots behind some of it, but somehow I have never been able to divorce the Christian understanding of the death and resurrection of their Savior from the fertility rites of spring.
There’s a lot of bad theology, along with some basic premises of Christianity, at play in my feelings. The brand of Christianity I walked away from was a bit fringe and very devoted to the idea that human beings, at their very core, are dirty, filthy, something to be denied the right to present themselves to the supposedly loving god who created them without painting themselves in the blood of another.
The cognitive dissonance that comes with marrying this idea to the idea of a loving god was what I think eventually broke through the programming and freed me up to really study the theology and religion as well as freeing my heart to actually find love.
I’m not going to go into details here. If you’re really interested you could visit my other blog and dig through old posts where I was processing out what I believe and what I really don’t believe. I haven’t posted over there in a long time though. Happy Spelunking!
Because of the way we pick the date of Easter, I often forget about it until I sign into Facebook and see a bunch of posts about it. Some years this has sent me spiraling through a bunch of not great emotional debris and internal dialog. This year seems to be less a spiral and more like a blip of “oh, hey, yeah…that was a thing” feeling. Maybe it’s the amount of introspection this year has involved.
Or maybe I’m outgrowing the trauma. And yes, I liken that theology to trauma.
Anyway, all of that to say, if you celebrate the return of spring or the return of your god, or just that it’s Sunday, I hope your celebration is fulfilling and filled with life and kindness.
Photo by Anthony DELANOIX on Unsplash
Natalie J Case 