The Unholy Cost of Resurrection
The world we inhabit is built on cycles of life and death and rebirth. We bear witness through unseeing eyes to the rise and fall and return of the moon, the tides, the seasons, our bodies. Yet resurrection remains a brutal story from a book we read once that we think bears no resemblance to our lives; to be observed with a toss of the head or chocolate bunnies.
The stories and myths of our many creeds and cultures are instructive, fables that nod to the lessons weaved into the human condition. This may be the biggest of them all. Endings are beginnings too if we choose to float with the dark tide to new shores.
There is such harsh sacrifice in any loss, especially when sudden or unheralded. Endings teach us the value of time and life abundant the hard way. Death feeds hope in tiny imploring morsels, bitter to the taste. A tormented world mired in its dark arts still quivers high sides that never hold water for long. Our refusal to engage until we are forced to overlooks the peculiar magic held in life's constant little deaths, even when bound by in grief or despair.
Resurrection is the promise of new form and function offering a different way of metabolising pain, loss and sacrifice. This weekend's epic mythology is more than religious. Its old tale informs our modern cultural obsession with redemption, our ongoing struggle with forgiveness, our clunky celebration of rebirth that denies its obvious precursor. Its all still our cross to bear, ephemeral and deeply personal.
So this next first Sunday, after the full moon and after the equinox, now that your false gods have been crucified by the heartless administration of life, what might rise within you?
... but well before that as you pray desperately in the dead of this night to save what matters most, what must you yet sacrifice as the cost of rebirth?
There are no easy answers as we teeter and fresh frequencies torrent through us like shards of lightning. Pass the dark eggs and the communion wine for our unholy considerations, I hear death and chocolate pair nicely together.
Resurrection Readings all this long weekend // cards and channel, tea and empathy
Words & pic c. Kerrie Basha 2025