Just Another Sunday?
Don’t know about you, but Easter has snuck up on me unexpected. In my head I think of it as an April thing, but of course it’s on the first Sunday after the full moon on or after the Spring equinox, and sometimes that’s in March. It’s so much easier to remember Christmas with its solid 25 December location (unless you are part of the Orthodox tradition, in which case it is 7 January). Ah well, what’s it about dates and remembering? For most Easter will be just another Sunday. Except it isn’t. Those who think that Easter has nothing to do with them...
Read MoreBecause courage is a necessary virtue…
American poet and social activist Maya Angelou famously noted, “Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.” If you think about it, she is probably right. After all, what good is it to be passionate about justice if you don’t have the courage to stand up and do something about it. It doesn’t help to feel awful about what is happening to someone else while knowing that you don’t have the courage to say something in their defence for fear of what might happen to you. To make a...
Read MoreThen I remember, death comes before the rolling away of the stone
It was a throwaway line in a talk by a speaker whose name I have now forgotten: “We feel more moral, more right, more cheaply than ever before.” It was a comment on the shrill nature of much public discourse, and how easily we feel moral because we have expressed a noble sentiment, though expressing it has cost us nothing. Although not necessarily the intention of the speaker, it set me thinking about spiritual and moral formation, and how we learn and grow in life. And then I stumbled upon this magnificent conclusion to Mary Oliver’s poem At Black River “Then I...
Read MoreSunday: Afraid yet filled with joy…
“So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples.” Matt 28:8 Have you been at a wedding where the groom cries, and the bride, and the parents, and granny – and as they do they all tell you how happy they are. Emotions are funny things. We sometimes cry when we are happy. And then there are those funerals where people burst into loud laughter as the idiosyncrasies of the deceased are recapped and tolerantly recalled. At many funerals mirth and tears intermingle seamlessly. Emotions are funny things. We sometimes laugh when...
Read MoreEaster as challenge more than comfort…
Back in 1950 Sir Norman Anderson famously wrote: “Easter is not primarily a comfort but a challenge. Its message is either the supreme fact in history or else a gigantic hoax.” Anderson goes on to explore the evidence for the resurrection forcefully arguing that unless it is factual, the entire foundation for Christianity is based on a lie. He writes that the resurrection is either “infinitely more than a beautiful story, or else it is infinitely less. If it is true, then it is the supreme fact of history; and to fail to adjust one’s life to its implications means...
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