practice resurrection

Spring Beauty (Claytonia virginica) from my walk today

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

— Wendell Berry, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”

Why is the Gospel story of the Resurrection important to me? Why is it so resonant? Why do I hold to it?

In part because I see it everywhere.

I’ve written several times now on how discovering Paganism/Druidry and the Wheel of the Year has put me back in touch with not only time and the seasons but has enriched my understanding of Christianity as well. The Wheel of the Year is organized around the rhythms of the Living Earth, the endless cycles that order everything. It’s too easy to feel disconnected from those rhythms when your life isn’t so immediately ordered by them, but the Wheel of the Year calls us back to awareness of them.

The Wheel is cyclical, and it constantly turns. The death of light at Samhain and its rebirth at Alban Arthan/Yule, the battle and alternating rule of the Holly King and the Oak King. The Cross-Quarter Days and the Equinoxes. When we observe these days, we remember what they mean, what they say about every other day in its context and its place.

I’ve also written many times about the way Creation Spirituality harmonizes a certain kind of Paganism and a certain kind of Christianity into something rich and vital and immediately felt. Father Richard Rohr speaks of a “Christ-soaked world”, material creation as God’s first incarnation. I believe—along with countless mystics—that nature has lessons for us about God, that it is in itself a kind of scripture every bit as authoritative as anything humans could ever write. If not more.

What nature reveals is that resurrection is a constant, consistent pattern. There’s nothing supernatural about it and we don’t need to resort to supernatural explanations for it; it’s everywhere, all the time.

In the Gospels, in the observance of the Holy Day, resurrection is the supreme culmination of... what was here the entire time.

Christ has been resurrected—resurrecting—since the very beginning.

What the wisdom of the Wheel of the Year also reveals is that resurrection is not a singular event. It’s a process. More than that, it can be a practice, a conscious element of the everyday.

I believe that there are truths that transcend any branding of specific religion, things that we all know on some level to be true. One of those is that, one way or the other, one meaning or the other, death isn’t the final word on the matter.

In Finding God in the Waves, Mike McHargue writes:

One day, I will die, and in time my atoms will go back to giving life to something else. Much farther along the arrow of time, our own Sun will explode and spread its essence across the sky. Our Sun’s dust will meet with other stars’ remnants and form new stars and planets of their own.

The universe itself exists in an eternal pattern of life, death, and resurrection. It seems poetically appropriate that the Source of all would have left this divine signature on the fabric of reality. In Jesus, I hope for more than just a God with a face or a uniquely gifted moral teacher. I hope for a resurrection that will one day reach every corner of our universe.

What the story of the Resurrection tells me, moreover, is that human power isn’t the final word on the matter, and human power will always fail in the end. Nature is nimble and clever and most of all true in a way no human authority can deny.

This is a practice, a process, a living experience. This story didn’t end with the Gospels. Nor did it begin there. The story itself never ended at all. It’s all around us, a spiral dance that invites us to join it—and indeed, we’re already there.