Today is Easter Sunday, celebrated by over 2 billion Christians around the globe as a deeply sacred event. The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the path of sacrifice and forgiveness promising eternal life, remain the cornerstone of Christianity and the Holy week of Easter. Yet, the holiday carries traditions rooted in ancient rites of Spring that recognized the rhythm of the seasons, cycles of life, and the amazing re-emergence of life that follows winter, or illness, or war and calamity. Out of these traditions, modern society has created an alternative celebration of secular and commercial Easter. If it were possible to trace all the roots and branches of the story and meaning of Easter attributed to our collective history, there would be no space large enough to illustrate or visualize it--layer upon layer of history, myth, analysis, revelation, pageantry, vision and mystery.
This Easter, I offer you one aspect of the story to contemplate: Our human need to put a face on God. True, we all have to reckon with the inevitability of death and therefore, many turn to Christianity because of it's belief in a path to "eternal Life". But the mystery of death is just one of the enigma's of life that propel people to a spiritual search. Birth is a mystery; existence itself is a mystery--pain and suffering, beauty, love and even sacrifice are often perplexing. Modern science and psychology offer some degree of understanding, but sometimes, the more we understand, the more mystery we discover in this phenomenal puzzle of life. The human heart has those moments of awe that open us to more transcendent awareness, yet not many can truly satisfy our personal well of gratitude, longing and love with an abstract 'God' of 'Allness'. A God with a "face", with "skin", with form, gives our psyche a bridge, allowing human perception to stretch to the imperceptible.
The Easter story revolves around Jesus as God (or Son of God; i.e, out of God) made flesh. Human yet Divine, he becomes a God of identification. He too suffers; he too is treated unfairly, he too has his time of doubt and turns to prayer, he too loves and despite it all, forgives.
A God with a face, is not only found in Christianity of course; many religions have tales of God (or gods) walking among the people, assuming human identities for one purpose or another-- Christianity absorbed the religious history of other traditions. For some, the saints, great mystics and teachers provide the bridge. A face that has transcended the confusion of life, reconciled, given way to the Allness, grounds us in a different kind Love, a different kind of Strength and Courage, as we stretch beyond ourselves to the Unknown. Happy Easter! (Susan Nettleton)
In this poem by George Herbert, the "face" of God is simply "Love". Follow the link: