My friend bemoaned the fact that her grandchildren knew nothing about the great Christian feast of Easter except that there were bunnies and chocolate eggs.
Watching television it’s hard not to agree with her, but then – optimists ever – we wondered if this search for eggs might not leave a lasting truth in the minds of those children.
An egg is such a miracle when I think about it.
When I gather the eggs each day and weigh them in my hand they’re perfect in shape and the wonder is that those birds can produce these things almost every day. That’s probably why they eye me in such a predatory way whenever I approach them. They need constant nourishment to produce the food that we eat!
The chick begins as a tiny dot of life, begins to draw nourishment from the yolk that surrounds it and emerges as a transformed body full of life.
That’s the way I think of this feast of the death of Jesus and the resurrection into the Christ body. Jesus, the risen Christ, emphasises this body when he asks for some fish to eat, when he breaks bread and gives it to the disciples and when he points to the presence of the wounds in his risen body, now become portals of life and grace.
Macarius, an early Christian monk, living close to what is now Syria in the fourth century C.E. describes the unity necessary between body and soul.
‘There is indeed a similarity between the body and the soul; between the things of the body and those that pertain to the soul; between those things that are outer and those that remain hidden.’
He goes on to describe how ‘the inner light and glory that shines splendidly from within the heart’ begins to flame up and spills over at times to be experienced in the body. This connection is so intimate that as well as the five senses through which the body lives, there will also awaken within us the five senses of the soul. The soul blends with ‘the eye by which it sees, the tongue through which it can communicate in words … for everyone should realise that there are eyes deeper within than these physical eyes and there is a hearing deeper within than this hearing.’ 28.5 (Macarius. Classics of Western Spirituality.)
Kallistos Ware, the Christian Orthodox writer, says that our vocation is not so much to save our soul as to become ‘spirit enfleshed … there is no salvation for the soul apart from the body; divinisation signifies the transformation of the total person, soul and body together.’
I suppose that is why the great religions emphasise the sacred nature of the body and the importance of our sensual life.
And this teaching also tells me of the importance of our relationship to this earth body from which we continually draw our sustenance: from the air, from water and from the sheer natural beauty of nature and the skies above.
Just as there is a similarity between body and soul, there is also a connection between our spirit-soul and the body of the earth. We do well when we become more aware and more caring for the body of the earth in which we live.
These are some of the messages of Easter and the great mystery of life, death and new life.
Barbara Stapleton
