Easter

What is Easter? 

For the kids among us, it's Easter baskets and more chocolate than likely anyone needs.

From my religious upbringing, I can certainly explain as well as any layperson (well, make that better than most laypersons) what the holiday represents.

None of that seems to work for me anymore.  Mind you, I do like chocolate, but quite frankly I need to eat less, not more.  Same goes for three-quarters of the other things I eat these days.  As for the theology of it all, well, I'm having a tough time the theology of most organized religions these days.  Strict adherence to rituals or literal interpretations of text written before there was even a printing press just don't seem to make sense to me.  Then we also have the manifest failure of organized religion on several fronts, well documented, it seems, on most news days.

Anyway, this isn't intended to disparage organized religion.  If anything, I truly do applaud anyone who has faith; if that comes from rituals, books or traditions, well, good for them.  Whatever works.

So, again, what is Easter?

Best I can figure these days, Easter is about resurrection; it's about coming out of the other side if you want to call it that, from a place where there didn't seem to be all that much hope.  That's an easy sentiment to write but a difficult sentiment to put into action.  Trust me, I know this for a fact.

I've been in need of a kind of Easter.  The specifics as to why aren't all that important.  What truly matters is that in some ways, it's been a bit of a difficult row to hoe over the past year or so.  I can't claim any kind of resurrection, but it does look like I am may be coming out on the other side of it all.  Of course, in the finest of Steve traditions, I haven't gotten what I wanted, but I do seem to have gotten what I needed.  Cryptic?  Damn straight it is.  Sometimes life is cryptic though:  We have some idea of what we think we need, but then the universe throws something else at us.  It's the kind of thing that David Foster Wallace once beautifully described as follows...

Here's to resurrections and truth and freedom.