Become all flame, Become Easter
The resurrection of Christ marks a time of celebration and joy, a welcome rebirth, but overly relying on familiar customs lets us bypass the deep soul work that the resurrection of Christ calls for. How can we, as Fr. Brandon said during the Great Vigil, “set the world aglow?” When our life is our practice, how do we fan the flames and become the resurrection of Christ? How do we become all fire?
The Glimpses of Grace podcast is a ministry of Grace Episcopal Church in Gainesville, Georgia. We are passionate about supporting the spiritual growth of souls, and we hope these sermons and conversations meet you where you are and enrich your soul as we all continue to make meaning in the world today.
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Transcript
I cannot think about Easter without thinking of childhood memories back in Arkansas, especially one moment at my great-grandmother’s house when so many of us gathered to find eggs. As we walked around and scrabbled through the azalea bushes and other shrubs, my great-aunt Joyce suddenly jumped out clad in white long-handled underwear, as we called it. She was decked out as the Easter Bunny, and she absolutely terrified us children. It’s not every day you see a great-aunt jump out of a bush clad in long-johns with tall ears on her head. A moment like that leaves a mark.
Easter has so many associations, and so many customs have accumulated around it that it would help to pause and reflect a bit more deeply on where we actually are, to look more deeply at the deep teachings found in Easter itself.
To just jump in, we remember that Easter is a lunar feast, not a solar one. It is a sacred time marked by the phases of the moon, occurring on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox. Easter is essentially linked with Passover, which is, of course, rooted in the story of the Exodus from Egypt. Since the full moon was April 1, today is Easter Sunday, the beginning of the Great Fifty Days of Easter. Easter is a Season and not just a day, and Pentecost is the Fiftieth Day of Easter.
We remember that so many lunar feasts across religious traditions focus on the cycle of death and rebirth, on new life coming into the world, rising again from the underworld. So, Easter is a lunar feast; Christmas is a solar feast. Solar feasts have a different tone. They focus on light coming into the world, and the interplay between light and darkness, many of them being there near the Winter Solstice. Lunar feasts focus our attention on the divine cycle of death and rebirth. For Christians, this is embodied in the death, burial, the anastasis or harrowing of hell, and the resurrection of Jesus.
With Easter, we have the hope that springeth green. The green blade rising through stone. The force of life rises again, offering hope. As the poet Dylan Thomas described, there is “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” As St. Hildegard of Bingen described, there is the veriditas, the greening power of creation that is the Spirit’s life in the world. The pulse of life coming into being again, stones rolled away from tombs. Easter focuses on the sacred alchemy of life rising out of death. It is a deeply embodied feast, carried in Christ’s own body. Now, we live these truths in our bodies.
Easter, and all its associated symbols and elements, from the eggs to the bunnies, even to the chocolate, with the flowers and the freshness of things, all direct our attention to the living pulse of divinity in our lives. Even the name Easter links us back to a time when we experienced the divine more through the earth itself than through mere rational thoughts, through the cycles of the seasons and in recognizing the presence of the divine through the transitions of life. Like we said, we live these truths in our bodies. As Brandon said in his Maundy Thursday sermon, our bones know the truth.
Through our practice of faith, we catch a glimpse once more of the divine cycle of death and rebirth that transforms our consciousness. But we struggle to swim out into the deeper waters beyond the accumulation of customs, the sticky refrain of “we’ve always done it this way.” We come to think of Easter primarily as bunnies and baskets of eggs.
Across the board, we often approach our faith like learning our multiplication tables. At some point in our childhood, someone taught us the basics, and we checked a box for memorizing the figures. And then we thought that was all we needed to do, all the time we needed to invest in it. We didn’t give it much more thought.
But then, perhaps, at some point in our life something didn’t add up, to stretch the metaphor just a bit. We faced a challenge or crisis that pushed us well beyond the memorized fact of eight times seven is fifty-six, but never having moved past this superficial level, we feel ungrounded and unsure of how our practice of faith actually connects with our lived experience. How does our practice of faith actually shape the way we live in the world?
The challenge of the church, on its institutional side, is that we have, for too long, supported elementary-level program maintenance in a complex world that demands graduate-level soul work. We need to name this and lean into the deep truths our practice of faith invites us to explore and embody.
Our souls yearn for a robust practice of faith, a faith rooted in the Easter reality. We need a practice that takes our lives seriously and gives us room to name the deep struggles we face rather than focusing on shallow fixations we feel we can control. Or just doing things because we’ve always done them. We yearn for a practice that has enough strength in its legs that it can support the fullness of our very selves. We do not need a brittle practice made only of accumulated customs.
It is easy to focus just on maintaining customs around Easter, but such customs don’t have the spiritual strength to hold us in these transformational encounters. Customs aren’t the crucibles we need for the alchemy that is now called for. Deep practices, however, those are the essential elements that nurture an embodiment of transformation.
There is an ancient story of two monks in the desert of Egypt. Abba Lot came to visit Abba Joseph one day and told him, Father, to the best of my ability, I do my prayers, I fast, I meditate, and I maintain my times of silence. I watch my thoughts and maintain the tradition. What else can I do?” The story goes that Abba Joseph stood up and lifted both hands above his head, where flames shot out of his fingers. His very hands became torches, and he turned to Abba Lot and said, “What else is there to do? You could become all fire.”
Our version may sound like this: we maintain all our customs. We have our baskets, the bunnies, our chocolate, our eggs. We have our brunch, and we even have a spiral-cut ham, as Cynthia and I were discussing. We maintain all the customs we have inherited. In terms of church, we work hard to manage all the details of ten services over seven days. We even work so hard on our sermons. What else is there to do?
We could become all fire.
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke once envisioned God saying: “Flare up like flame and make big shadows that I can move in.” What a fantastic image to meditate on. Burn with the transforming fire of the Paschal reality and watch new life come into being out of yesterday’s ashes.
Here, we encounter the molten core of our faith, the deep and robust truth that rolls beneath the shallow crust on which we live so much of our lives. Here we find the burning presence of Christ Himself, the living flame in our hearts.
When we become all fire, when we flare up like a flame that God can move in and make big shadows in, we realize that we have stepped far beyond merely celebrating Easter. Perhaps we feel our souls coming alive once more as we recognize our union with God in Christ, and with one another. Here we find true hope that can stand the pressure of the struggles of life.
In this awareness, we have become Easter itself, and we see, perhaps for the first time, the true purpose of our life in God.
Alleluia! Christ is risen!