Easter gave me a new way to think about this whole Corona thing.
The Easter break (I know, what break?) got me thinking about what the Corona resurrection is going to look like?
Remember that Easter, traditionally, was about the renewal of the world.
This got turned a little upside down in the Southern Hemisphere. But in the Northern Hemisphere, Easter celebrates the coming of spring – the returning green-shoots of life from the death-like grip of Winter.
Eggs and rabbits for fertility and new life. Chocolate because nothing turns a girl on like chocolate. Fruit buns to celebrate the abundance of it all.
And this married nicely with the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection, which was one of the central principles to come out of the example of Christ’s life.
Not just the resurrection of Christ himself, but the promise of the resurrection to all souls.
Mulling over this (and the choccy-egg high) got me looking at the whole Corona crisis through the lens of “resurrection”.
We are still in the middle of our own dread winter – an economic and a social dark age.
In many ways, we now have a taste of what life is like in the far north. Winter comes. You can’t work. You can’t get out and see anybody. You stay home and eat cabbage.
And then when the iced-blocked rivers break and flow again and spring, at long last, returns, you’re in the mood to party.
This is where we’re at right now. A long winter. Cut off and isolated. A little bit lost as to what to do with our time.
(Can you imagine the parties when this thing is over? It’s going to get a little crazy.)
We are holding to the promise of a resurrection – the promise that life will come again, and the deathly course of winter will be reversed.
We are holding on to faith.
But a resurrection is not a returning. A resurrection is a new beginning. A starting over.
Some things will persist. That’s the lesson in Christ. The immortal diamond survives the phoenix fires of death, and begins again on the other side.
And the gift of Christ’s life is that he pulled all the sins of the world into the fire of death with him.
There is an immortal diamond moving through us – a life-force drive that is constantly reinventing itself and evolving.
At the same time, the dead-wood of what no longer serves must be allowed to become fuel to the fire.
So what is the Corona resurrection going to look like?
What shape does it take as a society? What is going to carry through and endure? What is going to be left behind?
And what about you? What are you holding firm to? What are you leaving behind?
For a long while I was waiting for “things to go back to normal”.
But that’s not how the resurrection works.
What is close to the essence – what is held close – will endure.
Some things – thankfully – will be left behind.
In that sense, what we are in now is not a waiting room for ‘normal’. This is the birthing unit for an entirely new way of being.
Thinking about it in this way gets me excited. This is a process of phoenix-like transformation. The possibilities are endless – not just for us as individuals, but for us as a society.
It’s not going to be painless – no death is.
But I also know that the immortal diamond drive of life seems to be, over the long arc of history, directed towards ever more beautiful and generous and exciting expressions of humanity.
This is where I think we’re going.
So if you’ve got a spare few minutes, while the gravitas of Easter is still with us, ask yourself: what am I holding firm to? What am I letting go of?
Being clear on this will help you through this and the next phase.
DB.