Easter 2020

I write today because it is what I have been doing nearly once a week for the last three years. I ask myself ‘what do you have to say that matters anyway’?  I have no ‘rides to share or unique takes’ today.  I am reminded of a family monopoly game we played back in the early 60’s.  It seemed to go on for hours.  I am not sure what precipitated my younger brother Charley, to pick up the whole board and launch it across the living room, but memory of paper money, green houses, and pewter pieces strewn on orange shag carpet lives.  I do remember that after a “recess” we reassembled and played again. I have no idea who won but Charley regrouped and stayed in the game.  Right now it feels like the game is flying through the air in slow motion.

At its core Easter is about hope.  I spoke last week about my day with Elizabeth Kubler Ross. I remember her telling us about how she found her path into both the study of, and care for the death and dying.  She was an identical triplet.  She described feeling like a third of a person with no real identity of her own. It was right at the end of WW2. She convinced her father, a physician in Switzerland, to let her go volunteer in Poland.  At 15 she got on a train to Poland.  She described pulling into Triblinka, where the death camps for children were headquartered.  She described seeing huge piles of little shoes and coats outside of the barracks.  She then described getting out of the train with other volunteers.  They walked all around the camp. Graffiti was everywhere.  She said there were no drawings of skulls or fires.  No, rather there were flowers, butterflies, clouds with rainbows and smiles on kids.  “It was in that moment that I realized the human spirit is bigger than suffering and death”.  She told us story after story of grace in the midst of grief.

Today there are no lilies, or colored eggs, or chocolate bunnies in my sight. I can however, still hear my Grandma Opal singing in her warbling voice “Up from the grave he arose”… as her grandkids giggled with warmed hearts.  Today I will draw from the well of both memory and hope.

My line: “Praise the Lord— CHRIST has risen.”

Your line: “He has risen indeed!”

Onward and Upward

Mark