"Resurrection" by El Greco

     Yesterday, Easter morning, my wife and I took a short walk to a forest preserve near our home.  Climbing up to a high point, we sat on a log, waiting for the sun to rise over the lake below.  Our version of a sunrise Easter service.
     As we sat, read, and contemplated, we watched the sky, a budding crimson, and we watched the forest, its trees still naked and bare, the land barely green.  Then, precisely when we expected it to do so, the sun peeked over the hills and began spreading its rays across the water.  The geese continued to fly, the cranes continued to nest.  Squirrels scampered about.  And why not?  The night was over.  The day had begun.
     Out of the abject darkness of Good Friday, the darkness of every human folly and evanescence, the greatest of all sunshines arose.  A sunrise that eclipses and encompasses all others, a sunrise that changed history, bent space, and permanently altered all our notions of meaning and time.
     Yes, we can celebrate the meaning of resurrection, and yes, we can celebrate the fact of new life.  What we will always find confounding--and glorious--however, is the profound physicality of the deed:  that God, the living God, really did die, and God, the living God, really did rise from the dead.  It's nonsensical, it's unbelievable, it's unfathomable, but unless it happened, we are, as Paul wrote, of all people most to be pitied.  We live in a dream of our making.
     How can life ever be the same?