REsources for Living
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As I see it, there are three words—related but not the same—that apply to the holidays I celebrate this season. Those three words are resurrection, redemption and renewal.
Resurrection is pretty clearly a word that goes with Easter. Easter is the celebration of Jesus’ resurrection, of his return to life from death. Even if you don’t believe that it is ever possible for someone to literally be dead for three days and then come back to life, the concept of resurrection is a potent one. After all, who hasn’t experienced the feeling that something has died, only to come back? A relationship is broken, but then somehow we find our way back to a genuine connection again. A serious illness robs us of our capacity to live in the world as we are used to, but then, finally, we recover. Depression or loss leaves us adrift in a land where everything feels worthless, but we manage to find our way back into the land of possibility and hope.
Now, of course, not every relationship gets (or should be) repaired, not every illness is curable and depression can be a life-long struggle. But it is also true that in various ways, the experience of resurrection, of rising from the dead, can and does happen throughout our lives, and Easter is a beautiful way to celebrate the reality that life overcomes death in a surprising variety of ways.
Redemption, in Christian theology , is used to describe the way in which Jesus’ suffering buys back the sinful souls of human kind. But we more typically use the word to talk about how we retrieve something good from something bad. We redeem missing the bus by calling a friend while waiting. We redeem ourselves in the eyes of our beloved by making a nice meal after we have flaked on putting out the garbage cans. But we also find redemption in far more serious and compelling ways. More than one of my friends live with the complicated knowledge that they are alive only by grace of the organ donation of someone who died. There is no equation that says that someone’s death is good or right because their death enabled others to live. That is certainly never the case. But it is true that the gift of life that is organ donation does something to redeem the loss, to bring beauty into the tragedy.
Redemption in the sense of the buying back of souls is certainly no part of the Passover story. But consider the story of Moses, who was left in a river as a way to escape the Pharaoh’s cruel decree that the sons of the Jews be killed at birth. Moses is plucked from the river by Pharaoh’s daughter, is raised with the privileges of palace life, and eventually returns to defy Pharaoh and lead the Hebrew people to freedom. There is no way that killing babies—genocide—is ever anything but horrifically wrong. And yet through both coincidence and courage, Moses’ life creates a story of redemption in which the Jews leave slavery to become the covenanted people of God.
And then there is renewal, the least dramatic and most common of the three. In my mind renewal goes with the third major holiday of the season, Earth Day. We all live with the devastating knowledge of just how threatened life on our beautiful and beloved planet is. Pollution clogs our oceans, species are dying at a staggering rate, rainforests are being burned off to make room for cattle and climate change poses an existential threat to life as we know it. Earth Day calls us to focus on a painful reality that is always at least at the edge of our consciousness—human activity is causing devastating loss all around the globe.
But Earth Day is also a time to focus on the Earth’s incredible powers of renewal. Life is an incredible force, maybe even an unstoppable one. Time and again we find that if we restore rivers and their banks, their native inhabitants return. As more and more people plant pollinator gardens, devastated populations of monarch butterflies are starting to recover in their eastern migration. Areas devastated by fire will, all on their own, regrow to lush and healthy habitats if they are given the chance.
The spring reminds us of the Earth’s power to renew life after the dormancy of winter. Earth Day reminds us that we are part of life, and part of the incredible power of renewal, if we will choose to embrace that power. Like resurrection and redemption, renewal is inseparable from loss and grief and death. But life finds a way in even the most improbable circumstances, fathoms deep in the ocean or in arid deserts or in polar cold. And if life is that potent, that creative, that fierce an urge, then how can we doubt that renewal is possible, if we will only commit ourselves to fostering it?
Resurrection, redemption and renewal. Easter, Passover and Earth Day. Our celebrations of the season insist that while death is real and loss is inevitable, that if we give life a chance—if we are stubborn enough to never give up and flexible to embrace change as it comes—then life will spring again. Not always in the ways we expected. Not always even in the ways we wanted. But life, vigorous and determined as a weed, that will grow and bloom and seed and grow again.
- REsources for Living - December 1, 2020
- A Fond Goodbye - December 1, 2020
- REsources for Living - November 1, 2020
