Apr 2001 Easter, the name given to a holiday celebrated widely in the U.S., is the most religious (even more than Christmas) of all holidays. Rev. Addo's poem reveals the spiritual realm of Easter, as well as the religious. Most of us are acquainted with the names Jesus and Mary and know the story of how Mary encountered Jesus after the cruxifiction. It's a beautiful story of love and loss, then love regained. After his resurrection, Jesus holds Mary at arms length, restraining her, as Addo and the Bible recount. Death is a physically restraining force. It keeps us from embracing people we could once fling our arms around. That part of love is forever gone, but the spiritual aspect of love -- the strongest yet least visible -- remains. Mary had to redefine her love for Jesus from physical and finite to spiritual and never-ending. Unlike many of us who view the loss of a loved one as a tragedy, Mary rejoiced after she "saw" Jesus. Who knows if this vision was something real or something Mary dreamed and told her disciple friend, who then interpreted it for the ages. Don't we all dream dreams of those we have lost? In this way, they appear to us just as Jesus appeared to Mary. There are only two emotions: love and fear. Mary wasn't afraid to tell people that death was joyful, because she heard it from Jesus. Our own loved ones through dreams tell us that death is joyful and love-filled. But we fear telling this to others or admitting it to ourselves. The religious holiday of Easter is a celebration of the victory of death, the victory of love. It's designed as an elemental (for Christians) comfort for the most painful of all human experience: death. It's a holiday we celebrate year after year, hearing sermons, singing songs and reading poems such as Rev. Addo's. Afterwards, we turn our back on spiritual facts to once again embrace physical feelings, clinging to grief and pain. In essence, we exchange love for fear. You could say we love to fear, instead of love to love. The Easter story of death and resurrection, of Jesus appearing to Mary and Mary's loving response, is lost on us, as we worship constructed crosses draped with purple (mysteriously changing to white!) cloth. The cloth and the crosses come down in a couple of weeks and we go back to our fear-filled lives. When we get messages from our loved ones, just as Mary did from Jesus, we relegate them to some secret upper room, afraid of the reaction to a love-filled life. Too bad. It's a given none of us could ever be exactly like Jesus, but Mary is a symbol for us all, one of the most emotionally-charged characters in the New Testament. If she could yield wholeheartedly to the spirit, couldn't we? Thank you, Rev. Addo. ----- Original
osofoaddo 14 Apr 2001 THE ABOVE REACTION WAS SUBMITTED BY Ms L Jessup