Easter Meditation

EASTER MEDITATION. The mind-boggling thing about Easter is how, for Christians, it is the celebration of a historical event. It is not just a celebration of the tradition of being Christian, a celebration of shared feelings and attitudes about life, shared music and culinary traditions. Christians are celebrating the actual reanimation of a human whose irrefutable and utter execution had been witnessed by lots of people. “He is risen!” means “A mutilated and embalmed corpse has come back to life!”

And Christians mean that this ACTUALLY happened, in the same way that we believe that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. I went to a Passover Seder the other night. No one seemed to be claiming that the ten plagues occurred as historical events, as natural phenomena like a volcano eruption. But Christians are dressing up and going to church today in the same manner and spirit that we shoot fireworks on July 4. Actual human beings picked up a quill and scratched their names on a piece of paper in 1776, so we watch the kids run around in the twilight waving sparklers. And all the people you see dressed up today believe that an actual dead person stood up and walked out of a grave.

I live in a secular world where we just can’t believe this. And anyone who feels the smallest spark of spiritual feeling knows that we live in the age of science and materialism that opposes every trace of superstition. The shared global mentality that keeps jets flying, that produces medical cures, that sends people to the moon assures us all, without any flexibility, that the Resurrection could not have occurred. Dead people do not spontaneously regenerate.

But it is always interesting to me to consider something. If you wrote a science fiction story from a hardcore atheist perspective about a planet very similar to earth where an individual, for strange, incredibly rare but completely real reasons, did literally resurrect from death, the fictional history on this fictional planet would look a lot like the history of Christianity.

The same goes if your story was just about a group of people who were simply convinced that such a miracle had occurred. TRULY convinced of it as a factual occurrence. Again, your made-up sci-fi story would need to trace historical consequences of this “delusion” that resembled our own history for the last two thousand years. The conviction that a bio-physical miracle actually occurred in space and time shaped history.