Easter is one of my favorite holidays. There’s something truly moving about the idea of resurrection and the spiritual idea that new possibilities and opportunities are possible even after gruesome (spiritual or physical) death. Much more than simply being mere survival, the Easter story provides an example of overcoming the inevitable and the impossible-to-survive in the Resurrection.
How can one preserve the spiritual lesson of Easter in light of how most people celebrate it as merely being chocolate and bunnies? Is it possible to glean secular or non-Christian spiritual meaning from the central holiday of the Christian faith?
I think it is not only possible to glean secular or non-Christian spiritual meaning from Easter, but astonishingly easy.
CS Lewis offers some excellent thoughts on the nature of the Resurrection and how it differs from mere survival:
The Resurrection narratives are not a picture of survival after death; they record how a totally new mode of being has arisen in the universe. Something new had appeared in the universe: as new as the first coming of organic life. This Man, after death, does not get divided into “ghost” and “corpse”. A new mode of being has arisen. That is the story. What are we going to make of it?
By reflecting on the meaning of Easter, we can reflect on the opportunities for ourselves to alter not only our actions and our mindsets, but also our entire way of being. We can perform a metaphysical shift of mindset towards hardships and challenges. Shifting from, “How am I going to survive this?” to “How do I continue in being?” Hardships come and go — even the ones that define our lives are merely transitory. If we view them as definitional points to demarcate “beginning” and “end,” then we will fail to see our lives as extending beyond and above these mere transitory sufferings. If we enter into a new way of being, even one that we are imperfectly able to occupy, then we have the opportunity to strive for something greater by setting our minds above the moments that define and demarcate these aspects of our lives. We not only survive, but we live through and experience a new renewal.
I’ve noted before that there is a lot of bullshit in self-help writing, but that much of it emphasizes the very non-bullshit importance of finding or creating a purpose to one’s own life. I think there’s an excellent intersection here between the message of Easter and the practice of being self-willed and thereby fulfilled.
The self-willed man is an individual who lives through events and moments that otherwise define existence for the non-self-willed. The self-willed may experience hardships — just as he may experience nirvanas — but does not define himself as the sum of these experiences. He does not merely survive that which kills the will of most, but lives through it and beyond it, just as Christ does not merely survive crucifixion but continues to live beyond and through it (eventually to ascension).
While the analogy is imperfect — the self-willed man will not actually live through being killed — it is a useful one. Being self-willed and living purposefully is akin to entering into a new state of being that before seemed inconceivable to the individual, because otherwise he would have long ago entered into it.
While others trudge through their sufferings and skate through their nirvanas, they are merely surviving what life throws at them. The self-willed can not only not be struck down by such trappings, he lives through to something more than experiences. This “something more” is different between individuals, but it is manifested in the world not through experiences but, rather, through achievements. By setting a purpose and an end to which she strives, the self-willed individual is able to line up achievements for getting to this goal. Sometimes she fails, but she is not defeated. She lives through for the values which she is striving.