Shadow Boxing Easter

Easter came, happened, and went. I almost think that I missed it. I mean, I knew it was coming. The knowledge that last week was Holy Week was stored somewhere in the back of my mind, I think. But Easter was completely uneventful to me this year. Two years ago, I posted daily reflections here from the corresponding day of the week recorded in the Scriptures. Last year was marked by celebration instead of a more meditative observance. I wasn’t sure what Easter would bring for me this year. I didn’t want to plan it, because then it would have felt forced. I just sort of waited to see what would happen as it approached, and what sort of observance would seem most natural as it arrived.

Nothing did. It arrived. It’s over. So now, I’m sitting around on the Monday after thinking about how anticlimactic that was. The family dinner was a bit long and I was overwhelmed with people, and I ended up sitting back and observing (as I frequently do), pondering, “Is this it? Is this Easter? Bummer.”

I’ve never really been one for the chocolate egg and bunny scene, but Easter for the past few years has brought with it either a more sincere or a more enthusiastic reflection upon the core of my faith, but this year I feel almost as though I should be blogging something really profound about what the season revealed to me, that I should be posting some obligatory revelation that appears to have eluded me.

The fact that it’s 50 degrees and raining outside doesn’t help, of course, as this is supposed to be Spring and all. Ironically, pondering the season for a bit this morning as I remembered another blogger’s photo of a quite striking spring flower, combined with reading a friend’s tweet this morning about how Easter was yesterday and today begins the first week of the resurrection and how might this look in our lives, comes the closest to profound that my overly-scheduled life permitted me to grasp from Easter this year. Because the core of it is hope, hope for something new, something reborn, if you will…something popping out in vibrant color from beneath the rain and grey sky that are currently permeating my surroundings.

And I do hope for that, even though at the moment I feel as though I’m shadow boxing. It is an incredibly basic hope at the moment: hope for time, hope for inspiration, hope for productive writing, hope for a positive week. Hope, I think, for the color of the flower of my friend’s photo, at least metaphorically, to break me out of the dreary bleakness I’ve been drudging around in for most of the winter, so that I can approach the rest of the year with a resurrected feeling.

No accident, I think, that we observe the Resurrection in the season that we do. I’d like to discover some deeper level in this hope for a new life, but at the moment, even as I slow down and try to catch my breath, the best I can muster is a very shallow hope in a very deep Truth. I hope that my hope will grow, hope that it will somehow burrow its way out from under my characteristic cynicism and become what it has been in the past.

Here’s to hoping.

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