Happy Good Friday/Easter!

"The best thing I've heard lately is the Christian writer Barbara Johnson's saying that we're Easter people, living in a Good Friday world.

I don't have the right personality for Good Friday, for the crucifixion; I'd like to skip ahead to the resurrection vision of one of the kids in our Sunday school, who drew a picture of the Easter bunny outside the tomb: everlasting life, and a basket full of chocolates. Now you're talking.

In Jesus' real life, the resurrection came two days later, but in our real lives, it can be weeks, years, and you never know for sure that it will come. I don't have the right personality for the human condition, either. But I believe in the resurrection, in Jesus', and in ours. The trees, so stark and gray last month, suddenly went up as if in flame, but instead in blossoms and leaves--poof! Like someone opening an umbrella. It's often hard to find similar dramatic evidence of rebirth and hope in our daily lives."

"The thing about Easter is that Jesus comes back from the dead both resurrected and broken, with the wounds from the nails still visible. People needed to see that it really did happen, the brutality, the human death. He came back with a body--not like Casper or Topper; he didn't come back as the vague idea of a spirit returning. No, it was physical, a wounded body. He had lived, he had died; and then you could touch him, and he could eat; and these four things are as bodily as life gets."

"We celebrated Good Friday that night, a week late. It's a sad day, of loss and cruelty, and all you have to go on is faith that the light shines in the darkness, and nothing, not death, not disease, not even the government, can overcome it. I hate that you can't prove the beliefs of my faith. If I were God, I'd have the answers at the end of the workbook, so you could check as you went along, to see if you're on the right track. But nooooooo. Darkness is our context, and Easter's context: without it, you couldn't see the light. Hope is not about proving anything. It's about choosing to believe this one thing, that love is bigger than any grim, bleak shit anyone can throw at us."

"Easter is so profound. Christmas was an afterthought in the early Church, the birth not observed for a few hundred years. But no one could help noticing the resurrection: "Spring is Christ," Rumi said, "martyred plants rising up from their shrouds." Easter says that love is more powerful than death; bigger than the dark, bigger than cancer, bigger than airport security lines." ~Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith