I wish I could say I have a glimmer of understanding or feeling of resurrection. I have a belief in the Resurrection, but not an experience of it. Perhaps that is why we retell the story of Easter every year. Would we need to tell it, if we had the inner deed alive in our thoughts, feelings and will?
Like Rudolf Steiner, I don’t think the human soul is ready to experience the truth of inner resurrection. According to Dr Steiner with all his wisdom, we have a few more incarnations before we can have a living experience of resurrection.
How can we experience the Resurrection, if we keep the suffering of Gethsemane, the betrayal, all the events of Good Friday and the descent into hell safe in a story, in versions that aren’t our own?
The story of Easter Sunday fills me with awe, hope and joy as the resurgence of Nature fills me with delight every Spring. As a being living between spirit and nature, struggling to know my humanity and my individuality, I do not doubt that my spiritual and moral development is leading me slowly to the capacity for pure love that will cause me to die for everyone and the freedom from the laws of nature allowing me to rise from my own death to love again.
But for now, I hope for little excruciating moments of felt inner death followed by a powerful quickening of new life. Do I trust that I will be awake to these dim reflections of Inner Easter Mysteries? Once in a while. More often I am asleep to them or barely dreaming their reality.
What grows stronger in me with each Easter as I strive to find words for connecting what is so faint within me to what can be found in the Gospels is the certainty that at some time in the future over a span of great time, one by one we will each crystalize these mysteries in our souls and know in every cell, every breath, every waking moment the power of our own resurrection. We will no longer find a sting in death. And the greatest story ever told will no longer need to be spoken because it will live in each of us and we will recognize it in everyone.
Beautiful, Lynn. I love the way you write. How do you get to the place where you can put words to such delicate thoughts? Like trying to hold a bubble for me.
Dear Lynn,
This has been a WONDERFUL and inspiring series of contemplations, questions, and deep soul searching exercises. Thank you very much for your amazing work! May your Easter be blessed and filled with love.
Warmly,
Kim
Dear Lynn, so many thanks for your ongoing work and the sharing thereof. It is very precious to me and it never fails to bring me some deeper insight.
This Friday during contemplation in the afternoon, our priest spoke about the two criminals on the cross to each side of Christ, and how we also have these two inner beings inside of us; the ;positive’ higher self and the ‘negative’ double – I would say – even though it is of course not so simplistic. But as the priest covered the journey Christ walked towards Golgotha, pictures came to me of Parsival on his long and painful journey, and I thought how similar it is to each of our journeys on earth and how we only discover a tiny bit of that grail when we are near the journeys end. But how amazing it is that everyone’s journey as the active part of our life is the actual element where we learn more; if only we remember to contemplate on each day’s small part. If we then look back after maybe a year and see what was incomprehensible in 2012 is a little bit closer to understanding in 2013, one also get a small idea of ones own treasured proccess. So have I during his past year learnt to loose the sting of death. This came through the deaths of friends and the various ways in wich each of them went through the last days. Even though I lost my firstborn child at 6 months, and have been an Anthroposophist for as long, and understood Engelhardt’s death as something eminently needed to have happened to bring me to Anthroposophy and the understanding I have longed for since I was a child myself, and though I was never afraid of death as the immage of going from one room into another was always part of me, something just fell into place, and now the working with it brings ever new understanding. It all adds up, as they say …
May the rest of your Easter days be blessed, and thanks once again, e
your writing is beautiful to e, love Nancy
Engemi,
I was wondering how you managed to loose “the sting of death”, so to speak?
I have lost almost all of my family members in the past few years and last year the worst shock was the sudden death of my young sister, since her death I seem to be consistently feeling the sting of death, and no matter how hard I try to get rid of it, it is still there, fresh and strong with its grip. 🙁
I know the possibility of rising again, from previous Easters, from previous times of despair. Today I am feeling the hopelessness as the church bells stop sounding and all I feel are the absences. Yet in that silence is something of peace and in that lack of feeling of hope is perhaps a potential. I am with my own isolation and yet the breeze through the trees and in the sunlight dancing, there is the simple vibrating truth of life itself. A subtle joy, a powerful call to remember belonging to the web of life.
Dear Lynn,
Thank you for leading us into a reconciliation between the outer and the inner.
Since my marriage in 1982 I took on me to celebrate Easter with my immediate family and friends and to invte them for lunch. At the end of the day I often felt that I had not received any feeling of resurrection and, disapponted, I was then looking forward to Ascension and Pentecost. Now, I understand that the resurrection is already on its way as I prepare the Easter
lunch and as everyone is ready to drive all the way to our house in the country. I feel the resurrection in the willngness to meet and celebrate.
You have received the Easter Resurrection already early
this week, Lynn, as you wrote your inspiration for each day of this Holy Week.
Beautiful Easter to you, Lynn and to everyone!
Warm greetings.
Marie-Claire R-J
I woke up this morning feel joy and calmness. Where my familiar existential angst lives, I feel a sense of well being. Can I be with this joy with the same equanimity and lack of judgment and story that I try to do when suffering comes?
I feel energy arising seemingly on its own – whereas most of my life I’ve had to whip up some hype to feel any motivation. This energy doesn’t have any mania about it.
My heart is full. I don’t need permission from my parents, my daughters, or my grandchildren to feel good about myself today. Just for today, I put down all those old agreements about why it’s not okay to be happy and joyful.
t
Dear Lynn,
I am deeply grateful for your Easter tide gifts, I have looked forward to each day. Never thought of asking those questions and making the story my own, and meditating on these, I realize now that actually I have been living the story of death and resurrection almost every day in some small or big way, just was not consciously. Now I can look deeper within myself towards a more conscious awakening.
With loving blessings to you and yours,
Giselle
Lynn:
Your insights are like prayers for the reader to carry to all whom we meet. I have been struggling with the concept of the resurrection. I read this morning of a woman who had a dream that Jesus’s transcendence and sacrifice is what built the ubiquitous tunnel of light that near-death experiences all laud. I wondered about that insight, and would include another.
This Easter morning, the red-rocks of a southern Utah desert were still shedding their evening cold when my dog-niece Zoe, a Bassett hound, decided she wanted to fly. Zoe, moves slow. Other hikers must think I am a life-coach when they hear a litany of, “Come on Zoe, you can do it. Come on baby!” repeated over and over, as we ponderously climb the hills after the air-borne enthusiasm of my boxer, Duke. Zoe, had a hard winter. Sickened with a vicious respiratory infection last fall and neck injuries she hasn’t been able to enjoy hiking weekends with us for most of the winter.
This morning, after a long hike, she unexpectedly began to run. When she bolted I let go of her leash. Ears flying behind her like errant rudders she raced down a dusty trail, after my boxer, Duke. Her joy was evident. My laughter erupted from me like the wake of dusty-crimson dust trailing behind her. A impromptu dog version of the Festival of Color, a Easter Celebration.
Zoe’s endurance of her long winter and sudden intent to catch up with Duke, reminded of my own spiritual journey. Perhaps, even how I understand Christ, and Easter. Most days, I feel like I am just plodding along. Unexpectedly, inspired by something within, or without I bound forward with unexpected reserves of energy. Is this not what Spring, and Easter signify?
Recognizing the many moments in my own life where I have experienced miniscule and sometimes profound moments of death and rebirth I have decided to lay my misgivings at the feet of Jesus, and just love the relationships that I have with the divine, and all creation. Even qwqwa
Amen, blessed be.
Lynn:
Your words are like a prayer that we read and take to all whom we meet. Rather than just Easter time, perhaps, it’s all life, including the winged, two-legged, four-legged, crawling-creatures, and swimmers whose life’s sacrifices and joy continue a spiraling circle of renewal to the divine.
Amen, blessed be.
I found Easter easy to celebrate in an inner sense this year; but found my Lenten fast hard to let go. I have grown attache to it. Lynn, the joy you suggest is there is hard to find for me because today, April 1st, is the day in the UK when our wonderful National Health Service (free at the point of delivery) begins the process of being handed over to the private sector. It is a terrible betrayal that the English people have sleepwalked into.
So, what I pray for is nothing less than a miracle, and only the resurrection of Christ can give me may hope that that may happen in my life time.
Hi Lynn,
I love your work. I want to share a link with several programs in response to Easter…enjoy.
http://www.youawakening.com/winter-2015/replay/ .
Hello Lynn. I think we can experience the truth of inner resurrection even in part by watching the process in others who are resurrected. Every time we get to know parts who we really are I believe we experience a resurrection into light and love which is profound if we stop and watch it all. Tonight I watch the full moon and its beauty astounds me. What a wonderful world. Michael.
Hi Lynn,
As to the possibility of inner resurrection, I believe each Easter even in this incarnation we can each experience an inner, living resurrection of our thinking. Those thoughts we have nurtured in our hearts during Lent take wing on Easter morn out into the Light of Space:
“Thoughts move out to the ends of space,
Obscurely binding
Human essence to spirit’s being.”
From Steiner’s Calendar of the Soul, Week 1. I believe the translation is Christopher Bamford’s, taken from Patsy Scala’s Weekly Meditations.
I saw The Dark Crystal yesterday..seem to speak to a good bit of it.
Dear Lynn,
I receive your messages since november last year and I am very thankfull. They are an inspiration to help me find my own questions. I write every question down in my diary and wait for answers. Sometimes they come quick, sometimes the question stays in my head for a few days. And yes, sometimes, the answers come by surprise.
Thank you also for the Easter inspiration. It makes the story of Jesus more personal for me.
Lynn, I appreciate your frankness about not really getting the essence of resurrection. In my own soul, this morning, I felt uninspired and like I could not grasp the Easter mystery at all. The day has become better, and your words reassured me that this is a long time coming and to keep working to develop my own Self’s ability to embrace what I do not yet understand.
Lots of love to you,
Audrie
dear Lynn,
Thank you so much for these challenging inquiries into the mysteries of life, death and rebirth.
The questions you pose are ones we can work on for a long time. And like you, though I do not feel the inner resolution/resurrection most of the time, I do catch glimmers that come now and then, and hope to grow that capacity with each day, month, year. I have complete faith that as humans we are growing towards the direct experience of the Christ and true unconditional Love. May we recognize these developments as they come along, and not sleep through them. Many blessings……..Joya
I have only fragments of awareness:
My lack of imagination
my insensitivity of Christ’s full suffering
And the suffering of others
Limits me
yet my I notices
To simply remain silent
leave the unresolvable unresolved
Allow God of the Beond,
Allow the transcended God of the Beyond
To gently lift me up with Him, to Him
Fall back into the strong arms, held, carried, supported, lifted, maintained, loved.
I don’t have a glimmer of understanding either. Yet being aware of the seems to be sufficient for now. Easter eludes me! But I’m okay with it for now. And as you write, I can revisit it every Easter. Very powerful, confusing, and all okay by me.