Easter 2019: How Did I Get Here?

My Lenten practice wasn’t random. This year, I chose to create one thing of beauty each day of Lent (Lent is 40 days). I might not have articulated it on day one, but I chose this discipline in contravention of the more traditional view of Lent as a time of deprivation, penitence, and “doing without” as a cleansing process preparing us for the rebirth of Easter. The concept of humanity as sinners needing to be washed clean by the blood atonement of Jesus’s crucifixion is not for me.

I’m not alone in this. Fr. Richard Rohr, a Franciscan, says the substitutionary atonement theory of Christ has never been part of his order’s belief. What a relief. Even as a young girl, I wondered who would admire a parent that would send his son to his death for any reason whatsoever; it offended me that my selfishness was supposed to be so great that I thought this sacrifice was okay because it was for me.

So what is Easter to me? It is the mystic moment when we choose not to hate. Choose not to exact revenge. Choose to love inside a sea of hate. When we choose to look for—and find—God in the most terrible of circumstances. This most unheroic of choices, that is the cross and Easter.

It is a view of Jesus I chose to participate in this Lent when I took on adding one thing of beauty to the world each day. It was an act of support and solidarity, you see. God suffuses this amazing world. This is the way Jesus saw the world, as full of God. I want to see it that way too.