Kierkegaard was right when he said we are lucky we don’t have to understand what we believe.

Easter is the most profound of Christian holidays, but also the most difficult.

Nothing in life is more exasperating and frustrating than the simple reality that nobody can prove what happens after death. All we know is this life, which, by faith, we place in the context of our most cherished and elaborate frameworks.

We are souls, spiritual beings having this physical experience, physical beings having this spiritual experience. But the soul predates the body, and will survive it, to inhabit a glorified body in the afterlife.

Easter gives us the resurrected Christ, but the Bible doesn’t give us much detail.

“What did He look like?” would be the first question many of us would have asked Mary Magdalene. The Bible doesn’t tell us what Jesus looked like before or after the resurrection. I know the explanations of why those details weren’t included, but I maintain that the narrative suffers from the lack of details.

I figure, once the Messiah appears, that’s an indication that humanity has evolved about as much as it ever will, so it’s hard to say those writers were simple fellows with crude literary technique. We assume the scriptures were guided by the Holy Spirit, and that what we have is what’s best suited to the intent and purpose.

Who knows? We spend our lives wondering about these things, figuring, if we ask these questions, everybody must, but is everybody the same as us nowadays? No. We are an argumentative and contentious people, quick to pick a hole in an inconsistent argument, quick to question the authority, credibility, and arrogance of bossy know-it-alls.

The Biblical authors lived in a much smaller world. Why describe Jesus when eveybody back then would have had a really good idea of what He looked like, given the scarcity of ethnic types?

I wish sometimes Christians were more reluctant to depict Jesus. Where did the long hair come from? The perfect beard and skin? I have a “photo” of the image on the Shroud of Turin. That person looks, not classically handsome, but strong and charismatic, as I would hope.

Easter is a frustration. The idea is mesmerizing that this singular event in history took place as simply as a man would awake, sit up, take off his pajamas, stand up, get the stone blocking the tomb’s entrance out of the way, and go for a walk in the predawn twilight. There might have been angels, and terrified guards running away. Maybe Jesus had a flag, or a stick, for a prop. Maybe there were only a few women on their way to the tomb, and they thought they met Jesus, then knew they really had when they got to the tomb and He wasn’t there.

What happened to his burial clothes? What happened to the cross?

It’s hard to imagine that we don’t know these things. That we don’t know what happens after we die.

What happened to Mom and Dad after they died.

Were their guardian angels there to lead them to Heaven? Did they see their parents, brothers and sisters? Did they see God, and Mary, and Jesus? Were they threatened by demons? Are they in Purgatory, and what is that like? Are their souls residing in other persons, other beings, another multiverse? Did their souls get just that one chance, and Jesus has already judged them?

Don’t know. Don’t know. Don’t know. Don’t know. Don’t know. Don’t know. Don’t know.

Good thing we don’t really have to!