Years ago, a few weeks before Easter, someone walked past me eating Easter candy.
Not easily shocked, I think of myself, a veteran of the tough streets of downtown Seattle, but by that I was taken aback.
People I know now celebrate Easter as an occasion, but not as a religious holiday. I struggle to make sense of that, though I don’t know why, because that’s much more the case with Christmas.
Sell the candy, people will celebrate the marketed holiday.
Christmas has always been that way, though, whereas Easter hasn’t been so much so that until nowadays.
Even college baseball is starting to have a presence on television, although not so long ago that was completely obscure, maybe because baseball’s telegenics suffer compared to football and basketball.
Easter as a secular occasion is a tough one, though.
My wife wasn’t Catholic before we met. She converted so we could have a Catholic wedding, after I explained that any other kind of marriage wouldn’t seem necessarily more serious than any other type of civil contract. (Although my relationship with my wife would not have depended on that contract for me to have the deepest loyalty to her and our marriage.)
So Catholics we are, and a Catholic child we have. Christmas and Easter are religious holidays, and as the first Catholic of the family, I have the obligation to promote, cultivate, and maintain this aspect of our identity.
Not easy.
Can I prove that what we believe is valid? Of course not.
What I can do is try to explain why I find plausible what we believe.
First, the belief in God. Given what we know of the universe and the cosmos, the idea of an Omnipotent Creator seems far-fetched. The idea of Dark Matter seems far-fetched to me, though I trust the scientists who accept it as fact. I’m not an expert in the field, so I learn from them.
I’m not an expert on God, but there are people who are, and these people are found in every religious tradition. I learn from them, and piece it all together into a workable scenario. These people are compelling and convincing enough that I believe they’re right, everyone from Elijah the Tishbite to John the Evangelist to Catherine of Siena to Paramahansa Yogananda to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Nothing in life is more frustrating than the truth that we really know nothing about what happens after death. Is what we believe all for nought, in the end, despite the value and meaning we derive from our religions in this life? It seems impossible to imagine any kind of scenario that has any chance of being at all accurate.
Is Charon, namesake of a moon of Pluto, out there taking people across the River Styx?
Jesus, some of us think, really did die and come back, so He is the proof of life after death, but that depends on believing in the literal truth of those Gospel accounts. Not exactly science journal material!
The idea of Jesus walking out of the tomb in those wee hours is frightful. Only someone of truly great faith would want to go back and wait outside that tomb.
But is it at all far-fetched that the Son Of God would do that? Or be born of a Virgin? Or die on a cross? Not far-fetched at all. That Jesus did all that would help explain how the Apostles were transformed after the Resurrection into the fearless characters they became.
Dubious as it can sound, the idea of guidance by the Holy Spirit can explain why so much good is done by so many in the world.
So long ago. Such different times. How can we believe in all that?
In Tales Of The Hasidim, there’s a story about a person who grew to doubt his faith. No one he went to could convince him otherwise. One day he went to visit an old rabbi.
“Suppose it was true?” the old rabbi asked with a smile.