Happy Easter! Thank God in his love for us that His Son, our Savior, has been raised! The voyage has ended, the journey complete. Perhaps you ran a good race throughout Lent, perhaps you finished strong, but regardless, we are here on this brilliant day, in this brilliant light to claim the victory Jesus has won for us. I have often wondered why we don’t see the Easter season as a time of refreshment and don’t delve deep into the waters of joy as quickly as we do the forty days of Lent. The Easter season is ten days longer than Lent but often it seems like we only celebrate for one day and it is back to the sterile mandatory demands of life. I suppose resurrection takes work too. It calls for a daily realization that while there is always work to be done it also takes great work to look in the mirror and perhaps say, “I’m still here. I’m O.K.” We have to ask the question in this season what do I want my new resurrected life to look like? I toiled for it, so how will I let it grow?
Perhaps it is coincidental that I accidentally fell upon filmmaker Martin Scorsese’s 2014 commencement speech at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts. He speaks about this rededication to our dreams in very practical terms. He writes:
“You can’t do your work according to other people’s values. I’m not talking about also ‘Following your dream’ either. I never liked the inspirational value of that phrase. Besides being sentimental, it’s beside the point. Dreaming is a way of trivializing the process. The obsession that carries you through the failure as well as the successes. Which can be harder to get through. If you’re dreaming, you’re sleeping and it’s important and imperative to always be awake to your feelings, your possibilities—your ambitions. But you also know this for your work, for your passion—every day is a rededication, painters, dancers actors writers filmmakers. It’s the same for you as it’s for all of us. Every step is a first step, every brush stroke is a test, every scene is a lesson, every shot is a school. So let the learning continue.”
We may not get to the empty tomb as fast as others, like the running Apostles on that first bright morning. We may stumble more than others but that is not the point. We are the ones not running to the tomb, but the one inside it. We get to roll away our own stone. If we carried our crosses, then we can rise from it too. Have a blessed Easter Season!
I’ll be seeing you,
Elliot