Stories make the impossible possible, so too does love
It is hard to ignore Easter Sunday, even as Quakers who do not consider any day more special than another, each day is sacred. Quaker meeting houses are usually as plain as you will find. There is a room, chairs and maybe a vase holding flowers in the centre. Nothing adorns the walls. So it is not as if a cross will remind. Oh, there is a clock as we all need to know the time!
Yet such is the cultural force of some things that they are embedded inside us. I have no need for a cross on a wall, as my head is full of crosses.
A friend stood, “ I keep getting the words. ‘Don’t focus on death, focus on love.” I was thinking to myself, “Even Ann is being affected, as I think she would describe herself as ‘agnostic’.”
I was thinking that this Easter has been a clash of dates. Ash Wednesday was on Valentine's Day, and Easter Sunday shares the date this year with April Fool’s Day. I noticed earlier that on Facebook, someone had posted, “ Trump has resigned.” For a moment, I believed it, but then I realised it was April Fool’s Day. Could it be that Eashoa’s resurrection was an April Fool’s Day joke? Do we momentarily believe it only to quickly follow it with disbelief?
Sam stood, “ While the resurrection does not speak to me, I can appreciate the life and teachings of Jesus.”
Then came the words, “Stories make the impossible possible, and so too does love.”
Should I share them or should I hold them? They were so brief yet said so much that I was on my feet and they were out of my mouth.
You see here where we as Friends waiting on the same spirit that raised Christ from the dead, yet perhaps like many, our minds were puzzled by that question over the resurrection.
To me, there is a greater miracle that we believe that the Spirit finds its way to us every Sunday and finds a body that communicates on its behalf. Surely, raising a body from a grave is only one level up.
Later in the book shop, I read the preface to Lawrence Krauss book, ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told so far’. It tells the story of the universe in scientific language. It was in this that I thought perhaps herein lies the great divide between those of us who are switched on by science and facts and those of us who like a story that moves our emotions and imaginations. Some of us may actually take it so far that we become characters in the story and begin to feel love from the other characters in the story; now that is miraculous.
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