Easter Day 2020 - All shall be well

On the first day of the Jewish week after Passover, the first day it was permitted to move around after the festival, the women in the life of Yeshua went to retrieve and dress his body. 

But the body of Yeshua, the latest messenger of the justice and compassion of God, had gone missing. 

That sparked a whole new life for the story of Yeshua and — indisputably — launched and continues to launch new, clean, ‘begin again’ lives for countless millions ever since, to the present day. 

For myself, I find resonance with more oblique references to the mystery that is life; the notion of avatars (the material appearance or incarnation of a deity on earth) cannot engage me. 

A brilliant summing up was made by one of our group this past week: 

"I think there has always been a tension between the incarnate Word of social justice and lived truth, and the infinite well of being and possibility we live and move in.  I think doctrines like the Trinity are about bridging that experience without reducing one to the other or denying any part of it."

So, on the day celebrated by western Christianity as Easter Day, a model that means more to me, a model that makes me thrum like a plucked guitar string, is the model of the Hindu goddess Kali, wife of the god Shiva, and goddess of destruction and birth.  Known as the “dark mother”, Kali — a symbol only — symbolises the beginning and ending of being.  Sometimes depicted in her ferocious pose wearing a garland of skulls, she is said to devour karma — the endless ‘Groundhog Day’ cycle of death and rebirth conditioned by our careless, clumsy and stumbling actions — freeing us from its hold.

There is a beautiful devotional chant to Kali:

"Many names has our world Mother

Many dresses and many appearances.

I want to let you know my desire:

At the last moment of my life take me in your lap." 

And this chant, or prayer can be found here:

https://www.discogs.com/Robert-Gass-Chant-Spirit-In-Sound-The-Best-Of-World-Chant/release/6133461

So on this day of new beginnings, what my Unitarianism tells me is that God has already encompassed or dealt with the dread consequences of our mis-steps; and Hinduism, Judaism and Christianity are merely three different ways of saying the same thing:  that in the end, “All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.” ― Julian of Norwich