Split-Pea Easter

I’m making split pea & ham soup today, which I see as a perfect metaphor for Easter.

I don’t know if Jesus was the son of God. Maybe he was only a charismatic guy who started a sweeping cult at a time when poor locals were being taxed out of their homes and harangued by an invading “civilized” culture. Variations on this “savior” theme have happened many times since, and keep happening, all over the world.

I don’t know if Jesus was crucified and rose from the dead. Maybe Jesus studied, as some theories go, with Eastern yogis, and he knew how to stop his heartbeat & breathing, how to pull himself out of it three days later. Or maybe, as others have suggested, the Biblical sacrifice/rebirth theme is a later Christian re-vision of many pre-Christian traditions that tell similar stories.

I know for sure that it’s like the wandering murderer, the Misfit, said about Jesus in Flannery O’Connor’s story (O’Connor kept peacocks, BTW) “A Good Man is Hard to Find”: “If I’d’a been there, if I’d’a known, then things woulda been different.”

But because I don't know, Easter is my reminder that the life Jack Blizzard tried to stifle all winter is on its feet again, basking in the sunlight of longer, milder spring days, blowing Jack a big fat raspberry; that we have come through the long dark and have been stirred to life again by the amazing Cycle, and that the Cycle is pretty darned reliable; and that every sacrifice we make for each other—giving up a parking space, paying a son’s phone bills while he figures out how to move under his own power, passing a kid in English class who’s barely making it, because you see a spark that desperately wants to be fanned into a fire, putting $5 in the homeless guy’s coffee can, laying down one’s life to save another—every sacrifice lifts us ALL up a notch.

Back to the soup metaphor…I know this bothers some folks, but I don’t think the OPU (Organizing Principle in the Universe) cares whether I believe in the Jesus story or not. I think the OPU just goes on stirring the Cosmic Soup, adding perfectly seasoned broth, perfect organic carrots & celery, perfectly lean ham, perfectly green split peas. And if we’re AWARE of the cycle of birth/death/rebirth working in our own lives, if we’re GRATEFUL for the sacrifices we’re able to make and those others have made for us, if we live the next 364 days believing in THIS, then we won’t be that one pea-shaped, molar-cracking rock in this otherwise perfect Soup. Happy Easter.