I went to church on Easter.  I know what you’re asking, what is an ex-Christian like me doing at church on Easter?  Well, I wanted my kids to hunt for eggs after the music-filled service and get free candy.  Easter music is always of better quality than regular Sunday church music, where the second lady on the right sings the high notes slightly off key, and the second guitar on the right has one string out of tune.  That stuff grates on my nerves every time.

My husband is a progressive Christian.  My kids live in a predominantly Christian nation, although the local region is predominantly “none of the above”.  They need to understand the basic rituals involving Christianity, for cultural context later in life.  The church is filled with other progressive Christians, in contrast to the greater body of the church.  They proclaim to be open and accepting of everybody.  I make no such claims.

One of the rituals this church does on Easter is to stick chicken wire and ribbon around a cross, and have everybody put flowers on the wooden cross.  I can totally appropriate a public ritual for my own ends, and I did, but that’s a private matter.

The pastor’s sermon was on death and resurrection, as it would be.  We are all dead, in one way or another.  We have experienced a wide variety of personal deaths, whether of illness, or of job loss, or of relationship death, or of identity deaths.  This is one of the pieces of the inner transformation of a magician, the killing off of the parts of yourself that don’t work for you.  Then, there’s resurrection, and we are all come back from the dead as well.  We have healed of our illness, gotten a new job, made new relationships, forged new identities, created new communities, and brought back to life the parts of yourself that have started working for you again.  Silly people, you can’t die, so how could you kill parts of yourselves?  You can diminish them, strengthen others, but that shame, that guilt, that incorrigible trouble-maker, will always be there to call on when you need it.

This is basic cycle theory, after all.  Markets rise and fall.  Civilizations rise and fall.  The age of the dinosaurs rose and fell.  Saviors and comic book heroes do the same.  As we plunge into darkness, is there faith that the light will rise again?  Heading into spring, heading into fall, the seasons cycle, the years cycle, the sunspots cycle, the climate cycles, the planetary orbits cycle, the ice ages cycle, never again to be born the same, yet promising to revisit vaguely familiar times again.  People rise and fall.  That’s part of Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, to acknowledge that people go through waves of self-confidence and humility.  That’s not bi-polar.  That’s normal.  Women get happy and mad and sad in cycles.  So do men.  I ponder whether spirits and deities do as well.  The myths certainly say so.