♲ Easter Svithe

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Today I was invited rather last minute to speak at Zoom sacrament meeting. So I did a bit of recylcing. As you can tell from the time stamp, this is the draft as it exists before I slip off to bed.

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Today is Easter. Why is today Easter and not some other day? I wish I could tell you, but the way Easter bounces around the calendar, no matter how many times I look up the formula I immediately forget it again. But it has something to do with the full moon.

And the full moon’s a good symbol for Easter. The moon waxes and wanes, regularly dying and returning, to remind us of the death and resurrection of our Savior.

Every halfway worthwhile religion in the history of the world has had a spring festival to remind its followers of the return of life—nothing like waddling, fluffy ducklings to get your mind on the really important things in life. Resurrection and fertility is what spring has always been about. Australians should consider rescheduling their Easter to October—the Southern Hemisphere’s spring.

My religion is itself a symbol of death and resurrection. I don’t mean The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints per se, I mean my own personal inner life of faith. It too, like the moon, waxes and wanes. At times I am a man of faith. Other times I am a spiritual pauper.

Harold B. Lee described testimony not as “something you have today … [that] you are going to have always … [but as something] fragile.” It is hard, he said, “to hold … a moonbeam. It is something you have to recapture every day of your life.”

But that’s to be expected. Way back in 2006, I wrote,

Good old time, dragging us onwards ever onwards to mortality. Now that I’m a whopping twenty-nine, I am regularly reading about people my age dropping dead of heart attacks, brain aneurysm, peculiar cancers, and the like. I would have thought I had at least ten more years before I would feel like the bad news was about my peers. But not so.

I was taught once in a science class that entropy is the only true measure of time. Meaning that death is the only true measurement of life.

Christ’s great work of two thousand years ago, however, was not a merely mortal effort and is not subject to cheap entropy. And his Easter gift is not only to raise my body and to save my soul. Relying on him also allows me to daily recapture the moonbeam of my own faith. For he is the author and the finisher of that faith. The source of all moonbeams.

previous svithe

ps: the moon is a symbol
of the mother and easter
is almost certainly derived
from the name of a goddess
and so you might ask who
pray tell gave the son
to give himself