An Easter Story

According to the Eastern Orthodox Church, Mary Magdalene is really the whole reason that we celebrate Easter, because it was she whom Christ appeared to first in his resurrection. If you have ever wondered why we celebrate with eggs at Easter, take a look at Franciscan friar Robert Lentz's iconograph of Mary Magdalene pointing at an egg. Curious, isn't it?

As we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus this day, the Easter bunny will no doubt get much more attention than Christ's constant companion. The tradition of the Easter bunny extends back only to the nineteenth century wiith German Anglican immigrants who gave colored eggs and candy as gifts to good children, kind of like a furry little Santa Claus. Prior to this the Orthodox Church maintained a tradition of fasting from eating eggs during Lent, so colored hard-boiled eggs were used as a way to celebrate breaking the fast on Easter morning.

But there is even a more ancient story that associates the egg with Easter. As this story goes, after the resurrection Mary Magdalene traveled to Rome, where she was admitted to the court of Tiberius Caesar. Mary conveyed to the court her deep love for Christ and how poorly justice was served under Pontius Pilate during his trial. She explained to Caesar that Christ had risen, and to help explain his resurrection, supposedly she took an egg from off the feast table and pointed to it.

An egg is the most feminine object one can imagine – a symbol of fertility and all creation. An egg is the beginning, and life comes from within it. There was no iPhone to record her exact words, but she said something like the following. An egg, like a seed, contains the end at the beginning. The seed already has the bloom held within it. The egg holds safely inside whatever new life its precariously fragile shell is meant to protect. And if that new life is going to emerge, it has to come from within in its own time. We cannot hurry the birth. We can only let the tiny creature within the egg arrive on the day of its choosing. Each of us has to remain in this trusting, quiet unknown, as any mother or creative artist knows, and let each life declare its existence when and only when it is ready.

A body is like an egg, only it contains a soul. In the dark of the womb, the only light is the soul as the new life waits to emerge from within. The soul is the beginning, but also the end. Birth can happen, ideally, many times before we die. The more the soul rises, resurrects in this life, the more love is present inside us. The soul is what we are when we come into this life and it is what we'll be once again when we leave.

According to legend, Caesar denied that a person could resurrect. He looked at Mary, and he looked at the egg, and said a person could no more resurrect than the egg in her hand turn red. Immediately the egg turned red.

Each of us enters life from the egg of our mother. Consider the interesting fact that all the eggs that every woman will ever carry are formed in her ovaries when she is but a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her own mother. This would mean that the cellular life of every human being begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother's womb!

Wishing a Blessed Easter to All.