Easter Gladness

What is Easter and what does it mean to you? Maybe it’s a public holiday, a long weekend, or time away from work when you can go camping or spend time doing other activities. To me, Easter has a spiritual significance. For a long time I thought that Easter occurred once a year, but the more that I study what Mary Baker Eddy says about Easter, the more I find myself questioning why I would only want to celebrate Easter 1 day out of 365. Why not celebrate it every day? Mary Baker Eddy reminds us when talking about Easter in the Manual for the Mother Church, that “gratitude and love should abide in every heart each day of all the years” (60:15-17). She also poses a very thought-provoking question in Miscellaneous Writings on page 179:19-21 when she asks, “What is it that seems a stone between us and the resurrection morning?”

Christian Science has given me a fuller concept of Easter gladness than I had before when thinking of it as one specific day or season. We can rejoice in Easter gladness daily, burying mortality (matter) and bringing immortality (Spirit) into view. Celebrating Easter daily magnifies the glory of God and His dominion and power. This constant celebration is a song of man, God’s perfect, spiritual image and likeness, rejoicing in the spiritual understanding of man’s divine right to demonstrate by reflection this same dominion and power. We have a God-given dominion over hatred, pain, and death. Jesus’ defeat of these claims demonstrated for the world that God is the Life of man; that man’s life cannot be extinguished; and that man, the image of God, is the undying expression of Life. This Easter, we can let our thoughts be filled with the gladness divinely given to us when we awake in His likeness. Why wouldn’t we want this gladness every single day?

 

–Aubrey McMullin, CS

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