Letting Love heal through heartbreak – a pathway to resurrection
Easter. Happy Ostara. Happy Spring. However you name this season, something in us seems to open up when we this time of year comes around.
And when I think about the Easter story, it lands a little differently for me than it’s often told.
Easter marks the end of Holy Week for Christians around the world. There seems to be a lot of attention on the crucifixion — on the suffering, the sacrifice, the idea of a God who required retribution and offered up a son to pay the debt of human sin. I get the pull of that story. It names something real. It meets us in our brokenness. When you are struggling, or when you love someone who is suffering, it can be difficult to see things from a place of perfect, whole, and complete.
And yet the more potent part of the story is the resurrection. Not Jesus’s personal resurrection but the idea that we can all reclaim ourselves when we surrender to our divinity. That’s where the story of Jesus of Nazareth gets real for me. It’s the story about a man who surrendered his humanity so that he could integrate it with his divinity; we are shown the promise of our own eternality in the example set by a master teacher.
What “Sin” Actually Means
In new thought philosophy, sin isn’t damnation. The word itself — hamartia in the Greek — simply means missing the mark. It’s the gap between who we know ourselves to be and how we’re showing up in the moment. Not a verdict, just an observation. And more importantly, an invitation.
The invitation to remember who we are and to reclaim our wholeness.
The Jesus I Find Compelling
The historical Jesus grew up in a religious culture that routinely excluded the poor, the sick, and the “unclean” from the temple — from God’s presence, essentially. And he simply refused to accept that. From the core of his being, he knew: there are no exceptions. Every person, regardless of station or circumstance, belongs to God. Is one with God.
So he became a champion for the ones who’d been left out. He lifted people toward their own wholeness. He let suffering break him open — not break him down. And that is a profound distinction.
To be so grounded in love that when you encounter someone else’s pain, you don’t get pulled into it — you feel a love rise up in you that serves both of you. It was a powerful model 2,000 years ago, and it’s no less potent today.
The Both/And of Easter
Here’s what I believe: there is wisdom in the crucifixion and the resurrection. We don’t get to skip the dying. In fact, one of the spiritual traps in new thought traditions is the temptation to rush straight to prayer — to want the uncomfortable thing to simply go away — before we’ve been fully present with what it has to teach us.
The crucifixion, metaphysically, is about being present with suffering long enough to glean what it carries. To walk through it, not around it. To let it do its work.
And then — always, I mean ALWAYS — there is a resurrection. There is an eternal cycle of dying and a renewal. There is always a way through to the other side, where we remember the greater truth of who we are.
Jesus didn’t die for our sins, he died to the limited experience of the material world. Jesus rose up out of the ashes of his fate and reclaimed his divinity – the same divinity that lives in you and me.
The Invitation
What breaks your heart? Bring it forward and let it break you open. And from the place of an open heart invite your own divinity to experience life through you … right where you are, right in the thick of this thing we call life.
And as you make space for your own personal renewal use this mantra to keep you focused on what’s really true about you and your life.
There’s only one Life.
This Life is God’s Life.
This Life is Perfect.
This life is my life now.
We become what we’ve already been all along, not because we added anything, but because we’ve stripped away the attachments and become present to our true nature.
And this, my friends, is a resurrection worth celebrating.
