In a very few days the Holy Triduum will roll around again. Resurrection is a lengthy process and a recurring one. That’s the lesson I’ve learned in the last year. Unless there is some resurrection in this life—which, in fact is the very life Jesus says is eternal—it will not matter to us that our bodies shall be raised up when we die. A distant heaven will not matter if we don’t begin to see heaven in our lives now. You must understand, at Easter last year my problems were far different from those of atheist or agnostics or faithless Christians. It was not that I didn’t believe in the Resurrection. Simply that it no longer had any bearing in a life that sorely needed to be revived.

Now I begin to see what it is to be reborn, to take on new names. Nearly a year later (a spiritual year, for Easter’s time shifts from calendar to calendar) there are things that I no longer am, and things I never thought I would be, names I never thought I’d apply to myself: God manifests in the strangest places. Elijah: God is God.

Last year everything fit and everything was in order, but it was all dead and past its purpose. A few paradoxes in my life made me wonder. Now I take them for granted. In the western world we are so split up and compartmentalized that if we are to ever be whole a little paradox is inevitable. Yesterday I read someone describe themselves by the bland and disconcerting title: secular humanist. But after the shrug I realized that’s what I am too. My best friends are Catholic. On Sundays and during the Triduum I will mostly attend a Catholic church. When I hear them speak of heaven and hell, forgiveness, reward and punishment I realize that none of these motivates me and that whatever church title I wear I am really a secular humanist. My spirituality is really Quaker though I can’t stay away from a good Mass. I don’t believe in Rome, but because being a good Anglican means never forsaking where you come from, never cutting off other Christians, I’ll never renounce being Roman Catholic. I am a Christian, but I am an apprentice to a druidic tradition and hence, unregrettably pagan. I have as many shades as a stained glass window and am made up of about just as many pieces of broken down and ground up crystal.

But for the first time in a very long time I am also myself.

I am whole.

I begin to know what it means to be resurrected.