The words we sing are different
But the tune’s not far away
So stand with us
Join hand in hand,
And raise a sacred call
We sing of glory risen
We sing of joy arisen
We sing that love is risen again
And love is lord of all
~ Emerald Rose
First off, I wish everyone a joyous Easter, and a (belated) Blessed Ostara, and may the upcoming spring bring joy and fulfillment and fertility in all its forms to all your lives.
I will admit that Easter is one of those holidays that I have never fully understood, especially since it is a hybrid of so many things that have gone before it, and so many things that will one day come after. Shifting with the course of the moon, and aligning in all likelihood with the ploughing of the fields (both figuratively and literally I expect) there is much more to this holiday than Sunday best, Easter eggs and cuddly rabbits…
Something that has been driven home for me perhaps more than usual this season….
It’s so odd really, I feel as though I should be more inspired being in the Holy Land on Easter Sunday – a lot of the guests today are going to Jerusalem, several are going to Bethlehem and yet…I can’t help but feel somehow as if this land, if it ever was spiritual to begin with (and I don’t doubt that it was), has had so much beaten out of it that there is nothing of it left to fight over or to be inspired by. This should be the holiest place on earth, where three of the major faiths in the world converge into one central place. It should be a place of beauty and sacrifice and understanding…and I just can’t see that it is any one of those things. Or if it is, they are so buried beneath the horror that our own history has heaped on them that they are no longer visible amongst the ashes.
So much destruction over something that could have been so beautiful, that the beauty itself is perilously close to being lost.
Perhaps that is the lesson to be learned from all of this, perhaps that is what we need most to remember. Boundaries, countries, they are but lines on a map, if you were to fly over this pitted, thirsting war-torn land you would not see them. Those lines exist in the hearts and minds of humankind, and on our maps, nowhere else. Us, them? “They” are “us” and if we are not careful, we will be divided forever by lines none but us can see.
And is that what Moses, Jesus, Eostre, Mary, Freya, Odin, Allah or any of them would truly have wanted?
Love thy neighbour my friends, all else is rhetoric.
You summed up my feelings exactly about the whole place. It’s beautiful don’t get me wrong but it’s has its magic stripped from it from so much war and destruction. Someone actually said to me at the wailing wall. I’m not Jewish does it matter? And I just said it’s all the same God just different teachings and beliefs and yet people forget this so easily.