An Easter Meditation on Death and Resurrection

It's not what we think it is.

It happened three times last fall.

I’ve lived in this little town of mine for decades. I’ve sat for countless hours gazing at the autumn here, and yet I’d never seen anything like it before. The conditions have to be perfect. Death happening at just the right moment. Wind kicking up and dying down at just the right moment. Eyes to see it at just the right moment.

A constellation of golden leaves floating placidly on a still river, like a sunburst in the middle of the water.

The first time I saw it I was on a bike ride. The second, driving in my car alone. And the third time, my son pointed it out on the way to school one morning. “Look at those leaves on the water, Dad. They’re beautiful. They’re glowing.”

Never before. Then, three times in a week. It made me wonder what kind of message the scene might hold. I prayed about it. I meditated on it. And this was the revelation:

I like to think of myself as a towering tree, but I’m merely a single leaf.

I identify as this tall, strong, deeply rooted thing, which goes through a season of flourishing, and then a season of barrenness, before another season of flourishing, and so on. It’s easy, when you’re young and driven to experience yourself in this way. You fall down seven times and get up eight. Death and resurrection, and the resurrection is always a new season of flourishing.

It’s getting harder and harder to hold on to that identity.

As I age, it’s growing more and more difficult to tell myself I’ll always keep growing taller and stronger. It’s becoming more and more absurd to pretend like everything grows in one flourishing direction forever. The self-deception is wearing thin.

In the leaves on the water, I was given a new metaphor for who I am, for who we all are.

The grand tree along the river isn’t me—it represents this thing we call life. We are fortunate to bud as a single leaf upon it—fortunate to survive and to grow and, even, to flourish. That is what the first half of life is for: growth and expansion.

The second half is when we learn to let go of the tree.

We grow most beautiful in this second half of life. Most golden. And then we are pulled from the tree and we fall, but we don’t fall into nothingness. We fall into the flow—the flow that is God or the universe or source or existence, or whatever you want to call it. We float in the Great Flow.

Last autumn, in those golden leaves on the water, I saw that I don’t want to wait until I’m dead to float on the flow. I want to surrender my attachment to the tree now. I want to allow the falling now. I want to settle into the flow now. I want to trust it and allow it to take me where it will. To gradually grow in my faith that this floating is even more beautiful than life on the tree.

To see that, indeed, it glows.

I share this with you on Holy Saturday, because this week of Easter has me thinking about the resurrected Jesus. He didn’t walk out of the tomb and reestablish himself as an even grander, more towering tree. He didn’t go out and preach Sermon on the Mount 2.0, with pyrotechnics this time. He didn’t go pick an even more ferocious battle with the Pharisees. He didn’t finally succumb to the demands of the people and become the big, strong, and powerful Messiah they were all hoping for by marching on Rome.

He more closely resembled a fallen leaf floating on the flow.

He was at first confused for a humble gardener. He appeared quietly in a room of his friends and showed them his wounds. He sidled up to to two more friends, chatted, and broke bread with them. He started a campfire on a beach and cooked some breakfast. He was as ordinary as a leaf, and yet something about him glowed.

In The Unhiding of Elijah Campbell, I wrote, “In the Bible, Jesus dies on a Friday, and there’s a lot of talk about that. Then he’s resurrected on a Sunday, and there’s even more talk about that. No one talks much about Saturday, though. Death and resurrection. No one talks much about the and that bridges the two.”

What happened to Jesus on Saturday, as he lay between death and resurrection? What was it like to be him, falling from the tree of life, entering into the flow? What might my life look like if I fell with him in that way? What might our world look like if we all fell into the flow like that?

I wonder if it would glow.