A Christian Post for Easter

 For about two years of my life I was what is known technically as an “Anglican contemplative religious” in layman’s language a monk. Monks come in different flavours and I guess if you were looking for a job description for a contemplative it would be “praying the world along” the working day contained a lot of meditation.

Due to a misunderstanding I was attached to an academic order and they even tried to teach me New Testament Greek, thankfully I have forgotten the written part of this, languages are not my strong point and this one even has a different alphabet.

 Some of the sounds remain though particularly when they don’t need much in the way of translation, St Paul, who obviously was a Greek when trying to explain what it was all about, the “it” being the mystery of the gospels made a series of sounds in Greek not unlike “Christos Iasus in humen”. Which I suppose boils down to, there is now, because of this, an everlasting sense where god appears in or though other human beings.

On this Easter Day, if you bumped into someone who appears to have recently been beaten about a bit, has suffered a certain amount of mental bruising, type of thing, this can be taken as a sort of indicator that you may have had some sort of religious experience, without being aware of it at the time. There is also a sense here that if you were aware of it at the time then it wouldn’t have happened.

I would imagine that most of us have heard bits of the post crucifixion new testament where the accounts of the risen Christ seem to be along the lines of this sort of thing, and I guess that something Christianity has done, even for non Christians, is to give or amplify, this chance that not all religious encounters need to have that old testament sense of a finger pointing out of the cloud.