It’s Easter, and More

Over the course of the past Holy Week, my husband was preparing for services culminating with Easter today — the pinnacle of the Christian calendar.

Meanwhile, I was, for the first time, teaching a unit on ancient India to high school juniors. In my mind’s eye, I saw temples with elaborate carvings and women in colorful saris as I made the daily drive up and down a fairly bland stretch of highway.

It made for a kind of interesting mash-up around here.

While the unit didn’t go into any depth on Hinduism and concentrated instead on the succession of rulers during the Mughal Empire, I did give the students a kind of condensed version of The Ramayana – the famous Indian epic dating back to 300 B.C.

And they liked it! Fact is, the story has about everything you need for a good read: a hero (Rama) who is understood to be the embodiment, or avatar, of the god Vishnu, separated from his rightful kingdom and exiled to the woods; a beautiful wife who shows what chastity is all about (Sita) who is abducted by the evil and powerful ruler on Sri Lanka (Ravana); and even a monkey king (Hanuman) who rallies his troops to help the hero win her back and then return to claim his power. If you’ve ever wanted to know what dharma is all about, well, just read this book. You’ll carry yourself taller afterwards, I promise.

There are, not surprisingly, plenty of parallels with stories from the Bible. Some scholars have even argued that Jesus, in demonstrating such nobility of character and triumphing over darkness, can be seen as yet another form of Vishnu, or a related Hindu god – Krishna. Naturally, though, there are plenty of differences, too. For one, in the Christian tradition, Jesus is recognized as the one and only divine incarnation of a one and only God. His power comes from a kind of self-emptying process; he gives himself so that the rest of the world may live.

While Christianity is pretty clearly a “monotheistic” religion, Hinduism (with approximately 950 million followers in the world today) is considered either “polytheistic” or “pantheistic”—in that there is, in a way, one God called Brahma who rolls through all things and all people.

It depends on how you look at it.

Outside on the trails, the ice and snow are finally beginning to give way to rapidly running water— what a wonderful sound it makes, as if proclaiming newfound freedom — and of course to mud. When you look out on almost any expanse of land now, you’ll see a messy mix of everything, with too many earth tones to be called a “mosaic” really, but still a conglomeration of different elements, all in flux. It’s a kind of breaking up, with spring finally taking over from winter, presided over by the noisy red-winged blackbirds, who offer flashes of welcome bright red and yellow color on their wings.

Yes, in a way it looks exactly like “resurrection.” I’d have to say that I definitely see the virtue of “ahimsa” out there too. Either way, especially in the face of a relentless drumbeat of horrors in the world, we’d better pay attention to what the earth is telling us about balance, about harmony.