Here, the day is appropriately beautiful. Everything is growing new shoots. Dear friends, this may not be true where you are, but Easter is not a matter of changing weather, it is a statement of hope. May your Easter be another new start where hope rises…

This cross was scratched in a hermit’s cave on Eilean Mor, the McCormaig islands, some time around one-and-a-half thousand years ago. The monk who scratched it lived in a different world and used different languages and concepts to understand the God who died and rose again. The differences do not matter to God, so why should they matter to us?

The death of God

It is said that on the cross, the Wrath of God was

Satisfied; as if the stretched-out slaughter of his

son was the only thing that could turn his mind

to mercy; as if it could not be remade without

blood being spilled; as if the only way to satiate the

violence of God was through the torture of his own son.

Or perhaps that only ever made any sense in the mind

of religious men; perhaps it was never about the deployment

of heavenly legalistic strategy after all; perhaps it was a last

desperate act, when all else had failed, by a God whose

only surrender was to the way of love.

This is the God I reach for; the God I would live for is

indeed the one who died for me – not to ensure my escape

from the fires of hell, for why should I escape (through a

technicality) that which I deserve as much as the next man?

Rather this is the God who stretched his arms so wide that they

reach around everything that ever was and ever will be. He stretched them

around me.