This is a copy of today’s post on the Proost blog, the final one of a wonderful collection of posts, art and poetry from a wide collection of contributors. This one is mine, so I thought I would share it here too, along with a poem which I did not share on the Proost blog as there has been a bit too much of me over there. Here, you have come to expect that so I undulged myself. Happy Easter everyone.

Today we arrive at a destination of sorts in this great unfolding that we call Easter. Many of us will proclaim the age old He has risen and hear stories about an empty tomb and a cross transcended. Whether you take this literally, or figuratively is up to you, but perhaps we can agree that Christ is indeed arising – s/he is rising every where we look.

Throughout thisProost Lent journey we have heard poets and artists grappling with – and largely rejecting – the attonement theory of the cross known as substitutionary atonement. It was after all, a modern invention, but the roots of it go deep into our Christian history, perhaps even earlier than those arguments between Pelagius and Augustine of Hippo.

Certainly, by the time of the writings of Julian of Norwich, sin was what mattered most. In a world (like ours) riven by war and disease, the job of the Church was to call out sin and purify all heresy, such as those known as Lollards, with their unfortunate association with the Peasant’s revolt, led by Wat Tyler. It was all there- the power of Holy Church, the poverty and overburden of landless peoples, the call to freedom and the violent repression that followed. And yet at such a time as this, a woman sat in her porous cell and wrote things like this;

Some time in the late thirteen hundreds, Julian shared in her revelations what many others have expressed, both before and since.

If God is love and everything is held together by love, then God cannot also be wrath, as then everything would fall apart.

Those Glasgow children painted by Joan Eardley in all their beauty, innocence and poverty were not to be saved from their inherited sin, they were to be loved. Perhaps she knew that she was painting Christ, over and over again.

And in the end, all that is left, is Christ, which is also to say all that is left is love.

This is the culmination – the on-gping completion – of the Easter story. We are children of the living god, brothers and sisters of Jesus who shows us everything that we really are because it is all held together by love.

Original sin

Was I born broken?
Did I corkscrew out into this world 
Preskewed?
If I stare down into my own soul
Do I see only darkness?
Or am I light?

Can love call only to love?
Could it be that (despite the damage)
The deepest parts of me are
Still sacred?
If so, then awake my soul
Awake