Easter

Dear friends,

My book has now been launched and is sailing!  We had a great book launch party last Friday at a local pub with about 80 people, live jazz, buffet, welly cake, welly throwing competition and my talk sharing the story of how I came to write the book and reading out some of the pieces. If you haven’t bought the book yet, use the link http://shop.christianeducation.org.uk .  It’s called ‘Inner Wellies: Creative Space for Soul Searchers’.  To read about it go to Inner Wellies

Spring has officially come.  The weather is still dreary but the view sparkles with the bright wake-up yellow of daffodils, primroses and celandines.  Soon the blossom will be prettying the trees and telling the sun it’s time to return.  Soon it is holiday season and I, for one, am longing for time away from being busy so I can rest and read and recharge my batteries.

For us, Easter is an integral part of spring, the two re-enforcing each other’s theme of new life.  It must feel very different in the Southern hemisphere where it falls at the beginning of autumn.  All three of the new pieces on my website http://www.janeupchurch.co.uk/ are Easter pieces, written last year when I was in Cornwall.   The three days of Easter all represent different things to us, things that resonate whether or not we are Christians – loss, waiting, the triumph of love.  I will put the pieces in order here but on the website they will be back to front as all the pieces there have the most recent first!

GOOD FRIDAY
Oh, what a thing that Jesus should die, for me, for us, for all who were slate-grey stone towards him, to die for hardness, for sticky selfishness, for hate and desire and fear and all the cocktail of emotions we use to abuse the paths of peace.  How could he make such a dirty thing come clean, what is this strength of love that can hold evil and death and be transformed not tarnished? 

To read the rest go to http://www.janeupchurch.co.uk/view/words

Easter Saturday, the day between death and resurrection, between despair and hope, between pain and healing.  How do we cope when our life as we knew it ends and all we can do is wait?

EASTER SATURDAY
Easter Saturday and all is quiet, the clouds holding the sky like a muffler.  The colours of the flowers are dimmed, there is a snail sitting on a leaf of the wallflower and gulls fill the interstices of the silence with their warnings.  It is the waiting day, the day when the broken egg of dreams has seeped away and all hope seems hidden.  It is a day when the grief and questions of yesterday cannot run their measure but sit tight on the chest like a box. 

To read the rest go to http://www.janeupchurch.co.uk/view/words

How do we live without hope?  We need the lightening of the load we carry, the new rising from the old, the surprise of joy.  And hope that is based on the triumph of love is a hope that touches us all.

THE DAY OF EASTER
God of the glowing and the knowing and the growing, break forth within me as I breast this day.  Break forth from all the stony wastelands, the dead dreams, the ancient aches, for this is the day of Easter and the breaking of the grave.  This is the day of your body burning anew in the quick pulse of life that is now synchronised with eternity, a beat that is burnt into the rhythm of the world, into tortured hopes and wasted years, into my heart and all filled with yearning. 

To read the rest go to http://www.janeupchurch.co.uk/view/words

Happy Easter.  Don’t forget if you want to send me an email, you can’t ‘reply’ to this newsletter.  Use ‘Contact Jane’ on the website.

Love Jane