Easter at May Day

I love the annual Heart of the Beast May Day Parade.

It certainly isn't explicity or specifically Christian. It draws on mythologies of various belief systems and cultures. But if you wish to frame it that way, you can find a lot of Easter in it.

It's richer than I'll try to describe in this blog, but here's the key example as I see it. The story and themes portrayed by the parade usually flow along the lines of that which is good and full of life suffering or dying because of being overcome by evil. One of the portrayls of this is often the Tree of Life being carried through the parade in a horizontal position, draped with black cloth. It looks to me like a cross or a coffin. In the later part of the parade and especially later in the ceremony at Powderhorn Park, we experience resurrection as life triumphs and the Tree of Life is raised up again, alive, with the coming of the sun.

You might say the event succeeds at doing what we're trying to do at church. It connects universal themes to our day to day life in the context of a diverse community that celebrates the triumph of life over death and is re-energized to go forward embracing life and resisting evil, with the support of the community and the Power(s) that be.

Perhaps next year we can join in the workshops that create wonderful imaginative costumes to wear while marching in the parade and/or we can represent Gethsemane in the join in section at the end of the parade.