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Friends,
Have you ever noticed how the world seems to be full of symbols?
No matter where we look we are surrounded by them - all requiring to be interpreted so that we can get on with our daily lives.
They have become such a huge part of our lives that we now take so many of them for granted and perhaps don't even notice that we are interpreting them as we go along. If you just stop and think for a minute I am sure it will amaze you just how many times in a day you interpret a symbol - be it the buttons on your TV remote control, the dials on your cooker, the symbols on your clothes when you try to decide what temperature to wash them at, the dashboard on your car, even going to the toilet when you are out and about requires you to look at symbols and decide which one to use!
It suddenly seems as if we cannot live without symbols!
As I write this we have journeyed through Lent and are now immersed in Holy Week, that sombre time which leads us on towards Good Friday and what seems like a hopeless end.
However, we then journey on beyond the cross to the resurrection of Easter Day and that resurrection brings us an endless hope.
The Easter story brings not a hopeless end but an endless hope!
Easter as you know is a time of many symbols, not just Easter eggs, Easter bunnies and fluffy yellow chicks and if you have journeyed through the Easter Labyrinth this year on your own spiritual journey through Holy Week then you will have encountered many of those symbols of Easter at the `Reflection Points' along the way.
The bread and the wine, the cup of suffering, the thirty pieces of silver, the chains, the crown of thorns, the scarlet robe, the bowl where Pilate washed his hands of Jesus, the nails, the cross itself - and while the journey of the Labyrinth may end at the tomb that is not where our journey ends - for rather like planting those bulbs of the Labyrinth to signify our new life in Christ - our dying to our old life and rising again - for us the empty tomb is where our journey begins with new life in Christ.
Jesus came to prepare us for life - new life in him - those early disciples listened but did not hear, saw the symbols and the signs but did not understand, but Jesus has prepared us for life, not death and Easter and the Risen Christ reassures us of that.
So look to the cross and to the tomb - look and see the symbols not of a hopeless end, but of an endless hope.
Easter Blessings,
Caryl
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