Easter, day of triumph

GERTRUDE E. VELGUTH

Most of us have enjoyed a day of triumph. Was it graduation? Or did our red-letter day find us grasping a gleaming trophy, symbol of athletic, theatrical, artistic, or literary accomplishment?

The calendar of the Christian world highlights Easter as an enormously more important day—one of supreme spiritual triumph. To the Christian Scientist, instructed in the momentous significance of the risen Christ, this day of death's impotence, of Life's victory, of hatred's proven inability to destroy, of Love's conquest, illustrates the limitless possibilities of each day.

Unthinking, casual acceptance of the resurrection or shallow reasoning may temporarily cause a busy populace to overlook the tremendous impact of Christ Jesus' supreme proof of compassion for the human race. He was dedicated at whatever cost to bringing comfort and enlightenment to a troubled world. Those suffering from grief weren't strangers to Jesus. He was not indifferent, would not pass them by. How truly he understood that plea of an unenlightened world voiced by Job, "If a man die, shall he live again?"^{Job 14:14;}

It was Jesus' divinely ordered task to prove through complete self-surrender the resurrecting power of divine Life, the power that sooner or later each one of us will prove, the power that is right here actively available now. His assignment was tremendous, yet it was a mission he was divinely qualified and appointed to fulfill. The resurrecting energies of Love and Truth, expressed in forgiveness, understanding, compassion, were his life-sustaining forces. These forces crowned his day of triumph, ensured his emergence from the grave, afforded proof of immortality. Perfect spiritual understanding was his salvation.

The Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, defines "resurrection" as "spiritualization of thought; a new higher idea of immortality, or spiritual existence; material belief yielding to spiritual existence; material belief yielding to spiritual understanding."^{Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 593;}

With the way spiritually defined, you and I can begin a new calendar, circling days very much our own, days of personal spiritual progress, but whose lessons we gladly communicate.

There's the day we recall with deepest gratitude when we sensed and proved Soul's all-presence, when we felt its radiance and peace in the midst of evil's suggestions of turmoil. And the amazing day when, of all things, we remained silent in the face of undue criticism, because suddenly we remembered Jesus' for-bearance when censured. We didn't forget that he is our Way-shower.

Then followed triumphant days when we actually stuck to the spiritual facts of being, to purity and decency. We simply refused sensuous seduction, flatly denied the power of false attraction, of false appetite and passion.

We cherish these and other days of triumph, treasure their evidence of divine Mind's immediate defense and guidance. Everyone who calls on God, understanding His will for man as revealed in Christian Science, has his own times of victory. Through the teachings of Science days of moral achievement and spiritual proof succeed each other with rapidity as well as with increased buoyancy.

The day of triumph is here and now. It's the day when with the Psalmist we declare, "Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing: thou has put off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness."^{Ps. 30:11.} The day of never-ending Life, of infallible Truth, of omnipotent Mind, is the real, the only day. The time to prove the resurrecting power of the Christ is today. Triumphant Easter illustrates Life's indestructible forces, its immortalizing energies.

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