Families getting together for church, children dressed up in their best outfits, Easter dinner—and all under a warming sun and spring returning (at least in the Northern Hemisphere).

There's much that is appealing about Easter time even for people who aren't sure what they think about the Bible's account of Jesus' resurrection.

But there is a great deal more to Easter than the way it is generally observed. More is involved even than a religious faith in life after death. The Easter message tells of the true nature of our lives right now.

If we feel buried in some impossible mess, Easter has much to say to us. It tells us that we can do better, that we can find a way out and a way to go forward.

The reason we can, Christian Science explains, has to do with that which made Easter possible in the first place—Christ Jesus' proof that God is actually man's Life.

Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered and founded Christian Science, writes in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures of how a new understanding of life dawned on the closest followers of Jesus as they saw him after his resurrection: "Convinced of the fruitlessness of their toil in the dark and wakened by their Master's voice, they changed their methods, turned away from material things, and cast their net on the right side. Discerning Christ, Truth, anew on the shore of time, they were enabled to rise somewhat from mortal sensuousness, or the burial of mind in matter, into newness of life as Spirit."

Apparently, it wasn't just that his disciples saw Jesus alive again and so were encouraged, but that what he had taught them about God, Spirit, and about their being the children of Spirit, came back into focus. It must have seemed brighter and more obviously true than ever before. They themselves were lifted out of the mental darkness of believing that Jesus' life, and everyone else's, was dependent on matter and so could be crushed and destined to fail or to end. They must have seen more clearly than ever before that a man's life doesn't depend on material events but on his relationship to God and on all that God, Spirit, is—just as Jesus had been showing them through his healing works.

A typical view of life takes life to be at the mercy of a thousand things—from chance to sickness to injustice. Often people feel they are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It would be easy to conclude that Jesus was in the wrong place at the wrong time. There had been growing hatred of him by a probable coalition of those who felt he was dangerously wrong, unworthy, and full of faults. He was betrayed by one of his own closest followers. And then he was crucified and put to death in the terrible way used by the Romans at that time.

But Jesus rose from the grave and still lived after being ridiculed, nailed to a cross, and put in a tomb sealed by a huge rock. It is the supreme example of overcoming and surmounting—spiritual love and truth defeating injustice and evil. In fact it may seem so supreme we take it as utterly miraculous, or perhaps untrue. But Christian Science helps to deepen an understanding of what was going on, and we begin to love the Easter story as no other. We come to realize how true it is to all of human experience—including our own.

Each time that, through turning to the allness and power of God, someone rises out of a situation in which it might have seemed there was no way out, he or she can understand the Easter story better.

Christian Science explains that our life—our true identity, all that is good about us—is not ever really at the mercy of a material situation but comes from an entirely different direction, from God, Spirit. It's certainly evident that human life seems thoroughly material; yet Jesus' truth is that it is not. His promise, and his proof, are that if we are willing to do what is necessary to learn to live on this new basis—on the basis that God is actually our Life—this idea of God has a practical healing effect on fear, hate, sickness, and the sin that makes people so cramped and imprisoned.

But can we expect in the late twentieth century to believe that our lives have a spiritual basis? The fact is that they do. And there are many experiences, small and large, that offer encouragement to each of us to find the meaning of Easter for our own lives. Some of these experiences are included in this issue of the Sentinel. Others can be found in the last chapter of the book Science and Health, which tells of this Christianly scientific way of understanding God as the only true Life of man.

Paul, one of Jesus' followers, spoke in his letters to fellow Christians at Rome of walking in "newness of life" and serving in "newness of spirit." He wrote, "For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death."

It is a remarkable thought—this thought that God is Life and that we actually are not buried in a matter life, in material body and conditions, but we live right now in Spirit, God.

But it isn't just a thought or an ideal, Christian Science explains; it is the Christ–idea, the great, true idea of God, given to mankind by God Himself—the most important thing we could ever know.

Allison W. Phinney, Jr.