Back out behind the Roman Catholic cemetery, there is a grove of pines planted some 50 years ago. Too long ago; pines like these weren't meant to live long, and these are old now, over-mature and spindly. The grove took a heavy beating during the great storm, and now it's littered with broken limbs and smashed boles. It was a pleasant place and I'm sorry to see it in this state.

I stopped on my walk and pulled a few branches over to the piles of deadwood that other volunteers have been building. Small birds darted in and out of the piles, making use of this novel shelter, and two squirrels danced among the battered treetops, arguing at the top of their voices. The wind, still chilly--it's only early April!--soughed through the branches, a rustle soft to the ear. a beautiful sound to anyone who's been starved of the sound of leaves since last October. And the sky is a perfect blue.

As I yanked and tossed branches about, I found myself wondering, not for the first time: So what is this Easter business all about?

I don't know. I can't say rationally why Christ's death should redeem this world. It doesn't go into logic, any more than the creek, just cresting from the spring melt, would fit into my kitchen sink. It just *is*, as the creek just is: there. You can believe or not believe, but it's not something that you can take apart like an outboard engine.

Nor can you stop it. Redemption rolls over us regardless, not because we asked for it or did anything to deserve it--God knows, we can't do it ourselves!--but because it is what God wants to give us. God went to extraordinary lengths to prove this willingness to us, his desire to be with us through it all, under the most impossible circumstances--even through the most fearful of deaths. God has made it clear that God's ready to put Godself through whatever it is that we have to endure in this anything-but-easy life--to stand with us.

But there is a something at the centre of this that's too large to fit into human comprehension, which is what defines a mystery. We can try to sneak up on it in various ways, through metaphor and example and parable, but it evades us. Christ died to reconcile us to God, and then broke death to show whose is the victory. How? I don't know. That knowledge lies on the other side of the River.

What I do know is that the model works: when we're willing to give something up, really to let it go, let it die, we often find it comes back to us utterly transformed in ways that we could never have expected. We have Christ's example, to follow of obedience to God's will, patience in the face of necessary suffering, and the reward for these reward in the long term.

This little wood, so trivial in the scheme of things, cannot go back to being where it was before the storm; some trees are dead already and others will die. But it will go on to become a--something. A newness, a something planned in God's eye but not visible to my small and crippled vision, something with the thumbprint of new life and healing--God's mark--on it. "Beauty not so much vanished as dissolved and reshaped itself." But transformation goes only through death; you cannot skip the process, or make it conditional. Christ wasn't conditionally dead. Christ did it the real, hard way.

Jesus, on the other side of this day--past that silent moment when the world slipped sideways, lurched somehow, and was transformed --was human, as he had been, and yet something more than human. And all to prove that truly "all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well."

The woods may still be full of shattered timber, and the road before you may look endlessly uninviting, and nobody said that life was going to be easy. But in the end, we have the Resurrection, even if we can't wrap our minds around it, even if we can't understand just what it is that happened. That's enough to keep hope alive, whatever the doubts that may twist themselves around our ankles as we walk the journey.

Easter says: God's full of surprises. Expect what could never have been predicted, or even prayed for: for God hides turnings for us in what seem like the straightest and dreariest of roads. Expect that in the end God's will will be done, however lost we may feel ourselves to be, in that quiet yearning space between cross and empty tomb.