Tomorrow is Easter Sunday. It is also April 20, exactly a month after my father passed away. I’ve  been thinking of this coincidence —3/20 and 4/20 — and of the leap of faith required to believe in bodily resurrection after witnessing first-hand a bodily demise. 

It is, I suppose, an appropriate time to be pondering this eternal mystery. And an article in today’s Washington Post convinces me that I’m not alone.

As Easter approaches, many Christians struggle with how to understand
the Resurrection. How literally must one take the Gospel story of Jesus’
triumph to be called a Christian? Can one understand the Resurrection
as a metaphor[?] …

Here’s what I’ve decided. And it solves no great theological mystery. It’s only what I have to get me through:

It is no metaphor to me that Dad is gone — nor is it metaphor that he lives on. There is real, tangible proof that he does.  He is there in the World War II books and the multiple DVDs of “Twelve O’Clock High” (his favorite film and one he believed everyone should watch. “It’s not about war,” he told his friends. “It’s about leadership.”).  He is there in the bell he installed on the back door so the cat could be let in. He is there in the statue of St. Francis, one of many items he planted in the now overgrown garden. Most of all he is present in all of his friends, in my mom and in each one of us, his children.

You may have to look harder for him now — you couldn’t miss Dad before; he was always the life of the party — but he’s there, I’m sure of it.