Last Friday I marked an auspicious event. Having passed the two weeks following my second Covid vaccination, I was now deemed to have achieved the vaccine’s full protection. To celebrate what felt like a most special day, I did something I hadn’t done for over a year. I got a haircut. Sort of like a mini-rebirth, comically small and mundane, yet the first step I had taken on the road to physically rejoining both the human race and the life that had gotten frozen in time one year ago.
That we’re marking the arrival of Spring just as so much hopefulness is percolating within and among us is deeply symbolically significant. After all, throughout the ages, the arrival of the Vernal Equinox has been a happily anticipated event, the moment when daylight and darkness are in equal balance for a short time before the light begins to grow, overpowering the dark, on the way to the Summer Solstice. This celestial progression from the cold, dark, seeming death of Winter to the warmth, light, and new growth of Spring has been observed with awe and wonder by our ancestors for millennia.
Based on the myths and stories these ancient people told about this season of the year, they saw something we today often fail to see, something intimating a deeply sacred relationship between spring and the whole of life. For our ancestors, the welling up of new life each spring was evidence of an endlessly regenerative force which eternally renews and revivifies all of life. Not surprisingly, this primal appreciation of life’s boundless and perennial capacity for renewing itself has roots woven deeply into our earliest history as humans.
For example, the mythologist Joseph Campbell offers poignant descriptions of burials from the Paleolithic period, roughly 50-70 thousand years ago, death rituals strongly connecting the imagery of the tomb and death with that of the womb and birth. In these burials, bodies were often carefully arranged in fetal positions together with garlands of flowers and other personal effects, seeds, and sometimes sacrificed animals. In addition, these burials were typically laid out on an east-west axis, the path of the perennially rising and setting sun also associated with the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Based on this evidence, we can reasonably imagine that the survivors of those interred in these graves assumed their loved ones would be reborn in some form.
Flash forward to roughly 5,000 years ago, in the ancient world of the Mediterranean, where an astonishing mythological flowering spanned more than 2,000 years before the birth of Jesus. Crossing both geographical boundaries and centuries of time, dozens of myths arose concerning heroes and gods who undergo death – often painful death – only to be reborn to new life. In Greece, for example, Persephone, the abducted daughter of the agricultural goddess Demeter, must descent into the realm of the dead every autumn, only to return to the world of the living each spring. Dionysus, the son of a human mother and Zeus, the father of the Greek pantheon, is born in obscurity, dies as part of a bloody sacrifice, and is magically restored to life, a rebirth celebrated by the Greeks each spring. In Egypt, stories were told of the murdered god Osiris being magically returned to life at the Vernal Equinox by his faithful wife Isis. Similar myths of rebirth in the springtime arose in Asia Minor, Syria, Mesopotamia, Scandinavia, and Persia.
Anyone who has studied the wealth of material about the death and rebirth of these ancient gods and heroes cannot help but be struck with the similarity of these myths – at least from a symbolic and metaphorical perspective – and the central theme of the Christian feast of Easter. Of course, many believing Christians see their dying-and-rising god, Jesus, in historical terms, as the only being who has ever been returned to life from death. In contrast, the mythic nature of these older stories about figures who transcended death symbolically remind us that this theme is both perennial and universal.
While rebirth is the central motif of Easter, Passover is mostly focused on the themes of freedom and liberation from bondage. But renewal and rebirth are part of the celebration of Passover as well. For example, a green vegetable is one of the symbolic foods eaten at the Passover Seder in order to remind us that Passover is a spring festival, a time of rebirth.
More importantly, Passover is considered to mark the birth of the Jewish People, their emergence as a free nation after many years of slavery in Egypt. Centuries later, the story of the liberation of the ancient Hebrews from bondage became a source of inspiration for American abolitionists fighting to abolish slavery in this country. Abraham Lincoln, who was called the “American Moses” by his contemporaries, referred to the story of the liberation of the Hebrew people in the Gettysburg Address when he spoke of “a new birth of freedom.” That freedom must be reborn out the slavery of oppression generation after generation is one of the most important and powerful teachings associated with Passover.
Reflecting on this idea of a “rebirth of freedom” in the face of hatred and intolerance, I am reminded of an essay by political activist Stacey Abrams published in the Washington Post the day after the January 6 attack on Congress. She concludes her essay by saying that American Democracy had undergone a “near-death experience.” Her point in using this shockingly appropriate metaphor for what had taken place over the previous months was clear. Unless those dedicated to the preservation and expansion of American democracy see these events as a profound wake-up call, an exhortation to bring about yet another “new birth of freedom,” then our democracy will die.
Abram’s metaphor of a near-death experience speaks to the darker side of the process of renewal and rebirth – that something must perish in order for the new to take its place. These springtime stories of renewal also involve decay and death. The stories bear witness to the unpleasant truth that old, outmoded ways of being must die, sometimes painfully, so that new ways, more effective and more humane, may emerge.
The ancient stories also remind us of the possibility of communal renewal. Embracing the promise of social, political, and economic transformation has never been more important on a wide range of fronts, from racism, sexism, transphobia, and xenophobia to the ever-growing environmental threats. For, truth be told, not all near-death experiences result in transformation. When they do, it is because they serve as a wake-up call and a summons to change both our individual lives and the life we share as a nation in deep and profound ways. May we awaken to the call for change and respond to that urgent summons, so that the promise of the ancient stories, the promise of life richly renewing itself for all of us, may be truly fulfilled.