Easter, Recognizable and Named

In the pictures it was a few months before his passing, he had invited me to go during my summer vacation on a trip with him.

Easter has always carried a bittersweet energy for me.

It is the day my father died. I was eleven years old.

It happened very early in the morning, while we were still asleep.
I had already been preparing to celebrate with my family.

Since I was very young, I expressed myself through painting. That year, I had painted one egg for each person in my family. Each egg represented the character of that person and the love that I felt for each one. It was always an opportunity to honor that love through color and form.

We were meant to share them at breakfast that morning but that breakfast never happened.

So yes… Easter carries sadness for me.
But it also carries something else:

The memory of love, togetherness, and the ways I found to expressed it.

Today, I found myself reflecting on what Easter means for many people.

I didn’t grow up practicing religion. In fact, my family considered itself atheist.
We lived in a very Catholic society, shaped by judgment and expectation, which made that truth something we didn’t openly share.

Years later, after my mother passed, we discovered we. My siters and I, are Jewish by heritage. And now, I live in a strongly Christian environment.

Through all of this, I never truly identified with a single religious path. I just couldn’t feel it.

Instead, I found my own way of connecting. No labels, just my capacity to feel, reflect, and understand life itself.

So today, I asked myself:

What is the deeper meaning of this day?

I thought about the teachings of Jesus Christ, not from a religious perspective, but from a human one. Not what people say about him but rather what he might have been pointing toward.

Out of curiosity, I searched for the principles behind his teachings. Sometimes research reminds me, confirms and supports my own inner processing for clarity.

These came up.

• Radical compassion

• Inner transformation (not external rule-following)

• Direct relationship with the divine (not mediated control)

 • Love as a state of being, not just moral instruction

I smiled when I read them.

Because without any plan, without ever consciously following his teachings, those are mine. They are the values I have been building my life around, one hard experience at a time.

I had never seen them written out like that. Never compared them to myself so directly.

These are the exact principles I have been living by!

Not perfectly and not all at once. Some were discovered and some lived through my relationships since I was a kid. But all through my own process of observance, questioning, reflecting, making mistakes, choosing again. I had been building these values from within.

It was both fulfilling… and surprising, to see through my research, written so clearly, something I had come to understand through my own life.

So today is for me a reflection day which holds my own humanity with tenderness with remembrance of moments of loss and love, things that truly matter and a recognition of how, so very often, our own truth is discovered through the unfolding of our experiences coming to clarity little by little to be recognizable and named.