DW's Blog

He Has Risen. So Is the Rose

by DW Green — April 1, 2026

“An Easter Reflection on Love, Renewal, and the Radical Original.”

I’ll be honest with you. I almost let Easter pass this year without a word.

Not because I don’t believe in what it represents. But because the holiday has accumulated so much — so much argument, so much institution, so much tribal ownership — that sitting down to write about it felt like trying to find the original painting beneath two thousand years of restoration.

And then I remembered: that’s exactly what the man was trying to say.

Strip it down. Get underneath the argument. Find the original thing. Love. Compassion. Peace. Goodwill to all. Not as a theological position. As a way of being in the world, practiced daily, quietly, with an open hand and a soft heart.

That’s the Easter I’m celebrating this Sunday. Not a doctrine. The original radical act.

The Earth Already Knew

Easter doesn’t happen by accident in the spring. The early church anchored the resurrection to the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. That’s not coincidence. That’s ancient wisdom honoring what the earth itself was already saying.

We wrote about the equinox in this channel just weeks ago. Equal light and equal dark. The Earth passing through balance, not holding it. Dormant potential waiting for the right conditions. The return that always seemed impossible — until suddenly, unmistakably, it wasn’t.

A seed in the ground looks, for a long time, exactly like failure.

The disciples on Saturday — the day between the crucifixion and the resurrection — had no name for what they were living through. We call it Holy Saturday. They just called it the worst day of their lives. The teacher was gone. The dream was over. The stone was in place.

And then Sunday arrived, as it always does, whether we are ready for it or not.

The equinox doesn’t ask permission. The rose doesn’t consult the prison wall before it grows. And whatever happened in that garden on the first Easter morning — whatever you believe about the nature of resurrection — something returned that the world had tried to extinguish. Something that love, pressed all the way to its limit, refused to stay buried.

The Most Persecuted — And the Hardest Teaching

There is a sobering fact worth naming this Easter. According to the Vatican and multiple independent human rights organizations, nearly 400 million Christians worldwide currently face persecution or violence — one in seven followers of the faith. In 2025 alone, close to 5,000 Christians were killed for their beliefs. Thirteen every day. In Nigeria, Myanmar, Syria, Nicaragua, and dozens of other countries, men and women are imprisoned, beaten, and murdered simply for following the teacher whose resurrection we celebrate this Sunday.

This is not a political statement. Jewish communities, Muslim communities, and many others face grave persecution too — the suffering of one faith does not diminish the suffering of another, and the competition for who suffers most is itself a trap the teacher would have recognized immediately. He had no interest in building the biggest victim count. He had interest in one thing: love your neighbor. All of them. Even the ones holding the nails.

That is still, two thousand years later, the most radical thing anyone has ever said.

Not the miracles. Not the theology. The instruction to love the people who are making your life hardest. To pray for those who persecute you. To meet hatred with something so disarmingly open that the hatred doesn’t quite know what to do with itself.

Easy to write. Nearly impossible to live. Which is precisely why it keeps calling us back, Easter after Easter, to try again.

What He Actually Did

The Gospels are full of moments that the institution later found inconvenient.

He touched lepers — the untouchables of his time — without ceremony or hesitation. He spoke to women in public, which was scandalous. He ate with tax collectors, who were despised collaborators. He told a story in which the hero was a Samaritan — a member of a group his own people considered corrupt and foreign — and made him the model of compassion.

When a woman caught in adultery was dragged before a crowd ready to stone her, he didn’t debate the law. He knelt in the dirt and wrote something in the dust — we’ll never know what — and then stood and said: let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

One by one, the crowd dispersed. The oldest ones first.

That moment is the New Testament’s most devastating commentary on public shaming. It happened two thousand years before Twitter. The crowd was ready. The letter was already being pinned. And he simply asked the crowd to look at itself before it looked at her.

They couldn’t. They left. She stayed. And he said: neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more.

Not naive. Not permissive. But so shockingly merciful that it still takes your breath away twenty centuries later.

The Rose Returns

Last week in this channel we wrote about Nathaniel Hawthorne’s wild rose-bush — the one growing at the door of the prison in The Scarlet Letter. Beauty at the entrance to punishment. Life insisting on itself next to the machinery of judgment. We called it the human capacity for mercy.

This week I realize: Hawthorne knew exactly where he’d seen that rose before.

It was growing outside an empty tomb in a garden on the first day of the week.

Whatever you believe about the literal resurrection — however your faith or your questions have shaped your understanding of that morning — the image itself is universal. Something the world tried to bury came back. The stone was rolled away not to let him out, the old theologians say, but to let us in. To let us see that the ending we feared was not, in fact, the ending.

That is the Easter beneath Easter. Underneath the doctrine, underneath the argument, underneath the two thousand years of institution and interpretation and occasionally spectacular human failure to live up to the teaching — underneath all of it, the rose is still growing.

Mercy keeps showing up. Love keeps insisting. The heart keeps finding its way back to soft, even after the world has done its considerable best to harden it.

My Easter

I am celebrating Easter this Sunday as I always have at my best — not as a theological exam but as an invitation.

An invitation to love more completely. To extend goodwill beyond the people who make it easy. To meet this day — and every day arriving after it — with an open hand rather than a closed one. To spend more quiet, open-hearted time listening for the direction that comes not from the noise outside but from the soul within — where, if Meister Eckhart was right, God is being born continuously, right now, in this very moment.

The Pathless Path has been teaching me this all along. You don’t choose the road. The road chooses you — if you stay present, stay soft, stay upright, and keep showing up to the game even when the stadium isn’t yours.

He showed up. All the way to the end. And then past it.

That’s the Easter I’m carrying into Sunday. Love, compassion, peace, and goodwill to all — every one of you, without exception, without condition, without the faintest asterisk.

He is risen. So is the rose.

A softer heart receives what a defended one deflects.

Always NOW. Always ON. Always US.

Happy Easter. Meet me in the field. The water’s warm.

Next Thursday: The New A — The Scarlet Letter Never Left. It Just Found a Bigger Stage.