Easter is, as we all know, a time of rising. It has manynoble precedents -- th erising of the morning sun (although it is actually a turning of the lowly Earth, in fact, but never mind that); the rising of our daily bread in the often, from a misformed mash to a crispy, elegant loaf; the rising of our cost of living, month upon month unto the furtherest month; and the rising of the dangerous seas as our waste products glitter in the air and heat the planet slowly up. The rising of tempers, like hot air baloons in the cognosphere, comes to mind, and the rising of creeks as the symbolic defeat of all well-laid plans (which would come true God willing and the creeks didn't).

COnsider, too, the rising of our mothers from their beds each morning, to undertake another day of effort and nurture and care and sacrifice that life itself might rise up and renew its place on our chaotic dustball. And finally, Easter is about the rising of our fathers. It is something not often remembered, but which deserves commemoration, that for each of us to be here at all, the great and the less great, somewhere in dark of night, behind a stable door, in some glowing clinic restroom, on snowy hill or spring-dappled field, a father had to rise. Rise to the occasion, as it were, which called on him to stand for something and make his contribution to the river of ferocious protoplasm cleaving its way into the future.

There are thousands of us, and each of us has a thousand friends, a thousand times a thousand; and how oft we forget the millions of earnest, passionate risings that had to be undertaken in order for our place on the madcap stage of living to even exist!

Where would we be without those torrid, dutiful risings? Our very existence would be cast down in the gloomy, fitful dust, never to take form, a waste of unused cells, a secret code of DNA wasted on the winds, without a hope. But this was not our fate, thanks to those sturdy rising men.

Therefore, let us give thanks to the million men who rose before us, and used well what life had given them to stand up for the future. Let us celebrate the risings of all men in their scores and thousands and billions back through the cellular stream to the dawn of history! Let us speak out in behalf of risings on Easter, and let us who can add to their golden number, and those who cannot, bring risings about in others, that all may acknowledge this debt to the stand-up stout-hearted souls who rose in the past that the future might live.

In nomine Dominos et omnies checkers,

Fr. Grandissimus Maxissimus Stiffissimus
Rising Star
Temple of the Golden Globes