As we prepare for our Easter meal with family and friends, the yellow of Forsythia, Daffodils and early Tulips has largely passed, replaced with a wave of purple. Bright reddish-purple Redbuds, mixed with white and pink Dogwoods, appear throughout the woods around our town and in our community’s yards and hillsides, alongside sweet-smelling Lilacs. Light blue Periwinkle, violets, purple Moneyplants, bluish and fuschia Creeping Phlox, and darker hued purple and peach Tulips are all in full bloom. White and ruddy purplish Flowering Crabapples are blooming profusely and our apple trees in the hollow are opening their white blossoms as part of setting fruit.

As the Dogwoods have begun to reach full bloom there’s been a dip in temperatures, as is common in our springtime cycle. “Dogwood Winter,” as a coworker explained to me years ago, is a feature of the cyclic warming and cooling of our region’s early spring weather. After nearly a week of not using the furnace, we turn it back on to warm our home in face of the cool, damp nights. While we humans live with such comforts, the deer, rabbits, raccoons, possums, squirrels and many birds of the woods around us endure the cycle in the rugged, joyous beauty of the Earth.

The garden and woods are bringing the first harvests to our table. Using wild onions and ramps, my wife designed a vegetarian French Onion soup, using hearty vegetable bullion in place of beef broth. The soup, relying mainly on ingredients we gathered from our hollow and woods, is remarkably good. For our Easter meal, my wife is making Borscht with beets we’ve canned from the local produce auction, wild onions from our yard and Crème Fraiche from a local dairy. In addition to the Borscht, the meal will include a large Arugula salad harvested a day before from our garden. I am making a cinnamon-raisin Spelt bread using a recipe my wife adapted from a bread recipe passed to me by a friend. Some of the friends coming to the meal are musicians, as are some of our family, and as always at our family meals, the musicians will return the gift of food and companionship with music on our piano.

Recent events, along with memories of the Easter celebrations that we shared with my dear, devout mother-in-law, has made me consider the story of Easter from my view as an outsider to Christianity. In my work world, a leader who alienated many employees and customers was suddenly removed, causing joy to the staff below him. It was, from a compassionate point of view, a tragedy for him, since the career he had worked so obsessively has faced a tremendous setback. The man, younger than me, ignored numerous warning signs, blinded by the Hubris of early success, and was undone by his own actions, as the ancient Greeks observed in their stories of Nemesis destroying those suffering from fatal pride.

From my point of view, the leader failed to consider the feelings and lives of those who were affected by his power-over-others. The hierarchy around him, like all hierarchies, delayed him from suffering the consequences of the harm he did to staff and customers, but because what goes around tends to come around, his career has suffered a huge setback. Meanwhile, more telling, his loss is seen by many as their gain—if there is a future lifetime when he will again travel in the soul cluster of his former employees and customers, he will probably face harsh consequences from some spirits who unconsciously recall the harm he did to them in this lifetime. Not only has his harm-doing damaged his life in this incarnation, but if there are further lifetimes for him with these same people, he will almost certainly again suffer from his actions in this life.

At Easter, Christians recall the horrific torture-murder of Jesus during Passover and celebrate his denial of death with the resurrection on Sunday. This story, grisly and heartbreaking, is to both tell of the transcendence of death and of the earnest desire of the Christian deity to sacrifice for humanity. Rooted in a culture where child sacrifice, exemplified by Abraham and Isaac and in Chapter Eleven of Judges, was seen as a holy act rewarded by the deity, the death of Jesus is said to represent the deity’s sacrifice to humanity. In our modern culture, the story of an all-good, almighty deity torturing his beloved child is difficult to make sense of.

When I read the Bible years ago, seeing it as a patriarchal work, I was struck by the bleakness of the narrative. Generation after generation of violence, corruption and suffering is told, and, at the end, the nicest, kindest person in the millennium-long saga is tortured to death. It is a story of how the human world functions in communities where the Covenant of Good Works does not hold sway. Injustices that come from this imbalance is commonplace; in modern terms, the martyrdom of Archbishop Romero, Stephen Biko, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr—to name only a few—speak of the wrongs of the larger human world.

These stories break the heart of those who know them. From my outside point of view, the telling of the murder of Jesus communicates that those who lovingly seek peace and justice will suffer and those who use the quick, temporary violence of power-over-others will prevail against those practicing the slow, lasting works of love, charity and compassion. It becomes a moral telling that greed and violence will always rule our human world.

However, when I look at my personal world, I see clearly that the Covenant of Works is active in the web of lives I have traveled in. In my youth, my angry Hubris blinded me to my own harm, till the hallucinations of psychosis fortunately projected my shadow self into my conscious mind and made me aware that what I had sent out was returning to me. Like many views of karma/consequences, I was terrified to face the wrongs I did with the recognition that they would come back against me. Yet, decades later, I now see the Covenant of Works as a promise that by seeking to do good works I can receive good fortune. Unlike the story of Jesus, I need not be a martyr to transcend the human world; I need merely to think of others, seek to hear from them my true effect on their lives, and seek to align myself with the higher good of those around me. This is especially true in the close, personal world of family and friends.

I have the good fortune of living in a web of life where the Covenant of Works holds sway, which was not true for Jesus, Romero, Biko or King. In my personal world, when people do harm to others, that harm eventual becomes their undoing, whether or not they acknowledge their part in it. By seeking to be a good friend, neighbor, coworker and, most importantly, a good family member, I am given great rewards. Overlooking such good fortune and thinking that harming those around me will not return to me would be foolhardy and blind to the true workings of the soul cluster I am in. Like the Earth that wild onions, ramps and arugula grow in, the web of life I am fortunate to share with others nurtures my better self and reminds me through my own pain and joy that both the harm and good I do will return to me.