Souls and Sunrises
I must admit, of all the holidays my family celebrates, Easter has always been a favorite ever since I was a young lad…
Every Easter, my brother, sister, and I got a new spring outfit to wear to church — not just any service, but sunrise service. My mother and father helped start a Presbyterian church in Marathon, Florida — yes, dead center in the Florida Keys.
Being surrounded by water and beaches, every sunrise service for Easter was held at an eastern exposure beach. Sombrero Beach was my father’s favorite. It jutted out in the form of a peninsula and then swept back, forming a slight amphitheater facing due east.
I still remember helping set up folding chairs in a perfect pattern…
According to my dad, “We need to catch every ray.” Back in those days, there was no portable music, but somehow the lapping of the waves was all we needed. As the sun slowly rose skyward and each of its golden rays cast over the congregation, you heard the beauty of Nature and you knew God was there!
Both my parents are gone. My dad passed when I was 15, but my siblings and I still talk about the lifelong inspiration that filled us each Easter Sunday, so many years ago, on a biblical beach in Florida.
All my readers know I love Christmas and am a sucker for sunsets, pulling off the road and snapping a few pics any chance I get. As I see it today, Christmas is great with decorating and gift-giving and celebrating the birth of Jesus, but it also marks the onset of winter and the hibernation of life. Sunsets are beautiful and give us time to reflect on the day we just experienced and contemplate tomorrow. In some ways, Christmas marks the sunset of our year.
Unlike Christmas, Easter has no strappings of gift-giving or excess decorations — just the promise from God of eternal life and a rebirth of Nature with each warming day…
I find myself rejuvenated as I watch a sunrise and contemplate how I can make today special, one for the books. Sunrises and Easter — I find each brimming with possibilities and new hope that today, tomorrow, and all the next days hold the potential to be great. We just need to make the effort.
In recent months, our meteorological, political, economic, and world climates have been paralleling each other in their upheavals, uncertainties, and catastrophic behavior patterns that have left even the strongest among us feeling vulnerable and depressed.
The future that we may have felt a decade ago was solid and unwavering has become uncertain to many — many who now seek help in all the wrong places.
I heard a speaker at a motivational seminar last year say that the more time one spends on apps, social media, and artificial intelligence programs, the further away one gravitates from Nature and one’s own true reason for being.
Personally, I am certain (and my cardiologist will back it up) that the time you spend in Nature, enjoying her beauty and letting her soft breezes fill your soul, is not time subtracted but actually added to your time on earth!
We need to let go of our over-civilized, over-medicated, over-thought solutions to life’s problems and let the true meaning of Easter, with its promise of a rebirth and hope for the future, come into our lives.
All of you have heard it many times before, “To one’s self be true.”
Easier said than done. And it may feel impossible to do until you know yourself.
This weekend, get away from your phone, computer, and television and experience a quiet sunrise. Let Nature do the talking.
Victor Hugo said it best, “Dawn and the resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the Soul.”
And eloquently phrased by Martin Luther King Jr., “Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in Springtime.”
On behalf of my family, my staff, and myself, I truly wish for you and yours an Easter filled with hope and love.
Here’s to souls and sunrises,
Dr. Pfister