“If Easter says anything to us today, it says this:
You can put truth in a grave but it won’t stay there.”

Clarence G. Hall

These days, it seems to be mostly a day of indulging in tons of chocolate, chasing Easter Bunnies, and searching for Easter Eggs.

In my mind, today is the day that gives hope, more than any other day. A day that demonstrates, if that was necessary, that “you can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming” (Pablo Neruda). A day that proves that “life never ends and love never dies” (Kate McGahan).

The BBC has an interesting website dedicated to the story of the Passion in which they discuss many aspects of the event, the way it was documented, and its many different themes. They conclude that “the final theme of the passion is victory – the victory of Christ over death – and this is why the Passion story is inseparable from the story of the Resurrection”.

I agree.

For me, the story of the Passion and Resurrection is also a lesson for life. It reminds me that even when injustice is at its worst, when you are at your most vulnerable, people laugh and spit at you, when you are stumbling on your way up to Golgotha, there will always be people who will offer you support, even take that terrible load off your shoulders when you fall. You might not just fall once or twice, you might fall many times. But you will always get back up. Because you know that at the end, of course, there is not death but life. Because love never dies.

A few great and funny things happened during the week.

First there was the good weather changing everybody’s mood. The sun was out again. The sky was blue again. And the temperatures went up.

Have you ever seen a seagull getting a bit of heat by sitting on the roof of a car parked under a great blue sky? It happened right in front of the An Saol building during the week. We all had a great laugh. Why resting on the waves, in the cold Irish Sea, if you can sit on a different Blue: a clean, warm, bright new Ford?

Pádraig tried out an enhanced version of the handshoe mouse we had bought last summer, conceptualised, invented and realised by a really bright, enthusiastic student who has come up with great ideas to support Pádraig’s access to technology.

Pádraig is well able to click the three buttons on the mouse, but he has problems at times leaving his hand on the mouse. So that brilliant inventor student added the handshoe to the handshoe mouse.

He also designed a mouth switch – several switches mounted on a kind of mouth guard or retainer. That was a great idea because Pádraig has no problem moving his tongue thus accessing the switches is easy for him.

Unfortunately, it took Pádraig no time to dismantle the switches. We’ll be working on refinements.

There is a great air of enthusiasm around. Maybe it has to do with the time of the year. Maybe it has to do with Easter. Maybe it has to do with the fact that after night comes day; after winter comes summer; after a fall, you get up and keep going. You can (try to) put truth in a grave but it won’t stay there.

Happy Easter.