I wonder whether you think about why it is that we, as a Church, put so very much energy into our celebration of Pascha. The length of our service, if you participate in the entire Easter Service, is long and involved. We do everything to make it special. In addition, we sing the Easter Tropar over and over again. Why? Many modern people question all of the repetition.

Can we understand the meaning of the feast that we celebrate, help ourselves from   doing otherwise? Think about it! On Easter our Church declares her firm belief that God, out of love for us, became a human being so that He might reveal to us the true meaning and purpose of life and, in doing that, reveal to us that life is truly immortal! He knew, from His experience as a human being, that the one greatest fear we humans have is the fear of death. And why do we fear it? Because we don’t really know what will come   after death.

So God, in His great love for us, decided, from all eternity, to reveal that life is immortal so that we might be able to live this life with less fear. Knowing that life is immortal, we can begin to concentrate on making the most of this present life – we can experience God and His Kingdom as it is in our world right now.

Our Church exhorts us to become thoroughly engaged during this lifetime in learning how to be spiritual beings. She does everything in her power to make God real to us. She does this through her rituals and prayers. She   proclaims the truth of God’s love for us so that we might come to see that the meaning and purpose of life is to grow in our union with Him.

While I know that most of my readers are aware of what we must do to become spiritual beings, I repeat them only as a reminder.

We must learn how to love and forgive others unconditionally. Learning how to do this requires that we also learn how to treat others as we want to be treated and not judge then. When we judge others, it is impossible to unconditionally love them. One of the easiest things for humans to do is to judge others. This may be the result of our natural desire to always be right and to enhance ourselves by depreciating others. This may be the true meaning of what we call human sinfulness.