During Eastertime, my thoughts always seem shrouded in one form or another. You might be able to relate to me about the weirdness of Easter. Read on…

For example, I’m creeped out by the Easter Bunny. There’s a sort of Donnie Darko quality to his 6ft tall morose status, toothy near-grin - not to mention his delivery of chocolate eggs to strangers, myself included. Don’t get me wrong; as a kid I loved eating the chocolate he brought to my siblings and me. I just didn’t want to think about the things surrounding the whole fantasy process produced by each child-hood Easter. Then I had kids. Same-same. Now I have grandkids. Same-same-same. Harvey with an attitude is still shrouded in the recesses of my mind somewhere. I frowned a lot.

But the chocolate is good, so I still hide the chocolate eggs, eat the malt balls, ignore the creepier things. And I shirk off the guilt.

As a kid I also attended Easter Sunday church services each year. And in a sense, many of those religious moments had their own Darko/Harvey qualities to them. I double-frowned a lot. All around me were incense that was burning, lit candles, songs played on organs in minor chords and Jesus always in agony on the cross, looking down on me asking the teenage version of me to seemingly do something for Him. I never quite KNEW what it was I was to do to help Him.

Until I did know.

And it wasn’t me helping Him – it was Him helping me.

When I was 23-years-old, my faith about Jesus’ life, death, crucifixion and resurrection became real to me. In religious parlance, they call it an epiphany. In my own expression, I simply saw things differently and REALLY smiled.

Yet, even amid the cleaning out of the creepy bunny stuff and my childhood fears of dying in my sleep, only to find out (or so I thought!) that I had not DONE enough for God – nor could I ever accomplish such a goal, I was given a gift of simplicity: He simply loved me…and because of that awareness, I loved Him back. Simplicity.

Yet, all along these many years there have STILL been little weirdo things littering the pathway of my faith: things like avoiding cults, experiencing church splits, seeing women teaching OR not teaching (while all my best educational teachers were women! What?) I struggled with “inside baseball” topics that didn’t much impact the world. I watched Christian movies that were dull and pretended to like them. I tried to listen to preachers who didn’t teach and teachers who did nothing but preach. These and many more little weirdo things bugged me.

What most bothered me about my faith - especially at Easter time? In other words, what part of the historical Christian faith did I not quite understand? Relics. Click here for a list.

Chief among those relics was The Shroud of Turin, located in Italy.

Forget about the bunnies of unusual size.

It was my negative reaction to the burial shroud of Jesus that really kept me at a distance from reading anything updated about it. I simply found the preoccupation with its authenticity by Catholic and Protestant researchers to be weird. I was aware of the 1978 photographing of the shroud and glanced at a few of the professional papers on the subject – eventually dismissing all of them because there didn’t seem to be any finality to the arguments, either pro or con.

Yet, here was this burial cloth of a man badly beaten.

Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ used the shroud’s beating markings as a template for their make-up on Jim Caviezel, who portrayed Christ.

The scene in the film that captures the beatings is unforgettable.

Faith, the Bible says, is the “evidence of things unseen, the substance of things hoped for.” I simply didn’t want or need to SEE things like a burial cloth, to further believe in the Jesus at Eastertime – or any time after Easter.

And years went by and I STILL dismissed them all.

Until I didn’t.

Quite recently, one of my dear friends, David Ripley, suggested over dinner that I revisit the subject of the shroud – to “un-shroud” the mystery of it for my own intellectual interest.

I deeply respect Dave and his wife, Wendy, so I took the challenge to rip the childhood mask off of the Easter Bunny, to blow out the candles of my early religious years and to apply the same level of logic and research I do in other areas of my life, like business and politics, to this very important piece of history that JUST MAY be the burial cloth of Jesus – with His image and likeness burned into the fabric by a light more powerful than anything we can imagine or currently call upon to use.

David Ripley recommended that I pick up Dr. Gilbert Lavoie’s 2023 work entitled The Shroud of Jesus. I ordered it that night and have been reading it daily since after that dinner event.

Here’s the official blurb:

I’m reading it, as I’m writing this newsletter – and it’s BLOWING MY MIND.

It’s like visiting with an MD who loves research and wants to put his/her discoveries on the lower shelf for those of us who want to understand his/her research and discoveries.

Dr. Lavoie’s key points are as follows:

• The image in the shroud is completely proven to be a man who was crucified during Rome’s occupation of Israel over two millennia ago.
• The fabric was completely proven to have been made during the years on either side of Jesus’s birth and death dates, thus being fully possible to have been his burial cloth.
• The images created in the shroud occurred due to a light so powerful that it defies anything we have today to be compared with it.
• The person in the burial shroud was elevated from the horizontal to completely in the vertical (and floating in the air) when the light emanated from his body, thus creating the images on the cloth – at the very moment of resurrection.
• And the effects of gravity prove the doctor’s sound theories in ways that COMPLETLEY surprised me.

What?

Yep, “what” is right. The book is one of the most in-depth science challenges I have ever read regarding the moment in history that birthed the Christian faith: The Resurrection.

Without it, Christianity is just another religion.

With the Resurrection, Christianity is the basis for all life – both now and later.

Happy Mind-Blowing Easter.

Now, go back and consider clicking on the Amazon link above for ordering the book ASAP – and read it.

Bend your brain – it’s one sure way to stretch yourself.

More later,
Den

Den's Latest & Greatest

• Read the Gospel of John in the New Testament
• Order The Shroud of Jesus by Dr. Gilbert Lavoie and read it NOW
• Report back to me if your mind was blown by this Easter book
• Eat as many chocolate bunnies as you can
• Don’t waste your time watching Donnie Darko – it’s STILL one of the creepier flicks around
• Download and watch Jimmy Stewart in Harvey – it’s an oldie AND a goodie