I am not a Christian, but I have always been drawn to the early Christian writers and theology. They had such kindness of spirit and hope.

When it was founded, Christianity became the most generous, loving and inspiring faith in the history of what was a cruel and warring and unforgiving world.

No major faith had committed itself so boldly to lifting the poor and the vulnerable, to peace and the love of other human beings, and to honoring our responsibilities to nature and Mother Earth, considered gifts of God.

Anyone who has studied early Christian culture, writes Thomas Merton in his book Love And Living, “knows well enough how it abounded in life, sanity, joy, and creative power.”

Christ walked the earth gently and lovingly, and I see his spirit very much alive in Pope Francis, but this spirit is a flickering light here in our country now. So much of the most vocal and visible elements of the Christian faith have become a corrupt and shameless tool of the the bitterest, most intolerant and angry elements in our culture, they preaching power, fanaticism,  exclusion and dominance.

That is not the meaning of Easter as I understand it.

Jesus taught that we are responsible for one another, that we must practice generosity, tolerance,  forgiveness and above all, love. I see and read little about those founding Christian ideals in our culture or on the news. Yet here I am, a Jew turned Quaker some years ago, these Christian values are the tenets I am seeking to practice and  follow in my life.

I have always believed the teachings of Christ were open to me, and to anyone who wishes a kinder, more loving world, who cares about animals or the earth.

Easter reminds me of what rebirth means, of what I was before, of what I am now. I do not believe I can ever become a different person – a chilling idea to me. But I can become a better person.

To me, this is the most meaningful  holiday in the religious calendar. I think a lot about Easter, and about the idea of rebirth and resurrection.

I believe in rebirth and resurrection, at least in my secular world. I am not the son of God, but I was reborn.

I have experienced rebirth in the most basic of ways. I have been resurrected,  given the chance to see the world anew.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote that we are not only born once, when we come out of our mother’s womb, but that life requires us to give birth to ourselves again and again.

I have seen many good friends give birth to themselves again, I have  seen my wife do it. It is a difficult and frightening and arduous experience to let go of one self and take the leap of faith to a different place. It was the richest and most rewarding experience of my life, and it is what Easter means to me.

I did rise from the dead.

Rebirth was an almost desperate choice for me, and for a sacred few prophets and mystics and travelers I have been privileged to know. It is a process that never ends, that is never finished, that weaves through every part of life. When I broke down a decade ago, I chose life. I prayed for life, worked for life, pledged myself to life.

When I broke down, it was a kind of death, the loss of my old self, the loss of heart and soul.

In falling apart, I was reborn. I think that’s how it works. Light follows darkness, death follows life.

Merton, my spiritual guide and inspiration, reminds us in his writings that Easter has meaning for all of us, not only Christians. It is not only about Jesus rising from the dead and defeating death. It is about our own death and rebirth, our own return to life.

Meditating on the teachings of St. Paul, Merton wrote that we have died to the Law and are now free to live as saved persons reborn, and in the newness of life. Christianity, he wrote, was a liberation from every existing religious and rigid legal system of the time, a radical and humanistic ideal lost in the fog of greed, money and the absence a spiritual ethos in our lives in our times.

The Church, wrote Merton, was born as a society of free people, united not by mere natural bonds of interest and necessity but  by love and grace. Persons responsible for other persons.

There is more Christianity in the world of the Army of Good on behalf of the refugees and Mansion residents than in all of the cable news pundits and so-called evangelicals who declaim their piety and faith. As the moral philosopher Hannah Arendt put it so beautifully, hypocrisy is the greatest of all evils.

The true Christians are no longer at the center of our religious or cultural dialogue, they live in the edges, mostly out of sight and mind, supplanted by angry horses who confuse political aspiration with spiritual faith.

Christian friends ask me why I can’t become a Christian, since I seem so close to it in some ways. The answer, I tell them, is that I can’t find God in the Christians of today’s, I can’t tell them apart from the ideologues tearing our democracy apart. I can’t worshop something that was, but is not.

Still, I take so much from Christianity. “Let us not darken the joy of resurrection,” Merton wrote, “by remaining in captivity and darkness, but let us live as free men and women who have been called out of the darkness and into the light.”

We seek peace.

We seek to love one another.

We reject hatred and argument as a means of talking to one another.

We cherish hope and promise.

We reject cruelty and vengeance.

We forgive those who have fallen into evil.

We love our sister, the earth and care for her.

We stand with the poor and the vulnerable, not the rich and the arrogant.

We are the moral stewards of the animal world, and of the natural world. We seek peace, not war, and reject the killing of other human beings.

That is the meaning of Easter for me, that is what I take from Jesus’s return from the dead.

it has as much meaning for me, and perhaps for many others,  as it does for anyone born into the Christian faith.