By Kate Noonan
There is a striking irony buried deep in the Exodus story. The Israelites had just witnessed one of the most breathtaking demonstrations of Divine love in human history: ten plagues, a parted sea, water from a rock, manna falling like morning dew from heaven. God had moved mountains, literally and figuratively, to free them and care for them. And yet, the moment Moses disappeared up the mountain for a few weeks, they melted down their jewelry and built themselves a golden calf to worship.
We shake our heads at them. And then we go home and do the same thing.
This season, as Jewish families gather around the Passover table and Christians celebrate the resurrection of Easter morning, we are invited into something more than festivity and tradition. We are invited into honest reflection. Both holidays carry the same essential message at their core: the Divine is extravagantly, persistently, almost incomprehensibly devoted to us. Passover proclaims liberation: God saw suffering and refused to look away. Easter proclaims restoration: God entered death itself and refused to stay there. These are not small gestures. These are the great love stories of faith.
So the question that hangs in the spring air is this: how are we caring for our connection to the One who cares so deeply for us?
It is worth sitting with that question rather than answering it too quickly. Because the honest answer, for most of us, is complicated.
We do not typically build golden calves. We are more sophisticated than that, or so we tell ourselves. Our golden calves tend to be shinier, more socially acceptable, more easily defended. They come in the form of relentless busyness, the kind that crowds out every quiet moment where God might actually get a word in. They look like the endless scroll of a phone screen, the pursuit of status, the obsession with financial security, the need for control, the hunger for approval. They wear the faces of our anxieties and our ambitions.
Some of us have a single, large golden calf that commands most of our inner life: a consuming career, a toxic relationship we cannot release, a grief we have turned into an altar. We organize our days around it. We bring our best energy to it. We sacrifice for it. Too often we tell ourselves it is just a priority, not a god.
Others of us have a whole scattered collection of smaller calves, a smattering of lesser devotions that together add up to a life pointed in almost every direction except upward. No single thing has captured us entirely, but the cumulative effect is the same: God is somewhere in the rotation, but rarely at the center.
Reverence is the sincere and humble acknowledgment that we stand in the presence of something infinitely greater than ourselves. It is to carry, in the living of ordinary life, a genuine awareness that you are in relationship with something holy. It shapes how you spend your Friday morning. It shapes what you reach for when you are afraid. It shapes what you are willing to let go of.
Perhaps that is why the Psalmist’s words feel so countercultural today: “Be still, and know that I am God.” Psalm 46:10. In a world engineered for distraction, stillness is almost a radical act. And yet it is precisely in that stillness, away from the noise of our golden calves, where the Divine has always been waiting to be found.
The Passover and Easter stories both hinge on a moment of letting go: the Israelites releasing the only home they had ever known, the disciples releasing everything they thought they understood about how the story was supposed to end. Liberation, it turns out, almost always requires releasing something we have been clutching.
During this season, perhaps the most faithful thing we can do is take a quiet, courageous inventory. What is getting the best of you? What sits at the center of your inner life, drawing your worry, your energy, your devotion? What would it look like to gently, prayerfully, set it down?
The Divine that parted seas and rolled away stones is not asking for perfection. And while we cannot truly imagine the fullness of what God wants from us, perhaps we can deep down believe this much: that the obsessive, distracted busyness pulling us away from the beauty of so many gifts freely given was never the goal. The abundance is already here. It has always been here. We need only be still enough to see it.
