Resurrection Letters

My favorite moment in time is the Easter Vigil. This sounds like a strange phrase, but I mean it just like that. Because the Church understands that sacred night as a single, “sacred” moment that in a sense transcends all time and so is able to be “re-presented” to us every year anew, or rather, we are made newly present to the moment. It is the night that time stands still, and we relive all of salvation history through a series of Scripture readings that walk us through the sacred story, all the way to the great moment of fulfillment in resurrection. It is a night filled with witnesses: Adam and Eve, Abraham, Moses, David, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Paul, and finally, the women at the tomb. And they all share with us their own encounters with the living God who came into our brokenness out of love for us and brought salvation. It is good, every year, to be reminded that we are not alone; that we don’t live isolated existences cut off from the world and suffering in our own individual darkness. Those who go before us also knew fear, and pain, and despair, and doubt, and anger and betrayal, and disappointment. Living their long, patient story with them serves to remind me that I am not special in my own needs and wants and sufferings: Lent is not a private affair. This is why, at the end of the 40 days, we gather together to relive the great, wide, deep story of salvation and find our part in it, so that we too can recognize the Risen One by His wounds in our own corners.

I share here some verses that are the fruit of this yearly experience of being accompanied in this Easter season by the imperfect, wounded witnesses that always help me see anew the Risen Lord in my own story.

Magdalene

Chilled to the bone, you sit in the early morning

your body and soul as cold as the stone tomb opposite

waiting for a warmth you fear

will not come with the morning.

Because the Sun has been put out

and even his body, now, has been taken from you.

Even as the light grows, and the white, shining messenger bids you stop crying

and the gardener too disturbs your mourning, the chill cannot be shaken.

Except by that sound: “Mary”

the voice you never thought to hear again, giving you back your name.

And suddenly, you understand: you understand the meaning

of the dark, cold, long night

that it was for the sake of that name, for the sake of this moment,

that you could be remade.



Teach me to rest with you, in the fragile, slow waking of the cold garden in the morning,

to wait there, long enough to hear Him remake me with the sound of my name,

uttered by the Voice that first called forth the morning.

The Two

Your whole world has fallen apart.

You are walking away from the City that will now forever bear the scars of the broken shards of your dreams.

And you are returning home,

going away as fast as you can from the women who bear the news that rubs salt in the fresh wounds of his loss:

even his body couldnʼt rest in peace.

O you impatient ones,

whose hurt is so deep, it drives you away before the sun reaches the height of the sky

Heʼs coming, running after you, intercepting you on the road.

You did not wait; you left before you could hear a breathless Maryʼs cry that she had seen Him.

But he doesnʼt let you go; he doesnʼt leave you

because He promised the Father that He would not lose

one of His own.

He cuts you off, he walks with you away from the others that still wait to see him

and he takes the wrong road, all that long afternoon

all the time that it takes

to help you see, to help you understand and recognize him, when at the end

he breaks the bread, and sends you running back to the others who have seen Him in your absence.

I too am impatient to stay in the face of disappointment.

I would rather run away, remove myself as far as I can go

from the source of broken dreams

than stay and wait for Him to come through the long, slow process of how He brings to fulfillment

what I want in an instant.

But He comes after me, too, on my own road, and He walks with me as long as it takes, to send me running home.

Thomas

How did you do it?

What were you thinking?

When the One Who had disappointed you

who had shattered all your hopes

the One you had planned to lay your life down for and who hung from a Cross instead...

this One, whom your heart had cried out against in anger, in disappointed love,

“I must touch his wounds,I must put my hand in his side...”

And then He was there, and He was giving you everything you had asked for.

And you who in the end had not the courage to lay down and die for him

how did you find the strength to put your hand into that side?

to put your fingers into the nail marks, to touch those wounds...



And can you give me this courage? This humility?

when He meets me, here in my bitter disappointments, and desperate pleas

with hands outstretched to give exactly what I demanded

in a way I never expected to get?

Will you lift my hand and draw it into the side that was also opened for me.

Peter

Is it possible, after the darkest night, so much more terrible

than your worst nightmares

after witnessing what you could never have imagined

after witnessing the end of life, of everything...

it feels so surreal, to be sitting here again on the shore

with the fire, and the fish, and have him asking you,

“Do you love me?”

But not only that: “Do you love me more than anything? More than all of this?

Would you give up yourself for me?”

He, Who knows better than anyone that you have proved incapable of loving thus...

And yet you want to: you want to love him thus.

And all you can do is confess this want: confess your affection.

Confess your pitiful, weak desire that your love be all it isnʼt.

Can I say anything differently? Sitting, with you, shell shocked,

in the wreckage of all we thought we were,

how we saw ourselves,

the image of what we wanted to be still in pieces at our feet.

“Do you love me?”

“Do you love me?”

Each time, driving deeper the desperate grief

That I cannot give what He is asking.

And then He looks on me with love, and he asks,

“Do you have an affection for me? Do you want to love me?”

And overwhelmed in mercy, I answer with you,

“You know, Lord...”