The Easter Journals: Part One

                         

I wake up in a funk that I can only walk myself out of. I do not feel like Easter. I do not feel like resurrection. I feel like fear. The fear that I will get the call that says my mother is finally gone. The fear that COVID-19 is coming at last to kill me or kill us as it creeps rushes the world, the fear that we will be poor and on the streets, the fear that I’ll never be free from fear. The… What is this? The fear that I don’t know what to do with Easter the way I knew what to do with Lent.

I go out with scissors and a bag to cut flowers from around the neighborhood. It is four in the morning and sixty degrees. There are no cars driving, but many parked, and the air is that blue color of pre morning. I walk about looking for any flowers that don’t definitely belong to someone’s yard and can be placed on the altar. I am a cover snipper, kneeling and slipping things into my cloth bag, a strange Christian hedgewitch. I feel light and loose and unsafe, like something that will slip away. I don’t feel childlike,and I do not feel salvation. I feel confusion. Passing the parking garage that is darkened and shut down I see a wide dark opening before a shallow divet of grass and there is a blossoming tree. I go to it and pick the white blossoms and think, Is this how Mary Magdalene felt like as she approached the empty tomb?

I have never written an Easter story because I never understood Easter. I still don’t. I understand Lent. And mourning. We mourn every day, Dying and suffering, fear and betrayal I get. I do not get this resurrection.

There is the temptation to make resurrection smaller, handle-able. I resist this. I do not metaphorize it, or cut it down. There is the temptation to ignore it. Or maybe to sing the songs and ring the bell too loud to think and look at the white and gold altar and the floors. There is even the temptation of disbelief. What a comfort it must be to turn your back on the incomprehensible, the unreachable, to not live in this strange space. There is the temptation to do anything but look at the empty tomb, but resurrection is a different country. Resurrection is a hungry goose on her next of eggs waiting for the hatching. Resurrection is fragile buds waiting to come. Resurrection is the memory of  a spear in your side and five half healed bloody wounds. It is not the certainty that everything will be alright, not in the general every day since of the word alright. What is resurrection but the certainty that from now on the rules have changed and everything will be quite different?

I am heterodox but I a not no- odox. I am a heretic, but not an unbeliever. I have been full of feeling for the week of the two Lord’s Passion, for Palm Sunday and for the heavy, heavy mysteries of the Triduum. Right now, at five in the mourning I am not sure how to feel.

On Easter Monday I’m feeling a lot better than very early Easter Sunday. Going out into the world, seeing the flowers blossom, the daffodils strong and tall in the coolness of spring air, the little buds on great trees, the little trees covered in white blossoms like spring brides gently communicates the message I could not receive all at once. It is not so much a message as an invitation. Jesus tells Mary not to touch him. I wonder what this is all about. I wonder if this was added by men to downgrade her. Because the message of the empty tomb is not do not touch me. We naturally shrink away from it. We do not entirely understand it. The message is take my hand. Take my hand, do not be unbelieving but believe. It comes to me that the reason for the Octave of Easter, the reason for a Gloria every single day is because unlike Good Friday, it takes several days to even begin to understand not only resurrection, but transformation, renovation. The son of the widow of Nain is brought back to life, as is Jairus’ daughter, as is Lazarus. But the resurrection of Jesus is something different. He will never die again. This is life of another order. This is not only renewal but recreation. The flowers come again and that is beautiful, but this hints at something beyond the perennial round of seasons. This is the round of the soul, not only that we will rise from the dead, not only that we will go to heaven, whatever that means, but that having put our hands in the hand of the Risen Beloved, we will remember our lost state, return to our original state, come back to the blinding brilliance from which we were born, not mistake the daily grinding round and the common lack of vision for what should be. This is the invitation to see anew, live in a different way. It can only be done through grace.