Remembrance, come live in these bodies again and cast light upon beauty. Find out our edges. Admit us to your company. Dwell with us.
Today is Good Friday. It is also Easter Sunday. Today is his Advent. This is our every day. It is his day. Every day we crucify our lord, and every day he is raised up again. Every day he is born into this world through the anguish and persistence of a vulnerable, tender, trusting, young woman, into the land of dust and grime, and refuse, and blood, and glory and light. Today he is new from the dead never to die, yet continually he endures wrongs and evils in his land.
About this time, warm rays broke through the mid-morning haze. He felt repeated, furious strokes, lashes separating bone and sinew. His lamb’s blood washed the ground and set it apart for its most holy use.
About this time Mary, seeing alive one who had been dead, exclaimed in the garden, “Teacher!”
About this time the maiden Mary, heavy with child, upon a donkey, felt the struggle of the beast against the broken road, and searched the horizon for the place of her deliverance.
About this time I sit and sip coffee, brewed just so from a French press. I look out the dining room window toward flaming yellow Forsythia. It lines the back edge of our small yard, generous in terms of urban lots here in central Virginia. We have about all we please. We’re offered pleasure without restrictive, suppressive limits, a lie really, make-believe, but our sights are set low enough. A more subtle deception pretends such a world is desirable. We’re offered the path of never feeling hard things, of never knowing what’s truly valuable and precious, but beauty is marked by boundaries. Without a seal, broken souls hold no water. We buy to pretend we’re okay, so we fail to see the greatness of the hand that holds us here.
Finding limits pressed in upon us, we find liberty. We’re shackled together with feelings we’ve hoped to escape, but need to embrace, need if we ever hope to see. Thank God the marketing can’t produce on its promises. We’re confronted with ourselves, and, finally reaching the longed-for spring, with you. We have to rest, to accept, receive. We get to. We had bought another narrative because we didn’t trust the plan which includes our pain. We are held in your hands. We are safe with your suffering. This is beauty and rest.
Yes, we are timid to approach what we have pierced. We are fearful to apprehend truth. We are slow to trust your forgiveness. Trust your forgiveness - this bedrock limits us, from plummeting ages upon ages into a great abyss. Here we stand. Hindered, restricted from rust and thievery. Here we rest and breathe, and endure, and rejoice. Here’s a rock we’ve cast aside, which yet holds us continually, and ever builds upon us. This is wonder and Grace. He is with us!
