Monthly Archives: April 2007

By now Easter consciousness is long gone for most people I know. Mine, too, unless I wrench it back into place. This morning’s stream of consciousness “what does Easter season mean?” sort of entry means to do just that.

Hope. It starts with hope. But hope for what? For eternal life? Sure, but my kids were both scared of eternity when they were small–the whole idea put a look of panic on their faces. Eternity, infinity, forever–big scary blobs of conceptual goo I both long for and dread. It’s like thinking the only door to paradise is the tar pit, to get sucked into a world no one’s been to and there have been no legitimate reports about. Eternal life is something we like to invoke but would just as soon avoid thinking specifically about. But the Ecclesiastes writer said God put eternity in our hearts. It’s a cavern that runs in my chest like…well, forever.

So hope. Hope for eternal life, sure, but what about limited life, finite life, life on this side? What about my writing life and my husband life and father life and fighting out from under depression life? What to hope for there? For success? Resurrection as a symbol for success? What is that? More money to buy the things that will allow me to make more money so that I can enjoy something that I might never have but if I work hard enough I might? If I fail, I can succeed? Obviously, I’d rather succeed than fail, but these categories must be flawed if they make up the bulk of my thinking.

Hope. What’s funny is that the moment I’m in now is exactly what I’d hoped for at some point in my life. The vague hopes of youth–a good and loving family, a rambling career in which I enjoy some success and independence, and more importantly, the ability to have a meaningful impact on a day to day basis on the very real lives of the people around me. I’d hoped to be a “really big deal” one day–national bestsellers and all that, and truth to tell, those hopes and dreams are hard to shake–but the point is that what was once hope is now real, though I could never have predicted the path or the exact shape of the reality.

Romans says hope comes after suffering that creates perseverance, perseverance that creates character, and character that then creates hope. And “hope does not disappoint us because God has poured his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, who he has given to us.” The Holy Spirit of course, coming after the resurrection.

Resurrection. A symbol of the victory of love. The Holy Spirit of God releasing power back into the dead: dead moments, dead hearts, dead possibilities, dead relationships, dead inspiration, dead hope. Resurrection has meaning only in the face of death. Death is required, then comes re-borning. When a broken relationship is reconciled, when forgiveness is actually offered and received, when new ideas come to an old and tired mind–these are actual events, no longer symbols of anything, but real changes in real time.

The hard part is talking about resurrection as if it were some principle available to anybody anytime just by thinking it. And maybe it is. But if Jesus hadn’t died, if he hadn’t been resurrected in fact, then all of this would be so much myth, so much legendary metaphor cultures rummage through as they do civilization. All concept, no blood and bone. But Christ is the fulcrum, he is the point, he is the resurrected one. And however we deconstruct “No one comes to the Father but by me,” in those words a key lies. The Christ is the path to God, he is the keeper of all resurrection, the giver of all new life.

…he is risen…He is risen indeed…

Confession time.  I understand rest conceptually, but as a practical matter, it escapes me.  Does that make me a workaholic?  It’s not that I work all the time: it’s just that when it comes time to rest, I’m no good, as if I’ve wandered into a task I lack the basic skills for.  There are a thousand things I love to do, but are they restful?  I don’t know.  Yesterday I tried to take a few hours off and doing something restful.  I had to go to the airport, and on the way back, I scooted over into downtown and parked and walked.  Camera in hand, I wandered for about an hour and a half, shooting skyscrapers and market stalls, hunks of tulips and roses, and the occasional  street performer.   The colors thrill me, the personalities fascinate.  Several high class photographers were showing their wares; it made me want to not bother.  Pride is silly that way–as if I was trying to compete with the pros.  By the time I headed home, I’d enjoyed myself no question.  But was it restful?

At home,  I cleaned a bit while singing Les Miserables at the top of my lungs, fussed with the shots I’d taken downtown, and finally went to work.  I worked until after midnight and fell into bed, and now it’s 5:30 a.m. and here we go again.

Maybe when we’re young we have no idea about rest because we just don’t need much.  Or perhaps we don’t think about it, we just do it.  Maybe it’s not rest I’m wanting, but something else, some kind of experience in the midst of rest, in which I will be fully aware of the experience of resting.  (Are you laughing at me yet?)  I hypothesize part of my problem comes from being a writer.  How do you escape the written word?  If I watch  a film, I’m watching it from a writer’s point of view, trying to figure out how that story was told so I can go back to work and write a better story.  Same with novels and plays and short stories.  Even poems.  I don’t write poems, but I deal in metaphor and long to make metaphors like that.  Photographs are about composition, just like directing a play or a video.  The life of the creative seems to never stop, and though I am so thankful, sometimes I just wonder what it means to lay it all down for a few moments and just be.

The truth is that when I was younger, I didn’t want the juices to ever stop flowing, and I didn’t want anything getting in the way of creating 24/7.  I don’t know why, but that was simply true.  Now I’m in a different place, wanting something from experience I can’t put my finger on.

If I could only be creative enough to put my finger on it.

…back to work…

No, I haven’t had one, but a good friend of mine used to work with a doctor that did a tremendous amount of research into NDE’s of children, and the books he wrote based on many interviews with these kids are fascinating. Dr. Mevin Morse’s web site outlines his work, and though it’s been years since I read Parting Visions, I remember it made a strong impression on me. This morning I’m not so interested in the specifics of Morse’s research and conclusions as I am the overall reaction of people to their near-death experiences.

Many adults, after an NDE, change their lives. Many of them feel as if they’ve been given a new opportunity, a new chance to live on the basis of an understanding of life and death firmly rooted in what they experienced when they “died.”

Here’s my Easter Season question: what’s it like, now that Resurrection’s here? The new lease on life, the new understanding that everything’s different? How are we living out this new knowledge that life isn’t what we thought it was? To have stood on the brink of death, and now there’s life unexpected. Are the tastes sharper, the sounds clearer, the beauties of Spring more nuanced and forceful? Are the people we love more precious than ever, each moment filled with cherished understanding of their immensity, their preciousness, their image-of-God-ness? What about the dollar? How is it changed? There’s need for it as always, but can a moment of God be bought? A moment of love? A moment of self-sacrifice that is freedom?

For someone who’s experienced an NDE, death came and backed off. Whatever we think of the science of it, or the reality of the white light and all that, the point is that they have experienced something that radically alters understanding of who and what humans beings are, and what life is.

Which is exactly what the Resurrection of Jesus does as well.

I’m going to try and live the day just like that. Just today. Maybe I’ll end up my old slogging self by nightfall, but why not imagine there’s a new lease on life because death has been averted and beaten, and God is up to something in our lives?

He who loses his life will find it…

It’s Wednesday, the first midweek of Easter season. Frankly, thoughts of Easter have long flown the coop from most U.S. Christians, nothing more than memories now of Easter egg hunts and cellophane covered baskets and perhaps a new dress and shoes. We lay our heads down last night without thinking much of Death’s new status in the world, down a notch now that Jesus took it on and won. Life is back to normal–stressful, expensive normal, and business has crowded the miraculous out for another year, or at least until advent and we get to celebrate with presents again.

What if he hadn’t bothered to rise? Too tired, too much loss of blood, too dead. Let me just lay here and rest for a hundred years, then I’ll get up and take on the world again. These sins of theirs were heavier than I thought they’d be, and I had no idea it would hurt that much. Talk about weary and heavy-laden…

I’m thinking of tombs. There’s something fascinating about the catacombs of Rome. I hope to see them someday. Graveyards, cemeteries, urns on mantlepieces, final places of rest that in the end, won’t be so final, according to scripture. But the tombs I’m thinking of are the ones we live in, the ones we build for ourselves. Quiet places of imaginative dying, where pain is somewhat manageable, and we can bring the world’s din down to a dull roar outside, out there somewhere. Tombs we fill with tributes to ourselves, like Saxon warriors dead fifteen hundred years, our graves filled with stuff we think we’ll need in the hadean realms. Stuff like books and toys and TV’s and canvases of paint with pictures or globs of color. Stuff like foods and ambitions and distractions of every kind. Spring calls to us, as does dawn, as does the stray new idea, as does the morning song bird, and the fresh bread of the early baker. Showers make us clean, telling us “Wake up!” Some new pain jostles us, saying, “Wake up!” Angels roll back stone after stone, and those bright wings of their beat with furious intent: “Wake up! Time to rise. The tomb doesn’t need you anymore.”

Each day a tiny lifetime. Morning is youth, the afternoon middle-age, and the evening’s fatigue speaks of retirement. Sleep is death, and waking is resurrection. All of life each day. Creation, fall, the wilderness, the coming of God, the making of the forgiven community and the coming of the Spirit of Christ. Resurrection pouring out onto the earth like a fountain onto we thirsty, thirsty dying.

We think it’s rules. What a surprise is grace.

Life is an ocean to death’s tiny water glass.

…just getting started…