resurrection sunday

love and the adversary

I had no intention of writing anything the past three days. I was super exhausted, and I generally don’t want to, indeed can’t, write when I’m tired. But Thursday morning when I sat down to meditate, the meditation flowed into the piece I wrote and shared here. It felt more, in fact, like that piece wrote me, and each day since, writing (or being written) has rested, nourished, and rebuilt me. As it happened, of course, these days of rest and rebuilding occurred during Holy Week, and I’m sure the quiet power of that story has been part of the nourishment, too.

Anyway, here it is Easter, and there are a few more thoughts I want to share.

Here’s the first. The Holy Week story we’ve been following proceeds sequentially and chronologically—Thursday first, then Friday, then Saturday—but reality does not. Reality happens all at once, and the events depicted in the Gospels are happening eternally, meaning, happening outside the dimension of time, happening where moments occur not like a river moving from past to present to future but like raindrops falling all together. Christ is eternally being born, eternally praying to be free from the survival impulse and one with the love-force of the Abba, Christ is eternally being betrayed and crucified, eternally rising and returning to the world that rejects him, eternally descending into hell and ascending to the Abba. So while we tell the story one piece at a time, and in a certain order, our experience of the story usually has more of a simultaneous feel to it—several things happening at the same time.

Second, although we’ve been gathering around the Christian story the past few days, the realities this story represents are bigger than “Christian.” For some of you, I know, my presenting these realities in Christian language, with references to events described in Christian Scripture, has made it easier to hear. For others, it’s made it harder. And for some, it’s been a mix. (I say “I know” because I’ve received messages, all of them offered kindly, from people naming all three experiences.) But the realities expressed in Christian stories, symbols, and rituals were “real” long before Jesus was born. And though Jesus did, I believe, gather, concentrate, and radiate those realities in ways that make them more present and powerful “on earth” and “in heaven” (and that Jesus continues to do so, Jesus is eternally doing so), they would be real whether or not anyone ever, past, present, or future, called themselves Christian. We can call ourselves dog-barkers or pine-tree-ists, and the reality of the universe will still be the reality of the universe. Gravity was real for billions of years before anyone said, “Oh, gravity.” Truth needs no one to recognize it or call it just the right word for it to be true.

Third—and now I’m coming to what to me feels like the heart of all this—if we tell the story sequentially, the resurrection of Jesus comes at the end (followed by, we may as well add, the initial befuddlement and eventual empowerment of his followers). But what if we tell it non-sequentially, as an everything-is-eternally-happening-all-at-once story, with resurrection not at the end but at the center and as continuously happening ? (That was one of my points on Friday and Saturday: that in the New Testament, resurrection isn’t happening just at the end of the story, just on Sunday; it’s happening the whole way through.) And what if we loosen—not discard entirely, but loosen--the Christian language of the story just a little? It might sound something like this:

There are two powers in the world: one, the power of truth, beauty, and goodness, and another, a power that fears, despises, and crucifies truth, beauty, and goodness. Let’s call the first power Love, and the second, borrowing from the book of Job, the Adversary. Love and the Adversary follow different laws, generate different gravitational fields, and cause the world to spin in different directions. The Adversary spins things in the direction of delusion, destruction, and bondage, and Love in the direction of truth, healing, and freedom. We feel both powers working on us pretty much always. We’re affected by both spins. The whole creation, seen and unseen, is affected by both spins.

Resurrection, the word I’ve been foregrounding the past three days, means simply this: Love never ends, and Love is stronger than the Adversary. Love keeps returning, returning to the world and to the Adversary, returning for the Adversary, to illumine, heal, and free the Adversary from its bondage. (If you want an image for this returning other than the Christian “resurrection of Jesus,” try the Buddhist notion of the “bodhisattva.”) Love is the deeper power, the deeper law, the deeper magic.

Love is not mushy. It is, as Krista Tippett likes to say, muscular. It carries the burdens of the Adversary. It receives into itself the pain-expressed-as-cruelty of the Adversary. But it operates by different laws and different powers than the Adversary, and its muscle and power are in vulnerability, tenderness, and weakness. Crucifixion only magnifies its power.

One more brief point, a fourth, and then a story to close. It takes resurrection eyes to recognize a resurrection body. In the Gospel of Luke, two followers of Jesus walk all the way from Jerusalem to Emmaus with him and don’t recognize him until he breaks bread with them, and in John, Mary Magdalene thinks Jesus is a gardener until he speaks her name. We can be blind to Love’s presence and power until Love gives us eyes to see it.

Now here’s the story. My inner spiritual calendar is rarely in sync with the liturgical calendar, and I almost never feel drawn to take up any particular spiritual practice during Lent. This year, though, on Shrove Tuesday, the day before Lent begins, I felt a clear prompting to pray, every day, for help to see the world and see others through eyes of love. I am prone to see others through eyes of judgment and criticism, especially when I’m tired or overly busy. And while I’m not aware of openly voicing that judgment very often, none of us can hide the vibe—we may think we can, but I believe the people around us can feel it, I believe the spiritual realm around us can feel it—and I don’t want to hurt others or drag down the cosmos. I also don’t want to carry that poison in myself.

So I followed the prompting. Every day, I turned my heart to the Heart of Reality and asked for its help. Not on any set schedule, but at different times each day: “Help me see the world and others through eyes of love.”

It probably won’t surprise you that I’ve not noticed any great difference in myself. My inner monologue still includes criticism of others and of myself. But there have been times I’ve felt help was being offered. It’s hard to describe what it’s felt like when I was aware of help, but I’ll get you in the neighborhood with the word “tenderness.” It’s felt like a tenderness was there.

Anyway. Lent. Forty days. I spent a good number of those forty with my father, who’ll be 93 on Saturday, and mother, who’ll be 90 in October. For a number of reasons, it had become clear to them, my two brothers, and me, that Dad needed to move out of their home and into an assisted living facility, and it took a lot of work—logistically and emotionally—to make that happen. We moved him on Monday.

That day and the days prior were days of grief, as you can imagine, each of us feeling it and expressing it in different ways. My dad knows this is the right decision and is willing to do it, but he isn’t a hundred percent happy about it, and there were a few times in the eleven days I was there that he and I did things or said things that hurt the other’s feelings.

On Wednesday, his third day in the new place, I felt it was time for me to leave. I live two and half hours from my parents, and my two brothers live ten minutes away from the house where Mom is remaining and the facility where Dad is now. They are both very attentive, and our parents are in great hands with them nearby.

When I said goodbye to my dad, I kissed him on the head and told him, “I love you.”

He squeezed my arms and said, “I love you, too. And if I didn’t love you already, I’d have fallen in love with you.”

Those will not be the last words my dad speaks to me, but I can’t imagine he’ll ever say anything more tender or anything I’ll treasure more.

And I share this story here to say this: I was praying to see others through eyes of love, but others were seeing me that way.

Resurrection is always happening. Love never ends.

Happy Easter.

Photo credit: king Ho (Pexels)