Alive

Dawn (author generated)

Perhaps the less said the better when it comes to Easter, as opposed to Christmas with all its its carolling and food preparation. There is a different kind of build-up to Christmas. Setting aside the present-buying hype with all its attendant pressures, Advent, if you take it seriously, is about light and darkness. The days shorten as, each Sunday, another candle is lit, insistent light piercing the growing darkness.

Easter has a very different prelude. There are the long weeks of Lent, coinciding with the lengthening days of early Spring as they lead us into Holy Week. Lent was originally intended as a time of preparation for baptism, culminating in the deep darkness of Holy Week.

Holy Week is an invitation to re-learn the art of remembering aright, remembering how things are, coming to terms with the reality which we can only bear in very small doses, given the weakness of human nature and our capacity for self delusion. The triumph of Palm Sunday leads almost immediately to the betrayal which follows the last supper, and the hours of agonised prayer in a garden near the city while others slept.

Our lives are summed up in these six pivotal days, as our mortality is defined by them. Many churches end their Maundy Thursday liturgy by a stripping of the altars, followed by the resounding closure of the church bible. The sound will echo around the darkened empty church, a reminder of the transience of worldly things, the fickleness of popularity and success, and the fear of oblivion with which we associate death itself. Good Friday follows, and then the long wait through Holy Saturday when tradition tells us that Christ descended into hell to rescue Adam and poor old Judas. The Church waits in silence for his return.

Then comes Easter, the most unexpected kind of return, redolent of the silence and subtlety of the beginning of all things. The reality of the Resurrection has a way of dawning on us quite gradually, as it must have done for those who first witnessed it. It happened, we presume, at first light, that moment when after a long night of sleepless watching, we realise that the night darkness is not darkness any more. There is a softness and a secrecy about this realised moment.

Belief in the Resurrection is about realisation. It is something understood at the deepest intuitive level of the human psyche, what we might call the ‘soul’. The triumph of the Resurrection is commensurate with the triumph of the Cross. It is about forgiveness. There is a deep and almost hidden joy about it, a joy which takes hold of us as if by stealth. This is what we experience as new life in a moment of real forgiveness.

The dawn moment, for those who take part in the great Easter Liturgy, is subtle. It is ‘silent as light’, to quote a certain well known hymn. It returns us to the silence of the beginning of all things, a beginning that simply was, rather than ‘existed’ in any kind of mathematically construed time framework. It also returns us to the defining ‘yes’ of a young girl’s acquiescence to God’s invitation to be at one with her and, because of her courageous obedience, with us.

So it is also about the relatedness which is intrinsic to God’s being. To talk of the ‘existence’ of God is to limit God’s being, to try to render it down to our level of understanding, to deny the mystery of what we call the Trinity and to deny his relatedness to us in and through the person of Jesus Christ. The Resurrection was not a matter of reviving a corpse. It was, and is, about the risen and glorious body, something which we will ultimately share in, as we shall fully share in the relatedness of God’s own life.

The Resurrection is divine mystery. As Christ said to his friends shortly before his death, there is much more that we could know but, like his friends, we would not be able to bear such knowledge. From this it follows that the Resurrection is a mystery because we cannot fully understand its implications,  or perhaps we are not ready for them until we understand them in the moment of our dying. We are not yet able to fully embrace the mystery of the Resurrection because of our inability to live with the kind of joy which is unique to Easter, or, put differently, because of our unwillingness to live in the contemplation of God.

Hope and Glory

Easter is the most important feast of the Christian year, but the Churches have yet to agree where it belongs on the calendar. Perhaps this somewhat ludicrous difference is a kind of prophetic blessing. The ‘postponement’ of Easter on certain Church calendars reminds us that Christians can live with at least some differences. Our household postponed its own Easter celebrations – those which involve hunting for chocolate across several acres of soggy terrain, eating quantities of Easter cake with homemade marzipan (so much better than the shop stuff), and lamb not done the traditional way, for once, but spiced and slow cooked Ottolenghi style. We postponed all this because we had church commitments, as did our friends who came to stay with us.

Having taken the Good Friday service, and with Easter Sunday yet to come, I was particularly glad of the emotional space provided by Holy Saturday. Holy Saturday provides a chance to find our equilibrium in the context of the emotional swing which hurls us from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. Holy Saturday provides time to prepare for Easter Sunday without having to shop and cook at the same time. The preparation on Holy Saturday corresponds to the Jewish Sabbath, so we can also think of the women who had earlier prepared spices with which to anoint the body of the Lord once the Sabbath had passed. We need a Sabbath rest between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, not just to shop, cook and prepare the egg hunt, but to make sense of where the Church and our society stands in this ‘in between time’, in relation to the Easter event itself.

The Saturday space, between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, allows us to think of the world in the light of how all things will be when Christ comes again. I have long felt that Holy Saturday is better suited for ‘end time’ reflection than the Sundays preceding Advent. There is a sense of Christ’s absence about it which invites thought about how he will return ‘in glory to judge the living and the dead’, as the Christian creed puts it. This sense of absence is important. It gives us time to bring the suffering and dying of Christ into the light of his rising again and, in so doing, try to make sense of the world through the prism of these events.

Tradition holds that on Holy Saturday Christ descended into hell. While his descent might also be construed in his words of desolation and abandonment spoken from the Cross, he also descended into hell later, as the creeds declare, in order to grasp poor, despairing Judas by the hand and to offer him the kiss of peace in return for his kiss of betrayal. The hope offered to us by God in Jesus would not be hope if it did not travel beyond the reaches of despair.

While we were having supper on one of the evenings when are friends were with us, conversation turned to politics. We were generally agreed about one thing, and that is that the world is a pretty grim place and that it is hard to see where it will all end. Various end time scenarios were postulated, but that was about as far as the conversation was going to take us, until our youngest guest (aged 11) took us to task. What, she asked, did we think we were about? Had we nothing better to offer her generation than a generalised imminent doom scenario? What was she supposed to make of such talk?

Our young guest was far too intelligent to be fobbed off with an abrupt change of subject, or with being told not to worry her pretty head about such things, as if all would be well in the end. So we had to pick up where we had left off and posit something like believable hope. The conversation did not last much longer, but it did invite us to consider in our own minds how such hope, or the lack of it, relates to the kind of despair which Jesus experienced on the Cross and from which he later rescued Adam (the symbol of our humanity) and Judas.

The hope offered to the world in the risen Christ is not like any other kind of hope. It does not depend on vague belief in God, or on vague belief in anything. It is not a straw to be clutched at. Hope lives in the worst imaginable scenarios, past, present and future, and in any degree of despair in the life of any one human being. It is the hope of glory.

Glory pertains only to God. All other forms of glory, and the seductive and temporal power which they bring, are a poor imitation of the glory which pertains to God alone. The delusional desire for this counterfeit glory, and the seductive nature of power itself, accounts for the scarcity of true leadership in the world and in the Church of today. But hope sustains the human spirit because it proceeds from the glory of the ongoing life of the risen Christ. This is the Christ who speaks into the empty politics of the world and of the Church, as he spoke to the grieving woman who had brought spices with which to anoint the body of the one she loved, and found an empty tomb. 

The mood of the moment

Empty Tomb Photios Kontoglou

At times it seems that the politics of today only make sense when issues are seen separately, when they are allowed to become detached in the minds of the electorate from anything that went on yesterday, and from those which might occur tomorrow. This is a dangerous and delusional mindset, but one which is currently gaining ground among far right parties in Europe, and which should ring alarm bells in the minds of those UK voters with any sense of the history of the past century.

It is just as unrealistic to think that we, as individuals, can live our own lives solely in the present moment, without reference to the past. But there is a paradox here. The present moment, fully enjoyed and deeply relished, is a rare occurrence. This may be because we often mistake being fully present to the ‘now’ as being down to our ability to concentrate, to force the imagination into lock-down, so that some aspect of the ‘mind’ can take over and blank out surrounding circumstances.

I should stress here that a proper understanding of mindfulness discipline has nothing to do with this kind of strained concentration. It is much more a matter of letting go and freeing the mind, of ‘letting be’, but in a fully engaged way. Mindfulness is about being fully present to all the circumstances which converge on this particular moment, as well as whatever we happen to be doing or not doing in it, but without allowing them to impinge on our inner space. So it is a different kind of concentration.

Circumstances decide how we feel about life. We do not always experience the feelings appropriate to a particular liturgical season, for example (for which see also my post God is not seasonal 19^th February, 2015), or even to the weather. We are often, literally, ‘out of sorts’, at odds with the moment. Later, looking back on the day or on our whole life, events and circumstances seem to have ‘melded’. The day, or our life, acquires a variegated quality. It is uneven, both rough and smooth. This is what makes it precious. It is also what makes a life precious and unique in the eyes of God. A life is a melding of unique moments in which we are given an occasional glimpse of God’s presence at work in it.

This half awakened consciousness of God’s transfiguring work in us and in our world is what Easter is about. It is a ‘melding’. Easter melds with the rest of the year. It re-defines human history and within it the uniqueness of the life of every single person. The Resurrection, perceived as a new and altogether different encounter with the God who was crucified, holds and contains all human experience, and all human emotions, in one life-giving event.

In other words, it is where the corruption of death stops. By corruption I mean the destruction wrought on the human person, on all human relationships and on human history by death in all its disguises. But in the resurrection of Jesus Christ death itself is transfigured. It becomes its own opposite. It becomes life.

The life event of Christ’s own death, and of his rising, is now given to us so that we can see God, each other and ourselves in a new way. This new transfigured way of seeing is both personal, as it was for Mary Magdalene, and corporate, as it was for the frightened disciples who were holed up in a small room waiting for the police to arrest them. The risen Christ made his presence known to them in the most concrete and visible way. He called Mary by name, in a voice she immediately recognised, and he invited his friends to touch his wounded body and on another occasion to break bread with him. In all of these contexts, he was present to them when they least expected him and when the mood of the moment was certainly not one of rejoicing.

He does the same for us. He calls us by name in circumstances or moods which do not necessarily ‘fit’ with the moment, so that we do not immediately recognise him. In doing so, he is also inviting us to resist the tendency to over manage our spiritual lives, and possibly the spiritual lives of others, so that they fit with the season, other people’s expectations or our own unrevised expectations of ourselves. All of this is a matter of letting go into a freedom which will never be taken back by the one who gives it.

In view of the suffering being experienced in the world at the moment, all this may appear to be no more than pious optimism, or even an insult to the victims. It seems hard to apply it directly to the circumstances of a Yazidi family recently escaped from an Isis camp in Iraqi Kurdistan, but only because of the mental effort needed to do so. On the other hand, if we allow those who suffer to meet the risen Christ, within that place in ourselves which is the person only God fully knows, something quite different emerges, something which defies description because it has not come about as a result of our own mental effort. We have simply allowed joy.

Joy is freedom, freedom given in the life of the risen Christ. God is impatient for the truth about the human condition, now made new, to be fully revealed in the risen Jesus and also in us. He is impatient to free us from every kind of death-dealing corruption, from every kind of lie. So joy is not to be denied in times of suffering, any more than pain or painful memories should be suppressed when we are in the midst of celebration, because the risen Christ, in his physical body, brings a new kind of joy, one which transcends the moment.

God is not seasonal

When Easter falls early, or the weather is too cold to safely plant the potatoes on Maundy Thursday, the gardening year gets off to a rather ‘discombobulated’ start (to use a favourite expression of my mother’s). But while it is relatively easy to adapt to seasonal disruption where growing vegetables is concerned, the same cannot always be said for other seasons, the ones that mark the year in ways which affect us personally, Christmas and Easter being the two most significant. These two seasons are also connected to the two pivotal seasons of the year, the winter and spring solstices, when daylight is at a turning point. They affect our moods. They also speak of a God who is always with us, in times of both light and darkness.

Christmas will, at least for the foreseeable future, always fall on the 25^th of December, but Easter is a movable feast. This year it falls early enough to create a general sense of disequilibrium, or emotional ‘discombobulation’. We have hardly done with Epiphany when Lent is almost upon us. The Christmas chocolates have only just been finished and yesterday I found a couple of minced pies, somewhat past their sell by date, in the back of a cupboard. I threw them away. They would have been perfectly OK heated up but the season for eating them is over. They do not fit the mood of the moment which is already coloured by anxiety. I am not yet in the frame of mind for Lent. I have been worrying about this for the past couple of weeks.

Anxiety is the first temptation we face at this time of year. It was, incidentally the one which Jesus himself faced initially in the wilderness and which arguably informed that whole experience. Was he really the Son of God? If he was, surely there was no point in allowing himself to starve to death before his work had begun? Perhaps he should just settle for being a famous wonder worker … What to do? He was not ready, not in the right frame of mind for doing the work he was called to, with the sacrifice which it would entail, or so he was tempted to think.  

When it comes to Lent, I am tempted to think that the right frame of mind involves at least wanting to give something up, or do something, which would make me more ‘disposed’ to God, a better Christian perhaps. There is so little time, between the end of Epiphany and Ash Wednesday (about 2 weeks, in fact) for wanting to somehow be different or better. But these puerile anxieties have no place in the overwhelming mad generosity of God’s salvation plan for each one of us which, incidentally, has nothing to do with being a better religious person or anyone other than who we are. God is much bigger, much wilder than our self preoccupied worries can possibly allow us to imagine. He loves us most in our humanity.

Perhaps Lent would be a great deal more fruitful, and less discombobulated, if we were mindful and accepting of our humanity and of the humanity of others. Of special concern are those people who have endured a kind of Lent for most of the year, or even for a large part of their lives. Some have long term mental health problems. Others have been recently bereaved. All are living through a time of wilderness and temptation of which most of us have little or no experience. Giving attention, through prayer, or through physical presence to someone who is suffering; loving them, not because we want to be better Christians, but in their humanity, is what Lent is really about. We meet Christ in their humanity, and in our own if we will allow it. So our shared humanity and suffering has much to teach us, if we will only pay attention to it.  

This is how God pays attention to us, regardless of the season. We are loved in our humanity, in what we are going through right now, good or bad. We are loved in our day to day ordinariness, not in the persons we think or wish we could become. God loves us in the full knowledge that we will probably never become that person, nor perhaps should we. The imperfections which make us the persons we are, are also the wounds and bruises we carry around in life. On the whole it takes a life time to learn to tell the difference between what is a wound and what is an imperfection or a ‘sin’ in ourselves, let alone in other people.

All wounds, and the imperfections they generate, are also Christ’s, because he has chosen to make them so. For this reason, the season of Lent is also always Easter. Nothing is particularly tidy or seasonal in the way God relates to human beings.