An Easter Reflection
Part 1
-On The Gift of March 1 -
It started March 1, 2000 when I was walking to class from where I parked off-campus.
It had been a long winter. Many days I was stuck on the roads for hours due to the winter snow, the ice.
It had been a long winter in my soul. This was the winter where the effects of bad uses of power at the church we attended were coming home to roost. I was losing community. And identity. And faith. And because losing faith had always been posited to me as a fault of my own will power, I turned inward. I stopped eating, started controlling. I was deeply depressed and 94 pounds.
On this year’s first day of March, it was icy and hovering just around 0 degrees Celsius. But it was brilliant and sunny - the sky the kind of blue that makes writers write and artists art. There at a corner in University Heights as I was walking to my class, I stopped in my tracks because underneath the ice was a trickle of water. I could see it moving, slowly under the surface, gravity pulling it towards the grate in the curb. And in the noticing of this rivulet of water, I heard something. Or felt it. Or knew it in the ways that souls know things. However it spoke, the moving water gave me enough hope to trust that the long winter in my city and of my soul would not last forever. And indeed it didn’t. I eventually, in a couple of years, was to get the help I needed. I eventually began to understand this embodied faith as truer, deeper, more alive, less certain than the faith I had been given nor could have imagined when I was 20. I had to leave church, to let the pieces of my identity, community fall, and stop trying to succeed at “faith” and start walking by it.
On every March 1 since, I’ve thought of this moment and I take stock of where I am and what’s going on- a soul check-in I guess. I wonder to myself “where am I this winter? Is there a trickle of melt? In this city and in my soul? Some years I can see hope and some I can’t. Both kinds of year lead me to pray.
This year, in some sort of coincidence, I work at the same University and I park on the same street off-campus so I walk the same route as I did 23 years ago. And this year on March 1 I took stock, as I always do, this time in the same place I did long ago. This year the snow is deeper and colder. There had been thick, icy snow for months and on March 1 there was no sign of melt. The ice was solid. The sun was out but was cold. As I walked to the University that day I reflected on how my heart has been feeling this unyielding freeze acutely.
There is an entrenched coldness in our culture of faith right now. Issues of power and control over who gets to determine the boundaries of our faith and the boundaries of God are dividing faith communities. Again. (For more on this, see THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE WORLD)
Questions of who to trust, who is telling the truth and who gets to decide what truth is are dividing communities. Issues where beliefs and doctrines are pitted against the real lives of people, as if somehow we are could pit truth against lay-it-down love, are dividing faith communities. Issues of purity tests for ideology and doctrine are dividing communities. And it is not getting better. The ice is not melting, the thaw is not coming. Even though I know in my head that my experience is not the fullest truth - that there are places in faith communities where new life is springing up. But this year, in my tiny corner of the world, the ice was thick and unyielding. The rancor is real. Cruelty is seen as an approved weapon if it means your side wins. Even when disguised as heat, anger, righteousness and fury, the ice around our collective being has been keeping us all locked-in, unmoving, razor sharp and dangerous - especially to the most vulnerable.
So this year I prayed in the freeze, what humans have prayed for whole millenia: God, have mercy.
-The holy corner of Underhill and Udell
Part 2
-On Being Once Again Challenged By The Gospels -
The gospels do this peculiar thing in the lead up to the Good Friday and Easter Sunday stories. They slow the action right down.
Jesus is not getting ramped up in the lead up to his death. Jesus is not seen gathering followers, planning rallies, raising money for his cause. While religious leaders were actively looking for ways to get rid of him, actively doing the frantic work of plotting traps and patrolling theology, he was not studying ways to refute them. While they were policing the purity of his beliefs and actively gauging the crowds buy in at all times, Jesus kept telling parables, teaching and challenging assumptions in longer and longer moments.
Jesus spends time with friends, eating meals, his offerings to the world coming at the speed of walking. When he is summoned to a deathbed he takes his time. He is anointed by long-maligned, soft-hearted women. Jesus notices the tiny details like the widow offering pennies and makes sure his friends see that too. Jesus is praying in the dark.
After Jesus comes to Jerusalem, laughably on a donkey, to the fanfare of misfits and the needful, he weeps for the city and then he rebukes the profiteers making money off of people’s longing for connection with God.
In the lead up to what we now call Easter, Jesus remains quieter and slower. He gets his friends to prepare a place to eat. His last act before his betrayal is not a rally, but a meal. In the lead up to Easter, he takes off his clothes and washes the feet of his friends and betrayers. He passes out the bread made by human hands and the wine cultivated by human skill and calls them his body and blood. In the lead up to Good Friday, Jesus got softer. He didn’t pump himself up to lead, or to fight, but prayed with unreliable friends. And then when it came time and his friends wanted to take on the soldiers sent to take him, Jesus rebuked that too. Turns out that fighting and damaging other humans for God is NEVER the way God’s kingdom is brought.
In the final moments of the lead up to Good Friday, Jesus gets so quiet he doesn’t say anything in his defense. He doesn’t argue. He doesn’t blame. He does not play the victim. He stands as a witness to the brutality of humans and their rightness.
Christ, when the stakes are as high as they will ever get, gets lower to the ground, closer to his friends, quieter, softer.
Part 3
-On How To Follow Jesus’ Way When The Thaw Is Long In Coming -
This year, I am reflecting on the slower, quieter impulse God takes heading into Good Friday and wondering on how that softness speaks to the thaw I need to happen. Where the culture of faith is frozen over, how might the slower and softer ways of Christ speak louder than I ever could?
Where motivations are maligned and communities are torn apart because the fear of not being right is too much to bear, could I speak of parables of unmerited grace?
Where marginalized groups of people - the ones deemed less in our systems and our theology, are being pushed out, their histories banned, their created Good-ness dehumanized, could I find small stories of goodness and of mercy and point them out to my friends?
Where there has been a hardening of Christian culture, where purity tests of thoughts and ideas are abundant and where words are hurled, intended to hurt, could I refuse to get meaner and refuse to get passive but deliberately and confidently get slower. When my own motives are maligned in public, could I get closer to the ground and serve just the few people around me in love? Could I trust that what happens at the table is enough? Is that like trusting that trickles of melting water are enough to move the ice away?
Could I let the softening thaw around my heart become the melt that washes feet?
Where the ice of this season in our christian culture has become damaging, razor sharp and impassable as it does when men and women are allowed to abuse their power, control the narrative, block their ears and scapegoat the misunderstood, could I refuse to match like for like? And could that sort of refusal, even after their actions of death, be the softening, the thaw that is needed? Could I trust in the identity, community and faith that happens in unexpected places after I choose to leave behind this bad theology of control?
Could I trust that once again my own soul will thaw from the effects of bad theology and misuses of power, reawakening to the bigger, deeper beauty of it all? Like the T. Swift song says, “I’ve seen this show before and I didn’t like the ending.” Could I walk out that side door and trust that this, this Christ- worn path, IS the way to life?
-Fish Creek Park, Spring Thaw 2023
Part 4
-On What Happens After The thaw-
In the city and in my soul, when spring does come, it is inevitably messy. Mud, dirt, dust everywhere. Our little church is going to have our Easter celebration outside this year. And while it is not as iced over as it was on March 1, there is still a fair amount of dirty snow left clinging to the city - we are not in daffodil season yet. I went to the picnic site yesterday to see the state of it before we gathered there on Sunday and it is a fair portrait of spring. Half old, gray snow, half dingy, bruised grass, everything seeping with mud and slush. We are definitely going to get muddy.
I wish that after the softening thaw, everything went -POOF- and we magically got to the good stuff - the soft grass and the spring flowers. But it never ever happens that way. The water melts unevenly. Trickles happen under and within the ice, slowly, slowly eroding the hardness with its life.
Then after the thaw comes the mud. Then the warmth, the sun, the roots and the growth. Then far into the future comes the harvest. We never would have imagined it if all we had was this ice, this trickle and the mud but this cycle, this path, this way of messy resurrection is a true thing.
Is this still a good metaphor, God? Is it accurate to expect that after we soften and thaw, it gets messy for good while? Seems to be the prerequisite for life - the mud and mess - and it is what I, and we, are longing for. Ice is strong and pristine yes, but dirt, messy, uncontrolled dirt is where life that sustains is cultivated.
The ice, the thaw, the spring.
The death, the softening, the resurrection life. Even here. Even where it is very hard to imagine.
Even when I know how messy it will get, even then, this is God’s way. And there will be a kind of joy in it.
Come Lord Jesus. Your angry, iced-over, socked-in little church needs you to make a soppy, trickling mess of us now. Because we need new life.