Feeling so blessed- I am married to the love of my life, and am Mommy to the sweetest boy in the whole world!
As a Pastor holy week brings a plethora of emotions to the table, but what a privilege to take it all in.
I am all too aware of the pain and suffering, the death and loss that accompany the lives of so many on this Easter Sunday, and know that resurrection means as many different things to people as does crucifixion. I myself, am limited in my understanding of resurrection as my life has been void of the many crucifixions that I witness on a daily basis, the kind that break, destroy, burn, kill and maim, disfigure, retaliate and isolate, the kinds that leave for dead not only bodies in the streets, but babies and mamas in roofless homes, children and adolescent boys abandoned to man-sized violence, black and brown youth with oversized dreams in an undersized white world, families dissected by disease, infidelity, mental illness, trauma, the everyday working public hostage to yesterday's bad policies and tomorrow's corrupt legislature. Brokenness, abandonment, murder, brutality, torture, suffering, lying, cheating, stealing, death...
Crucifixion.
And then there's Resurrection.
The kind that reunites drafted soldiers with grown baby girls, parent to child after war-torn annihilation, refugee families separated by decades of violence. Resurrection- like when the ice cream truck's jingle of sweet summer's stickiness wheels into the cul-de-sac and barefoot children run screaming for ice cold relief, like the time you leave the doctor's office and forever hanging on your tongue will be her last word: "remission", like the time you held your grandmother's hand while she took one last gaze across the decades of lines on your face and peacefully breathed her last . Resurrection- not only from the bodily-induced breathless coma that stills the heart's beat, but the kind of feather-like soaring above the clouds spurn by those words "I forgive you", the kind that shifts the family-feuded paralysis of loveless grudges to full-blown family reunion-type kinship.
Resurrection is not only made possible through crucifixion it is received, perceived, absorbed, accepted and/or rejected because of what is and has been crucified...within and without us. The closest ally to death's sting, to darkness that stops all things living, is the light that has been suffocated within its shadow. Only Resurrection reminds us of light's true value and, in betrayal of her dark friend of the night, it is resurrection that shines her blinding light into the darkness and with courage raises up, from the dust of our existence, that which had once been surrendered- life.
I pray that in my Eastertide tendency of seeking comfort and release, & rest and renewal, that I will lean more intensely into the trenches of crucifixion that exist behind each phone call, each unwanted visit and ignored face of an anonymous passerby, each painful memory that longs to remain "unacknowledged", each crevice and crater of heartbreak that threatens to claim a future joy. I pray that in my living I will not disavow the sacredness of the dying, the pathway of all birth from one life to the next.
Crucifixion...a new hope for the Resurrected.
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