Words are a poor medium for awe.
I’ll say that up front. I’d like to say something bigger, something less obvious, but that is what I have right now. A heart full of awe, and a thimblefull of words I’m squeezing out of a pinprick of a brain.
Yesterday was East Sunday. My congregation held our services at a local park. The sermon, by all accounts, was fantastic (shout out to M, if he reads this!), though I cannot say from first hand experience. I was leading a raggedly organized group of kids (ages three to eleven) up and around winding waterfally paths and through flowering trees to keep them occupied until the true point of Easter- the egg hunt!- could commence. So I missed the sermon, which I regret a bit, as it was one of the few pointedly “Jesus” shaped sermons of the calender year for my congregation. (I think, collectively, we dig on Jesus, but I think we are a bit reluctant to invoke his name in a religious setting).
I miss sermons, but I probably, in the balance of things, would prefer to be with the kids. Their lives are lived immediately, and when that immediacy is one of beautiful flowers! and the shape of leaves! and how far and fast can I run up this path! and oh, this beautiful, beautiful flower petal on the ground! and oh, this funny hilarious thing I am telling my friend!- and then right around the corner is an Easter Egg Hunt- well, who wouldn’t rather be basking in that kind of energy?
But what it means to be running around or after or carrying children is that I didn’t have much time yesterday to think- at all- about Easter. About the concept of redemption or resurrection at all. I went about the day filled with immediacy- first the church immediacy, then the immediacy of brunch and a visit with my future mother in law and future fiance, then the rare luxarious immediacy of deciding to spend the rest of the day, beginning at five o’clock, in bed watching Little House on the Prairie and reading and napping to the sound of the rain (rain which, miraculously, held itself in check all through the Glory of the Easter Egg Hunt, and allowed the sun to shine out appropriately!). My only even remotely religious thoughts were around bed time, when I was filled with reflective gratitude, about how fortunate I am and how undeserving, but how I’ll try to repay the fortune with my joy, not my inadequacies.
And it’s probably not really that terrible of a thing for me, as a person who isn’t a Christian, to not spend much time thinking on Christ’s resurrection. Except that, I’m not entirely not a Christian, and Easter, which my really whole-heartedly not a Christian housemate calls “The Holiday of Zombie Jesus?” (question marks included) is the most important moment in the Christian Calender- in fact, it is the point of the religion- that Christ died and was risen. That his sacrifice was not in vain, and that, in dying and rising, he redeems our whole entire lives.
I did spend the Saturday before Easter thinking about this. Well, actually, I spent the Saturday before Easter thinking around this. Particularly, I was seized with a specific example of a pretty regular (and idiotic) anxiety in my life- in this case, what if a particular lovely and loved member of my family, who is both younger than me by a decade plus some change and also devoutly, devoutly Christian of the literal variety and also actively involved with Evangelicism- what if she wants to talk to me about faith? Hers? Mine? The whole potential what if is kind of ridiculous (we live at least 2000 miles away, I’m almost certain she assumes I’m a Christian anyway, we see each other three times a year if that, etc), but it terrifies me, because of all things I don’t want to do, complicate another person’s faith is pretty high up there. Right along with not lie about my own.
The problem as I see it boils down to this: I believe- fervrently, passionately, deeply, in God’s love, joy and benevolence. And I remain pretty agnostic to almost anything else anyone has to say on the subject of God, except, as a caveat, it all seems to me to be equally true, and equally valuable, and equally holy and equally awful, given context, interpretation, etc. If my family member finds grace, love, strength, joy and happiness in her relationship with God, and sees that relationship through the lens of Christ’s sacrifice and revival- well, who am I to question that? And she does. So there is that.
But if she is to ask me what I believe- I can’t be honest and say I believe in Jesus as my savior. I just can’t. Maybe Jesus really did die on a cross and was really, really raised from the dead- maybe he really went to hell first, and triumphed there before going to heaven to prepare a place for his followers. Maybe that really was the whole entire point of his life. But from where I am standing, that experience only complicates, not completes, the general mystery of God’s love to begin with, and only works if it’s one of the many many paths that people take to get to God (including a path of honest atheism). Which is to say I find it completely possible, and even likely, that that is true. That Christ really did die to save us. But I don’t think it’s a unique event in human history. I believe that kind of thing- God’s constant, steady, all the time attempts to reach us by any means possible- is going on all the time. That doesn’t, to me, mitigate or lessen Christ, it just means that Christ is joyfully sharing the load of shepparding us fallen humans with all the Gods and Goddesses and avatars of all the other world religions that urge us towards mindfulness of each other, towards radical love, towards radical sacrifice and radical joy.
It makes a lot of sense to me, given how generally awful humans can be and how generally amazing we can be too, and how in need we all are of finding the grace inside of ourselves, and in letting go the muck, that we might well require the sort of God who actively comes down to Earth to live as a human and die as a human and come back as a more than human to get our attention. And for people who find their path through Christ and his sacrifice- for people whose faces shine with the joy of the knowledge of that love, and whose hearts yearn, as Mother Theresa put it, to be broken so deeply that the whole world falls in for the sake of that love and sacrifice- for those people and their story, I have only awe, only gratitude and humility in the face of it.
But I can’t claim that as my faith. And, if asked, I don’t want to lie. And I don’t want to dismiss my kin if she asks. And I don’t want to shake her own faith at all with the complicated meanderings of my own. So on Saturday I fervrently cleaned our house, and fervrently swept, and fevrently thought about what to do if we end up, she and I, having This Conversation.
I didn’t come up with anything eloquent (and I probably won’t- the conversation, when it comes, inevitably, will probably be awkward and filled with long pauses and inappropriate giggles on my part, and then long, long drawn out ruminations afterwards about my own inarticulateness!), and finally my fiance gently encouraged me to turn my mind to something else, since this was getting me deeper and deeper into no where.
Today, then, Monday. Easter is over. It came and went, like so many things, on the steam of its own seperate existence, and my awareness of it, or of its deeper meanings, or lack thereof, didn’t affect it one whit. Monday is an easier day to deal with, theologically and even just psychologically. Monday is filled with all the infinite practicalities of work, finances, housemate relationships, overdue letters and library books, etc etc. Glory, Grace, God- all that stuff, on, on Monday, is truly a miracle because you get it in glimpses between all the other stuff, the scaffolding of life that feels like drudgery at times but which I am convinced is what makes grace even remotely possible to deal with. Grace makes you a glorious madman, and if you have any desire to do things like, oh, say, save up enough money to take care of your parents in their retirement, you need the mundane not even so much for itself, but as a protective measure against losing your sanity to the gloriousness of it. I think there must be some overarching thing- some SuperGrace- that touches and encompasses it both, the glory and the mundane of it- and that overarching redemption, when I think about it, makes me laugh and feel joy in the same place I find God smiling at me all the time, even when I am crying.
So on Monday, I can spend the time between learning a new computer program or puzzling out how to meet my new found responsibilities to my clients by getting glimpses of the glory and grace and beauty of this world, and letting myself just soak in the wonder.
I must admit, that is probably my religious life. Avoiding God when I have time to think about God, and then God and I play this huge and gigantic and ridiculous game of hide and seek, dodging around things like Responsibilities! Regrets! Longing! Etc!
But there is this other thing I also want to tell you.
I envy the kids in my Sunday School their immediacy, but I recognize I’m not that far removed from that myself. I spend my life in as much a state of responsiveness, and as much get caught up in the lovely, silly, ridiculous, gorgeous details of the moment. A stranger’s accent in the elevator. The way my coworker looks so deeply contented when she has an a-ha moment at work that I just want to hug her. The petty emotional dramas I get involved in. My cat, curled on my lap and purring. How frustrated I become when I feel neglected or taken advantage of. All of it, all those details and infinitely more, they take on the mantle of My Whole Life for the moment I am looking at them- and then I set them down, and the next new thing comes along, and that, too, takes on my entire existence. I really am like the kids on their Easter Egg hunt- the thrill of each new find, each new discovery. And while my deeper heart longs to step back and connect it all, to see the pattern, to see God’s thumprint on it- really, in the day to day, I can barely manage to keep my mind focused on connecting two of those things, or on remembering to be generous and kind while I am at it.
Today I left work, left that sanctuary of busyness, and decided to go to a coffee shop and finish a novel by David James Duncan, called the Brother K. I hope I get to write about that novel soon- I thought it was beautiful, and filled with so much love and charity and joy- but tonight it is not the thing I’m writing about. When I finished the novel, I felt as if all the love he’d infused into it, all the deep deep hearted acceptance of the world, and love for it, had seeped into me, and I walked home through the wet mist and the traffic noise and the clouds obscuring the stars and felt the thrumming, patient goodness below it all. I felt kissed on the forehead, and felt my heart reach out to bless the trees and the strangers I came across and the homes with lights on and the homes in darkness.
Then I came home and read that a Christian writer whose works I admire more than I know how to say, and whose struggle to follow Christ’s example of bondless limitless love was a crucial thing for me to read, when it comes to reconciling myself with my once family, then bitter enemy, the American Christian Church, as well as giving me a much needed example myself in those very same lessons, had passed away.
His passing was not unexpected. He was in the end stages of cancer. He was surrounded by his wife and family, and he died the day after Easter.
He was a man who truly gave himself up to Christ, in a way I have not previously seen in my life, and whose giving was a joyful, inspiring, terrifying, brave, honest, brutal, amazing thing.
I cannot help but be grateful that his friends and family have Christ’s resurrection to look to for hope. I cannot help but be moved to awe that he also has that story in his heart. I know that soon enough I’ll be sad and broken for the loss of him, because his writing has been a beacon for me (and I know for so many other people)- but tonight all I can think of is gratitude for him, and for his God, that they get to be reunited. It must be a joyful thing for them both.
