Maybe Resurrection

An Uncertain Easter Reflection

Where are you resurrected God? I’ve nudged your dead body many times, wondering if you were really alive. To be brutally honest with you, I’ve asked if you were there one too many times for someone supposed to have studied the divine. Did Aquinas or Teresa or Paul or Calvin ever admit that you were deafly silent to them at times? Unless they were in denial, they had to admit to at least a Holy Saturday when the tomb stayed painfully silent.

The other day, I heard from a hospital executive about how many times she was in the room with someone who just died, and I remember the many times when I was the only one present when someone took their last breath. I just held a hand and told them goodbye. Perhaps that was where God was in that cold and lonely room. There was another time when I sat with a patient who experienced a miscarriage, an empty womb. She was waiting for her partner to arrive and wanted me to just sit with her as she cried on my shoulder. Never was I asked to do this and I did not know how to feel. To be a shoulder to hang a head on. She had once carried a divine being, and its absence was not a sign of hope.

I asked so many times where was God in those antiseptic halls, but also in a life riddled with broken dreams, full of hurt not only for myself but also for those I seemingly could not help. A person shared about a recent divorce and move, and I felt the trauma in her voice and how she talked about burrowing her life under the earth. Nothing more was needed to say, nor did I press the issue any further. Knowing this was enough. This is the same knowledge that I feel God absorbs from every single person, everything not said between the painful lines. As if a tearful bystander.

The church rarely tells its people that Easter is Emperor Constantine’s way of Christianizing a pagan holiday to celebrate the full moon after the vernal equinox. But the same goes for Christmas and all the other ways people try to give frame to God in our minds. How else can people understand what they cannot see, or hear, or touch? But still I’m drawn to helping people talk about this absent deity in any way they would like, in grief or in joy, in heartache or celebration. In that way, I can’t stay cynical for long, because as soon as I turn the corner something strange happens.

The silence becomes something else. The absence doesn’t remain that way forever. I can’t help but notice that when I allow the longing to persist, something beautiful can emerge. I don’t know what that actually is, but all I can tell is that it gives some kind of hope. Like when the parents of a child tell me that their daughter was checked into an emergency facility for psychiatric problems, but still held the possibility for a real resurrection in her life. Perhaps this is a reminder that there is something I can’t easily dismiss, something still waiting for me, even as I hold out an empty hand.

Photo by Claire Kelly on Unsplash