Touching the Sunrise

There are times when we have to deal with big questions. And then there are times when big questions sear deeply into our identity, shake our consciousness, tear our hearts with guilt. They toss us about with fear, doubt, and loneliness. The big questions seem to be dealing with us. We might stay up at night wondering where we fit in God’s plan. Questions haunt us: Who am I? What is the purpose of my life? How will I go on from here?

When we’re haunted by these big questions, we are like the apostles after Calvary’s sorrow and the collapse of their hope, when rumors suddenly swirled around that some of them had seen Jesus alive. How they must have longed to see once again the face of their Beloved Master, and yet also perhaps felt their hearts shrink in the uncertainty of what his eyes would say to them.

The forty days of Easter before the Ascension are like an educative process. After the resurrection, Jesus doesn’t engage the apostles on the level of emotion. He becomes their guide through the complexities of their hearts and the events that left them fearing what God’s plan might be. To them, Jesus asserts the authority and gentle power of his presence: Do not be afraid. It is I.

For forty days, Jesus engages his apostles and disciples who are astonished at God’s way of acting in Christ now risen. For forty days, Jesus leads them on an educative process in which they learn to mistrust themselves, their interpretation of events, and their own evaluation of who they are before God. Instead they become convinced of the reasons for their faith, a faith so strong they would give their every moment and their very lives, witnessing to others, telling them who this Jesus is and what he’s done for them.

The Easter season teaches us anew that, in our hearts, we also have already risen with Christ and experience something even now of the heavenly Kingdom. In Baptism we have died with Christ and have received an initial grace, which is the point of departure, of gradually intensifying experiences of grace through prayer and sacramental encounters with the risen Lord. Each time we receive the Eucharist we are fed at the heavenly banquet. It is true that this interior glory, which is still mostly hidden within us, will burst forth only in the eschaton.

These days, may we learn the Easter lesson to not rely on our own experience, to trust God as our guide, and to let our souls continue in communion with God—no matter what inner storms toss our hearts.

Image Credit: Cathopic

A long year has sputtered out during the holy season of Lent. Conflicting messages about the end or the resurgence of the pandemic… Life-changes and unexpected transitions… Worries over my parents’ health…

I have found myself feeling exhausted, listless, desolate.

This Easter, Jesus has come and stood in my immediate presence and I have stood in his.

“Peace be with you,” Jesus has whispered to me, proclaimed to me.

“I have been here all along. I rose from the dead. I live, the Risen One. Why are you troubled about the events in your life? Why do you wonder if I am here? If I can do anything?”

What troubles us…what troubles you…these 2000 years since Jesus burst the bars of death? Why does Jesus have to ask the same question of us as he asked of his disciples in today’s Gospel just days after his Resurrection?

I believe we sometimes don’t even realize we are troubled, we question, we doubt, we worry… Did the Apostles, after all, really get the depth of their confusion, insecurity, guilt, fear?

I believe that an inner suspicion gnaws at our heart today even as we recite the Credo… After all, we breathe the same air as the rest of humanity.

I believe there is this subtle desperation, so subtle we don’t even suspect it is there…

Why?

Even more than a year into the pandemic, we remain surrounded by questions, haunted by emptiness, suspicious about whether our life has real meaning. We have touched the small daily nothingness that often threatens to dominate our days. How much time people admit to scrolling through an endless social media feed without the will power to stop until they are exhausted? We live in a time where nothing is very strong as we are half-aware of the “dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why,” as C. S. Lewis said in The Screwtape Letters.

We suffer the absence of something—of Someone—that fascinates us, captivates us, bowls us over, seizes us…. “We are all of us limp” (Leo Tolstoy, The Idiot).

And then there is the Risen One who appears in our midst. There is something that happens right in front of our eyes. Someone who creates something new again and again, in heart after heart that will gaze upon him.

Jesus, in each encounter with another as recorded in the Gospels, asks only one question, “Will you love me?”

He doesn’t ask, “Did you get it right?” “Have you really learned how to pray yet?” “Have you converted completely this time?” “Have you succeeded?”

No. Instead, “Look at me. Love me. I am your brother, your Savior, your Shepherd, the One who is risen and at your side.”

I realized this Lent that my heart has been torn apart with this existential nothingness for quite some time. Call it nihilism. Call it skepticism. I believed. I trusted. But how I suffered because something had been taken from me as I breathed in the scary information and the ideology that has passed for the news which has bombarded us for over a year.

Then this Easter Vigil, Jesus said to me, “I am here, you can touch me, my hands my feet. I am real. My word is a promise. I guarantee it with my life. You can hold onto it and it will truly satisfy all your desire for affection, ultimate meaning, eternal desire and infinite happiness. It will not let you down. Breathe it in. Drink it. Read it not as inspiration. Read it as something that God has done and is doing and will do. They are not words. They are events that cannot be undone.”

Jesus opened my mind to “understand the scriptures,” to understand that he is acting in his Word for me. Now I am a witness to these things. I believe in this man, Jesus, the Risen Son of God and Savior, the Lamb of God. He has all my heart.

God so gently and only gradually is building up his story within my history and within world history. I trust him. No matter what happens to me, I shall live because he lives. I. Shall. Live. 

“Peace be with you,” Jesus whispers to you, proclaims to you.

“I have been here all along. I rose from the dead. I live, the Risen One. Why are you troubled about the events in your life? Why do you wonder if I am here? If I can do anything?”

Take your troubles to the Risen One. Doubt no longer, but believe.

Image: Robert Wilhelm Ekman, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The joy of Easter is the joy of the Gospel, the Good News that breaks open our lives with the possibility of mercy and hope.

That life could be more than we could ever have dreamed, that our days could be other than what we believe we’ve deserved.

Resurrection joy this year has been a time of real grace for me.

I like to imagine the apostles after the Resurrection. The Gospel stories leave us with a sense of breathless wonder and excited disbelief. Slowly, though, ever so slowly do our minds change and our hearts reshape their hopes. There must have been such gentleness about the gradual realization that Someone had changed everything about what they thought would be their future. Even Jesus thoughtfully came again and again in different places, in different ways, to help his incredulous followers take in sips the ultimate Reality of his Resurrection and continuous presence in and among them.

Slowly is the perfect word to describe this Easter for me. Slowly has my heart warmed to the fact that I am different than who I thought I was. Broken then, still broken now, but loved forever.

Slowly have I taken in my poverty as Jesus stands by me to tell me it is going to be okay. That he is the one that does things. He is the one responsible for making things happen. I will mess things up, again and again, the woman in bedraggled gown crying in the corner, so aptly described by Jessica Powers in her poetry. I must let Jesus be the One who bears the sign of victory.

Slowly have I let the slightly warming spring weather creep into my wintry heart and open the fragile flowers of my dreams once again.

Has your Easter been more like a trumpet blast from the Hallelujah Chorus or like an uncertain breeze announcing something unknown but unmistakably true?

Thanks for joining me on the journey,

Sr Kathryn