Watch what you say and to whom, especially if you are an authority figure. Watch whatever news you think is recent, even when it’s horrifying. Listen to people you trust with your one small precious life. Inconvenient as it is, you have to trust your own wisdom and divine Immanence alive within you—both/and. Follow your tears. That’s what the women who crept back to check on the dead Jesus did. It’s what all disciples do when they are afraid to trust.
* * * *
It took nearly thirty years before I fully digested and embodied the personal implications of global warming/warning in my ongoing suburban life. By the 1970s, political furor about shortages of fuel meant that we had to wait in long lines to get gasoline for our car. Restless children wondered why we had to wait so long to get to—anywhere in our car. Delay was annoying. It was revealing. It was predictive. It was inconvenient. It was omnipresent.
I bet the disciples of Jesus took a long time to figure out that Jesus’s gospel contained good and bad news together. He was telling them something that mattered on earth and in heaven, even though they didn’t understand or trust it.
But right now it’s Easter, and Easter season lasts 50 days. Do we weep or rage or both?
All I hear and see in the “news” are images of war and poverty, dying children, and leaders who bully. I feel sad about getting old, sad about the pull of temptation to avoid my own sorrow. I am not afraid of dying as much as I am of losing faith in the vocation I struggled to fulfill. In a word, I need to trust Christ alive. I need blessed food. I need the depths of music and worship that hallow life itself—everywhere. AND I despise/distrust evangelical-ISM, as if Christianity were THE ONLY WAY for the whole world.
* * * *
The joy of Easter, whether I feel it or not, lifts me. It lingers in the air, on television, plastered on Facebook and also stuck in my heart, visible on my face, even in my tears. Great and unexpected joys are small and large, and they still happen. I don’t long to sit in a pew for worship. I do miss the soul of it—the hullabaloo, the Hosannas and Hallelujahs, the joyful ingredients alive and well and rising always everywhere—no matter what. Why Easter? Well, because Easter matters—on season AND off season! Day AND Night.
The Alleluia hype matters—for its own sake. For its own sake. It’s always present.
