In this ongoing Easter season, the temptation is to keep the concept of resurrection at arm’s length. Whether through associating it with miracles and mystery and Jesus only, or assuming it is an Easter-only event, it is easy to sidestep the demands of both this concept and the Easter season.
I have written in an earlier blog about the basic aspects of “resurrection” and how the word can mean “again standing up”—all the daily aspects of just getting up and showing up.
But there are also those more life-changing, ground-shaking aspects of looking at new life, at change, at resurrection power. Quaker author Parker Palmer has written about what it is like to be “threatened with resurrection”—that deeply ambivalent reaction I certainly have to newness and change.
Alan Jones, in his book “A Passion for Pilgrimage” so captures our dodge in the face of resurrection:
“All along we have had a companion on our pilgrimage who has been goading us with the Resurrection. Our uneasiness has to do with our committing the sin of refusing to be fully alive. To be fully alive is not to be in total control of our destiny. To be fully alive is to grow up into someone we are not yet. To be fully alive means our realizing that the Resurrection is now.
It means giving up the comfort of what Marie-Louise von Franz calls ‘the Not-Yet.’ As long as I can go on convincing myself that this is not the time, that this is not the place, that I haven’t yet arrived, I can always slip out of a difficult situation and made my pilgrimage an excuse for moving on. I do not want any form of closure or finality, because I would prefer the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about.”
Ah, yes, the not-yets… the “yes… buts”. My specialty is the endless pilgrimage, not the rigor and risk of choice and destination.
What is it for you? Take a moment this week to look at your good, logical excuses that keep you from embracing the “now” of whatever change is pressing on you. |