EASTERING FAITH

EASTERING FAITH

                   One who is not young or willing to be young at heart will never understand Easter. Think of the spice laden svelte Mary Magdalene hastening to her lord’s tomb, or imagine the “beloved disciple” sprinting over boulders and outrunning Peter as the latter was double-timing cross-country to reach the empty tomb. The marks of youthful agility!  Easter is the festival of eternal youth, of rejuvenation (from the Latin “juventus” meaning “youth”), of freshness of breath and lightsomeness of body. All these qualities are realised in Jesus, the risen lord and life-giver; so fresh and full, radiating happiness as he takes his mother gently into his embrace, and she caresses his face and hair blowing softly in the morning breeze of that first Easter day. That living picture is realised anew for every mother and child as they meet in heaven after a life where tears were plentiful and the final moments painful. When the last tear has been wiped away and death banished forever, the fresh innocence of childhood will be restored for keeps.

          This is our resurrection faith. We are an eastering people, eastering through struggle and pain, life and death, till God takes final and complete possession of us. We believe that it is already happening each time we celebrate the mysteries of Jesus and allow the Holy Eucharist to expand into our daily lives, with their hard choices and inevitable accidents. Indeed, Christian conduct is a eucharistic conduct. We only need believe that the paschal mystery of Jesus’ death and resurrection is operating in our lives and that every teardrop is weighted with the lightsomeness of resurrection glory. Mysteriously, pain and dying have been transmuted into transmitters of life.

  

          This is faith, indeed. Faith means acceptance; acceptance of someone’s words, for instance, and behind the words, the person we accept. Faith also means that other people can accept our words and us. It leaves us vulnerable - open to the possibility of betrayal. Yet, without faith it is impossible to live. At the deepest level we put our faith in life itself. We believe that since life is fundamentally good, our faith discovers goodness at the heart of things.

For, in spite of our disappointments, we go on believing. It is a basic commitment to life, to revival, to the sheer insistence on going on. It is a basic belief that the gnawing hungers, the piercing yearning within us shall be satisfied. Every man and woman can build on this gut level faith, since it is affirmed and reinforced by the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christ’s resurrection is our own recurring resurrection.

          The resurrection of Jesus can tell us something when life gets us down. Jesus was tortured and killed by cruel men, but raised to life by a loving God. The resurrection tells us that when the worst happens the best happens as well. It tells us that our basic belief in life is quite right and that our deepest instinct is pushing us in the right direction, into the ever-open future; not a pie in the sky but eternal life now. That is what all the simplicity and subtlety of the Christian creed is about. We don’t just recite it; we surrender ourselves to it.

                                                         My life is like a faded leaf,

My harvest dwindled to a husk;

Truly my life is void and brief

And tedious is the barren dusk;

My life is like a frozen thing;

No bud or greenness can I see.

Yet rise it shall - the sap of Spring,

O Jesus, rise in me.

Christina Rossetti (1830 – 1894)