Somehow You Keep Going (Thoughts on Easter)
My parents died when I was 30. Two months apart. I felt like I was in an ocean without anchors.
There are no words to describe what happens when you lose your parents. The deep painful emptiness is beyond the grasp of language. Even less so when those losses are in quick succession at a relatively young age. To say the world as you’ve known it ceases to exist is an understatement. Suddenly, it’s you in the vastness of life making all the decisions. There are people to inform, services to plan, appointments to be canceled. That’s to say nothing of the grief.
Today is Easter, a day when many focus on a story about the power of life over death. If you’ve read any of my posts about how I see the world, you won’t be surprised to hear that I view things differently than most. Growing up, I hated being in church on Easter; I simply couldn’t get onboard with the central idea of the day: resurrection. What do you mean Jesus rose from the dead? Logically, that didn’t fit my analytical brain. One person in the history of humanity experiences this phenomenon, this miracle, and it never happens again? Not only that, but what does that say about a God who requires a bloody, violent death? That certainly isn’t a God I want anything to do with!
It wasn’t until I reached college and majored in religion that I discovered the way that Easter would resonate with me. It’s worth noting that I have a very complicated and nuanced relationship to things like the Bible. I understand and appreciate it as a compilation of writings by various authors over a vast period of time that were written in a variety of contexts with different audiences in mind. It is in my opinion, humans trying their best with the information they have, to make meaning of their experiences.
With that context, I remember an assignment for a class on feminist theology where we had to come up with what it would look like if we had to start a faith community rooted in feminist theology and its methodology. After extensive research, I settled on the name Emmaus, which comes from a story in the gospel of Luke. In the story, Jesus has just died and some of his followers are walking on the road. They meet a stranger and after traveling together for a while, invite the stranger to share a meal. It is in the sharing of the meal that they recognize Jesus.
Do I really believe they saw Jesus on that road? No, I don’t. The great theologian Marcus Borg would say that there is a difference between whether a story is historically, factually accurate, but that it can still hold deep truth. For me, it is in the sharing of a meal and the connection of community that we can glimpse the presence of those we love and know that even if they’ve died; they still remain with us in our hearts and minds. That’s why I say the Emmaus story is one of resurrection. It isn’t that life overcomes death, it’s that life persists in the midst of it. Years ago I wrote that one doesn’t have to believe in the physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus to celebrate Easter. I still believe that is true. Resurrection isn’t something that happened once to one man, thousands of years ago. It is the daily, moment-to-moment choice to somehow keep going despite great loss or defeat. It’s making a way out of no way. Jesus’ friends experienced it, nature displays it as frost gives way to spring, I continue to strive for it in my life as I search for freedom in the midst of isolation and neglect. The phrase often heard during Easter is ‘He is risen!’ but I find a more accurate one might be ‘We are rising!’
