*Warning: this is a long one! I guess I am making up for lost time. I wish this thing was wider, then this post wouldn't take up so much room!*
Oh, hello again.
I know, I know it's been a long time. This is due to the fact that, of course, I try to fit an infinite amount of activities into a very finite space, such as the mere 24 hours we are allotted every day--16, if you take time to sleep. (Which, trust me, I certainly do). This past weekend, Holy Weekend, I especially felt the finite nature of time; I know that celebrating the Feast, Death, and Resurrection of Christ is a beautiful, communal Church event, but, man, does it make for a busy weekend! But anyway, Easter is one of my favorite religious holidays: I love the time we spend preparing for it through Lent; I love that our whole lives and schedules become wrapped up in each other as we remember together; I love that Spring has usually sprung when it rolls around. I don't really love all the commercial/consumerism that surrounds it (what the hell is an Easter basket, anyway?), but man oh man, do I love those Cadbury Eggs. I love that we celebrate the new life that surrounds us in nature, and that we hope in all things made new in the Resurrection of Christ.
Easter is usually the season when I am most reflective of my life in God, and of the "Kingdom lifestyle" I have chosen to orient my life around. In fact, around 8:25 am Sunday morning (35 minutes before church started), as I was furiously whisking eggs in my pajamas, I started to reflect on Easter last year. I was in the midst of a bout of serious depression, struggling minutely with anxiety, desperate for consolation and guidance on dealing with Ed's impending death (he died two days after Easter last year), and felt isolated and withdrawn from life around me. The season of Lent and Easter was actually a dark season for me: in this time of life and newness, I was feeling grief, pain, and despair.
Thankfully, within the next few months, the clouds of depression started to lift, and the sun of hope and peace started to shine once more. I was able to make some internal and external life changes that reduced my anxiety and increased my connection with community. I made many new friends, deepened the friendship I had, and started to seriously reflect on the next steps I would take in my future. I felt alive and liberated: hope was no longer something I anticipated, but something I lived in. Though this year has certainly been hard, I think I will (hesitantly) declare that I am more healthy than I probably have been in awhile, if not ever.
And, you know, Thanks Be to God, right?! I am so thankful for this time in which I really live in hope for the future. And I'm sure many of us are able to relate to this scenario: life is hard (really, really, really hard) sometimes, and it sometimes seems impossible to get out of bed and go on. But, sometimes by making good choices, and sometimes by sheer miracles, things turn around, and life seems livable again. The possibility of good things continuing to happen doesn't seem so remote.
However, if that is what hope is--painful situations alleviating, and us feeling like life is good and possible--then I don't really like it. I don't think it has a place in Christianity, to be honest. It makes hope contingent on the diminishing of pain, trouble, despair, and death; it leaves no room for miracles. And don't get me wrong: I am not discussing the daily troubles and problems in life; I am talking about the devastating, crippling problems in life--both death of the body and the death we experience in life. The things that overtake us, that entrap us in despair. The things that make us not want to get out of bed in the morning because we know we must face them.
In the little Evangelical Church I grew up in, we would equate deliverance with the movement of God: if someone's illness was healed, if someone's difficult financial situation turned around, if major church problems dissipated, then all thanks was given to God. If we kept praying and praying with no avail, then we still gave thanks to God in the hope that eventually it would, because God is faithful to us. A gratefulness that I certainly admire, but an expectancy I am not sure I can jive with. This is why: in our finite minds, in our finite understanding of time, we try to fit what God's faithfulness is into a timeline we can understand--namely, in our lifetimes. We expect that eventually, things will turn around, because that's what God's faithfulness means. And who can blame us, right? How else are we expected to get through life--which for most around the world and in history is "nasty, brutal, and short"--without hope for deliverance? Maybe, maybe we live with the hope that even if we do not live to see our situation in life turn around, future generations will see that hope actualized.
But, what if it doesn't? What if none of us live to see all of the poverty, all of the injustice, all of the pain, all of the sickness, all of the despair vanquished? Does that mean God is not faithful to us? Yes, God promises life for all in the future Kingdom, but God also promises death for all who choose to follow Christ. The story I told to the kids on Easter Sunday said that, yes, we remember the Crucifixion of Christ in light of the Resurrection, but that we also remember the Resurrection in the light of the Crucifixion. We cannot have one without the other, they cannot be pulled apart. Death has lost it's eternal sting because Christ died; God showed faithfulness on Holy Saturday by communing with the dead and the damned. And when He rose from the grave, his body was still wounded; and Scriptures don't give us any reason to doubt that Christ's body was wounded when He ascended into heaven. Therefore, the Church, as the Body of Christ, still displays the wounds of the Crucifixion.
So, what does it mean for us to hope when we are eternally wounded? I guess it means that, a.) hell, let's still live in the hope in the future Kingdom of God being made full! That still remains to be God's promise to us, I think. But, also, b.) we must remember that the God of the universe, stars, little bunny rabbits and precious children is also the God that communes with the poor, the hungry, the outcast, the depressed, the sick, the disabled, the political prisoners, the terrorists, and the damned. God sits with them. God grieves with them. God dies with them. God does not promise that we will not suffer, but rather that God suffers with us. When we hope for life, God brings it by sitting with us in our suffering, but not necessarily by alleviating it. We hope in life actualized in the nearness of God.
Please don't get me wrong: I believe in goodness, I believe in joy, and I believe in rest. These things are all in God, I think. And I really do believe that miracles happen--that Jesus still spits down in the dirt to make mud to heal a blind man. But I hope never to dismiss the reality of death--which is not final, but certainly very, very present. Right now, my thoughts go to my grandmother, who is suffering from Alzheimer's. Her mind, literally, is deteriorating: she is loosing her memory of her life and loved ones, and there are days she is but a shadow of her former self. And I don't believe that when she dies, her soul--"the real her"--is going to be released from her body and then go to heaven, and everything is going to be ok (mainly, because that's neo-Platonic, rather than Biblical). But I do believe that God sits with her as she suffers, and that God suffers with her. The Creator of the Universe sits and communes with an old woman who doesn't even know who she is anymore. She is never left alone.
What hope, then, have we in God's faithfulness! God is the life that dwells among death.
