Scripture:
Reflection:
Tucked away in a grove of trees on the campus of St Anselm College in New Hampshire is a small cemetery where dozens of Benedictine monks are buried. It is a quiet spot with uneven grass on sandy soil. The headstones are identical, lined in orderly rows under tall, soft evergreens. Above the name of each monk is the inscription “Here Will Rise,” a stark reminder of our central belief as disciples of Jesus Christ.
During Easter season the readings are filled with provoking reminders of this foundational creed, including today’s readings.
The ugly scene on Calvary left Jesus’ followers deeply depressed and overwhelmed by despair. Who among us has not had such feelings when a terminal sickness, fatal accident, suicide, divorce, murder, addiction, bankruptcy, a house fire, a natural disaster, war or a myriad of any number of other tragedies befall us?
During such moments, when our discipleship pilgrimage with Christ aborts, we can sink into seemingly unending anguish and hopelessness, feeling alone and passive before the forces of darkness. We may well wonder if our faith has been little more than a well-meaning delusion all along.
The temptation in such pain-filled moments is to give up faith entirely, to manage our own lives on our own terms, licking our wounds, and finding our own way, perhaps returning to selfish lives of pleasure and accumulation of honors and possessions.
Or we might re-imagine our faith as an after-life hope with a triumphant Christ, limiting Him to our individual hearts in a comforting Jesus-and-me-alone spirituality.
The deeper challenge is to let Christ use our pain to be in solidarity with people who are also in the shadows of life . . . the sick, the grieving, the lonely, the mentally ill, the addicted, the shunned. I can ask Christ for the grace to lift me out of the tomb to a resurrection, to live differently, in deep trust and deep surrender to Christ. It is a call to follow a radical Jesus, carrying into us a radical hope that, in partnership with Him, we rise above our sorrows to confront the evils of our collective idolatries that cause so much human misery: possessions, competition, militarism, selfish pride, and social esteem.
We pray to the living Christ, our life partner in resisting evil and building a reign of love. He is a partner who is ready to take charge of our wills, our feelings, our talents, our intellects, all that we possess in order to conform us to the will of God.
Isn’t this deep spiritual response to life’s harshest sufferings what resurrection is all about? The resurrection isn’t just the top-of-the-tombstone inscription above those monks’ names. It is a radical transformation of a limited, superficial, self-focused life here and now into a loving union with a loving Christ. In fully surrendering to this risen Christ, all our sufferings are transformed into goodness, and, over time, by God’s grace, into inner peace and joy. Not fearing death any longer, we are truly liberated to fall into the loving arms of Christ, letting him guide our everyday choices, feeling his presence in our hearts and in the events and people that are part of our pilgrimage.
Jim Wayne is a board member of the Passionist Solidarity Network (PSN), and author of The Unfinished Man. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky.