April 4, 2021. In this short Easter spoken meditation, based on Mark 16.1-8, I explore that nature of darkness as a fertile, creative space and why the preoccupation with light, light, light, and happy-slappy attitudes are unhelpful for the journey of our souls and the healing of the earth. A spirituality that faces the rugged realities of our lives, will embrace darkness, fear, and struggle and find there the resiliency which is the vision of Easter.
1.
Often we come to Easter with a sense of general happiness and enthusiasm. It’s spring. Flowers are blooming, it’s getting warmer, we’re outside more often. Easter often also means some kind of connection with folks we love. In some ways many of us feel this way again this year. Flowers are blooming, it’s getting warmer, we’re outside again, there’s a chance we’ll be together with people we’ve missed, if not today, then soon.
While there’s some similarity this year to Easters past, there’s also something terribly different this year. I’ve chosen those words intentionally. Yes, despite our desires otherwise, there’s something “terrible” about this Easter.
Our word, “terrible” in English comes through the medieval French word, “terrible,” which means to “cause terror, awe, or dread.” “Terrible” in French comes from the Latin “terribilis,” to be “filled with fear.” The word also has resonances with the East as well. Sanskit has a similar world “trasanti” which means “to tremble,” “to be afraid.”
“Terrible” is something universal, especially this year.
We know “terrible” in ways this year we haven’t known “terrible” in the past. Yes, there has been terror throughout human history. People have lived through war, plague, environmental disaster, tyranny and so on. But this was for us a perfect-storm-of-a-year. Many of us have enjoyed significant privileges that have shielded us from real terror. But many haven’t. And the reality of this highly interconnected global community means that the terror has been more universal than at any other time in human history.
So, yes, this Easter is terribly different from the Easters we’ve known in the past.
2.
One of the problems a preacher like me faces on Easter is the fact that, for most of us, Easter is a national holiday. That means that most of us have had just enough Easter to be inoculated against the real thing.
Bunnies and chocolates and flowers and colored eggs, which are nice and perhaps have some connection to what Easter might mean for us, can dull us to the raw truth and power of Easter. Easter, frankly, has much more in common with the terrors we’ve known this last year than with the Hallmark sentimentality that often hooks up with Christian Easter. What we’ve endured this past year—the isolation, the altered way of life, the mortality, brutality, and tyranny, the injustice, anger, and grief—all this the Good Friday-kind-of-reality that may be necessary to make any real sense of Easter.
In Easters past we’ve chanted, “Christ is risen!” and that is true theologically, but what does it mean to us experientially when things are going quite well, when we elect or hire people to use lethal force to purchase security for those with privilege, when we exploit the earth to secure the comfort of those at the top, when we elect leaders to maintain the status quo of happiness for some and misery for many?
As a preacher of the gospel of Easter, I’ve often felt that most of the time, aside from some worshippers who find themselves in the midst of suffering, we chant those traditional words rather glibly. We like the way they feel, but we don’t really know what they mean. The organ and the trumpets stir our bodies, the scent of lilies fills our olfactory receptors, the sermon and songs make us feel like we’ve been to church, but do we, do I, get what it’s really all about?
Maybe this Easter, this terrible Easter, we might.
3.
“When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalen, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome” came to the tomb. In Mark’s account of the resurrection, they arrive just after dawn. Mark’s story disagrees with John’s retelling of it. John tells us that the women came to the tomb while it was still dark. They were like so many women today, so many of us; they know what it means to suffer, but they also know what it means to get up and do what needs to be done anyway. They are a symbol not only of the terrors that can inflict us, but also of the resilience that can rise up within us.
Matthew and Luke say they came around dawn. But Mark says: “Very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb.” Mark wants us to know that God was already on the move in the dark of night, through the debilitating pain of their grief, the terror of all they’d endured.
We rarely sense the movement of God in the dark. We think it’s the light that matters. And, frankly, that’s part of the problem with the Western Christian tradition and part of the problem with the way we generally celebrate Easter. All light, light, light. We’re infatuated with the light. But it’s darkness that’s the sacred and fertile place of new beginnings. The darkened earth is where the seed goes to be broken in order to be reborn. The darkened womb is the place the child is conceived and grows; it’s the lightless womb that suffers in order to bring forth new life. The dark is where the diamond is forged through intense heat and pressure. Down in the dark is where the immortal diamond of your own soul is forged. Your soul, and mine, does not so much come down from the dazzling light of the the sky above. Instead, Easter teaches that it rises from the darkened, fertile clay of your personal depths where you’ve suffered and endured and found a way to rise again to embrace the wonder of each new day given to you.
The three woman came to the dark place where Jesus was laid to rest. They came in the fertile dark of their own anguish and grief and trauma. They are symbols of the way we come to Easter this year, this terrible Easter. We, like them, do not know that something has been stirring in the dark of this last year. We want to move past and forget this past year. We, like them, do not know that the darkness of the nighttime of our lives is more fertile than we’ve ever dared to imagine.
And if we ignore this, we miss the genius of Easter as a way to point us to the genius of the fiery resilience that hides in the darkened, sacred place inside even the most frightened or despondent human heart.
4.
That little congregation of three women had their own sunrise service that first Easter. The preacher, “a young man,” we’re told by the writer, basically said to them what most of us preachers say on Easter morning: “Christ is risen; Christ is risen indeed!” But they left the service unaffected. In fact, you could say that they left church more troubled than when they’d arrived. They left that Easter service and “said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
“They were afraid.”
Those are the final words in the earliest text of Mark’s Gospel. “They were afraid.” Period. End of the story. That’s the way Mark wanted it. But later editors, uncomfortable with such a frightful ending, added a more cheerful, triumphant one. But their words fail the human experience. It’s not all light, light, light, is it?
We will leave this service and find ourselves afraid again. Fear clings to us, even when we try to ignore or avoid it. Fear has a way of coming back over and over again. And, while we might get some relief from it down the road when we turn the corner on this pandemic—and we will—we will be afraid again, won’t we?
Those three women may have left afraid, unwilling or unable to say anything. But they didn’t stay that way, did they? We’ll leave this service and fear will throttle us again, quite soon, despite our best efforts to ignore it. But like them, because of Easter we won’t let fear hold us down. We will rise and live, despite our fear. We will rise, resilient, determined, and, because of what we’ve suffered, compassionate.
The darkened places of our lives are the fertile ground of new beginnings. Let us rise up from the dark and fertile ground of what we’ve endured.
The darkened earth is where the seed breaks open in order to burst forth in new life. Let us rise up, broken, but not defeated to bear something new in the world.
The darkened womb is the place children are conceived and grow. And the dark is where the diamond is forged and the immortal diamond of our souls is born.
Do not fear fear; it is the sacred ground of new beginnings.
Easter tells us that we will rise. We will always rise. That’s the way the sacred earth works.