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Easter After our all-church retreat last September, three of our members were in a terrible accident. They were Martha Giardina, Peggy McNamara, and Andy Frantz, our Church School Director and Grand Poobah of Kids. They were all taken to three different parts of the emergency room at Yale New Haven Hospital, as our retreat was in that vicinity. I was behind them in a car and saw only the traffic that announced that someone had been in an accident. When I got to the hospital and discovered that they were all in pretty bad shape but alive, I was thrilled. I didn’t fully understand all that was happening though, because as the night wore on, each one from their individual bed wanted desperately to see the others. Now these are people who could hardly move their frames, but they wanted to see each other. The emergency room Gestapo had no intention of letting any of them move. Permission was adamantly not granted for motion. Still, Andy and Peggy, who were in the best shape, insisted that they see Martha, who was in the worst shape. We engineered a coup. We conspired to get Andy and Peggy to walk through the back of the emergency room. Abigail Hastings, Jack Lawrence, and Kim Kelly―my accomplices―were all there to witness the event. Martha lies on her bed, in what might be called a drugged state. Andy and Peggy limp and stumble secretly to her side. We had a resurrection experience. Our two stalwarts, wrapped in their hospital gowns, showing a little butt, marched toward each other in a Trinitarian moment. They grabbed a little comfort out of a lot of fear―which is the method of Resurrection. In the method of Resurrection, we understand that the big noise of big car crashes is not going to be the only sound in our ears; the scuffle of hospital slippers is also there. Someone is right now sneaking to our side to bring us the good news that hospitals cannot give. Hospitals can only keep your body alive―and there is nothing wrong with that! But it is not enough. We who are mortal also need to keep our spirits alive. We do that by marching toward each other, like angels in white gowns. In those moments, our spirits matter more than our bodies. I know embodiment is the pop theological word of the day. But at Easter we don’t mind a little disembodiment. Think of sea shells: the disembodied life, the life of the spirit, is as beautiful as any mollusk, living or dead. I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at your own absurd collection of seashells with clear eyes. I certainly have. What am I doing with all those dead shells, those containers that once contained oozing, pus-y, gooey life? What is so great about a dead oyster anyway? Well, I for one think that a dead oyster shell is quite beautiful. It is what is left. It is what is left behind. It is what people wake up early in the morning to seek. They comb the beach, reminding themselves of death so that they can live life more fully. Life is that short time when you jump out of the womb, before you jump into the tomb. It is 100 years of breathing time, if you are lucky, before and after which not much happens that you know about. I have called this middle time our speckness. We are such specks in the grand scheme of things. So small. So little. So much the flickering star of the long night. The great writer H.L. Mencken kept a sealed envelope in his file cabinet. It was to be opened at the time of his death. When was finally unsealed, three words appeared: “Don’t overdo it.” (Mencken got the memo about his speckness and returned it to the universe, or at least to those who were writing his obit.) Life is the time between trapeze bars when we sail through the air with lesser or greater ease. Easter is an attempt to manage the ending of life, by telling the story of how some other people managed it. Mary is the practical one: Where is the body? The Emmaus disciples are the romantic ones: We found ourselves strangely warmed. Peter and Paul become the organizational geniuses: Let’s create an institution to tell the story of the one who died but remains in our hearts. Easter is a story about how to manage transition. There are many such frameworks. Surely the largest one is psychological: until loss is acknowledged, the person will be a mess. Elizabeth Kubler Ross even gave the process of grieving stages. From denial we move to acceptance. We often “pathologize” people who are stuck and their resistance to change. We call people who don’t want to change idiots, or worse. I am beginning to think this is the big mistake progressives of our ilk make when we talk about working people. We pathologize their resistance to change rather than acknowledge what they feel they have lost. Usually these people, who are sometimes ourselves, are resisting change because they have a badly managed transition. They have an unacknowledged loss or ending. Things shifted, and they are no longer sure of themselves or their culture. No one helped them. They didn’t know how to help themselves. No one listened and acknowledged that they had lost something important. That lack of attention created another ending―and people move into what some call a neutral zone. They freeze up. They can’t move. When people’s losses are acknowledged, either therapeutically or through their own common sense, people are liberated from the loss and manage to go on to new beginnings. This is what the folk wisdom means when it says that every end is really a beginning. This is what Christians mean by death and resurrection. Death is not a period, but a comma. It is the movement from embodied life to disembodied life. When we acknowledge that loss and that pathway of everyone’s life, we are liberated from the fear of endings. We no longer are so afraid of the stock market. Or the school bully. Or climate change. We become people who know that everything must end and that in every end there is a beginning. We know life is the airtime between trapeze bars, when we have let go but not yet been caught. We know our life is short and we also know it is good. Death does not end life. Nor is death to be feared; it our destination as mortals. The Buddhists actually argue that the best way to stay well in life is to think about your own death for a few minutes each day. I think Easter is suggesting just that: look long and hard at your death. It is not that scary. Defang and demythologize it―and you will enjoy both your body and your shell much more. Jesus died to show us the way to die. The methodology in the great speech that Obama made this week about race is its use of the Easter framework. Let’s walk these people into the hard truth about racism and division in our land. Let’s walk right into the tomb and from there acknowledge what has gone wrong. Only from inside the tomb can we walk around the tomb. There are no detours to Easter, no highways around suffering. The highway is through suffering. He was even more astute than that. He showed how the bitterness of his own pastor was in his own pastor’s way. I happen to adore Jeremiah Wright. I don’t think Obama is right about his bitterness―but I do know that bitterness is a detour around suffering, not an entry. It is a shield. The Easter process drops the shield of bitterness, enters the suffering, and comes out joyous because loss has been acknowledged. Jesus’ resurrection power is to love his enemies, even death. His life after his death is that love. Some of you know that I was in love with one of my associate ministers in Miami. His name was Chuck Eastman and he was as gay as I am straight. But we immediately fell in love. He and I clicked. One day he didn’t show up for work. His biggest enemy on the staff, a Cuban lesbian who had known him for a long time, kept bugging me the whole day. By the way, the staff was half Cuban and half Anglo, and every now and then one of our divisions did not occur across those lines. I always called that a miracle, worthy of resurrection language. “Chuck,” Mari kept saying, “is not here.” “I know, Mari. I know.” “But Donna, Chuck is not here.” “So, listen, Mari, you don’t like it when Chuck is here so why don’t you stop bugging me? I told him to take a day off, he has been working too hard.” “No, Donna, you are wrong, something terrible has happened; I can feel it in my bones.” “OK, OK, OK…” Finally she went to Chuck’s apartment around 4:00 that day and, sure enough, Chuck was dead of a heart attack. He was only 54. He weighed nearly 300 pounds. Some of you just met his son, Brian, at a retreat earlier this year. But that’s not what matters. What matters is the way our common sense chased his shell around town. He would have loved the absurdity of the experience. It was Keystone Cops in the tropics, a good old-fashioned car chase worthy of the worst movie. We felt that we simply had to see his body. But traffic prevented everyone but Mari, who had gone early, from getting to his apartment. Just straight out prevented it. We told everyone who would listen (there were very few) that we were on our way to see the body of a dead friend. Several reported us to the cops. There was Mari, alone with Chuck’s body in his apartment. I was in the car, on the phone with the ambulance people, who said they were going to remove the body from the apartment. I begged them to wait till we got there. They would not wait. Finally, they had to go. So we chased the ambulance containing all that was left of Chuck, in the big black bag that was Chuck’s final home, his last shell upon shell upon shell upon shell, not to mention the layers of extra corpus which he was using as his shield, to the Miami coroner’s office. We got there just as the ambulance was pulling into the mortuary where Miami keeps bodies that no one has claimed. Yes, we were trying to claim it. But we were almost too late. One of my accomplices on this particular evening bribed the ambulance driver, saying we just wanted to pray over the body and to say good-bye. We wanted a proper embodied ending to his body. The ambulance driver said he would lose his job if he unzipped that bag. That was when my accomplice noted the name of the coroner on the mortuary. He was in her Rotary Club. So she got him on the phone, the ambulance driver opened the bag, and we prayed over Chuck’s still warm body. Some bizarre kind of satisfaction ensued. Why tell you stories of limping friends limping toward a friend in a New Haven hospital? Or stories of brokenhearted friends bribing ambulance drivers to touch a body of someone we loved? Why did Mary turn so practical at the tomb? Because as good as embodiment is, disembodiment also has its moments. Shells matter, even after their life is gone. There is fertility in the void. Its fertility comes in both the womb and the tomb. In the emptiness, and acknowledging, much about life is released. We collect shells conspicuously and compulsively on beaches. We hardly think of them as dead things. But they are. I think we have to be very careful at Easter to rejoice in the right things: it is not the life so much as it is the life after we have come to terms with life and death. Jay Hildreth, who just got out of the hospital, called me up one day before his fall to say, “My amaryllis has bloomed.” That is a great moment. It is the amaryllis fully embodying itself. It is its time of fruit and flower. And lots of people get Easter wrong and think it is the time of fruit and flower. These are the pastel Easter people. They miss the point. The point of Easter is the life after the flowering. It is the life after the death of the flower. It is actually the life after the life after death. It is the life of the spirit, which takes over when the life of the body has died. Spirit life takes over after body life dies. It is when we really rejoice because death has stung us and then lost its sting. We are disembodied in our joy. We don’t require flowers to prove beauty to us; we know beauty in a different way. We are lovers of all four seasons, even the fallow ones. We like both filled shells and empty shells. We know what Mary knew: even though Jesus was dead and his body had been stolen (or so she thought), she still loved him. Their relationship lasted after death. It is what Bill knows about Wendell: he will never stop loving him. (Note the lily Bill put in the angel’s arms early this morning, a practice that he is continuing for his beloved.) It is what I know about Chuck: he is alive to me, in me, through me, in all that he taught me and all that we hoped for together. I like his son, but I don’t need his son to live the life after death of Chuck and me. It is what you know about your mother, or father, or child, or lover. They are not dead; they are risen. Some of them are as near as your own thumb, as close as your own shell collection. My Easter argument is here. Life after life after death is an understanding of life linking to death, which then links back to life. It is like a swing, or even an old tire hanging from a tree. You get on it. You pump yourself up and then you fall back down. You pump yourself up again and then you fall back down. When you make the reverse motion―the falling after the rising―sometimes you tuck your legs in under your knees. It makes the falling more fun. These swinging motions are the essence of life. First you get sick, then you get better. First you bleed, then you scab. First you are young, and then you are old. First you are full, then you are empty. You empty to fill. You rise to fall. You can rise even further if you fall back further. You create energy for the swinging by the energy you give to both motions―not just the rising, not just the flowering, but the falling, too. We know the eventual disembodiment of all these kidneys and ovaries and ears and tongues. After the embodiment, the great flowering of the amaryllis, comes the disembodiment. The relationships we have with each other last and they go through stages. They are eternal. They swing. The life we have in our bodies is one kind of life and the life we have after our bodies is another kind of life. We exist as memories, as testimonies, as hopes. Jesus exists as memory, testimony, and hope. He is not dead; he is risen. Amen.
Easter Prayer
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