Resources on Resurrection

Transcription

1 Hearts rebuilt from hope resurrect dreams killed by hate. -Aberjhani It is such a letdown to rise from the dead and have your friends not recognize you. -Rob Bell I am an infidel today. I do not believe what has been served to me to believe. I am a doubter, a questioner, a skeptic. When it can be proved to me that there is immortality, that there is resurrection beyond the gates of death, then will I believe. Until then, no. -Luther Burbank With respect to the books of the New Testament, particularly such parts as tell us of the resurrection and ascension of Christ, any person who could tell a story of an apparition, or of a man's walking, could have made such books; for the story is most wretchedly told. -Thomas Paine The old must be torn down for the new to be raised; to have a resurrection you must have a crucifixion, but God wastes nothing, not even the wrong we have imagined into existence. In every building torn down there is much that remains that was once true and right and good, and that gets woven into the new; in fact, the new could not be what it is without the old. It is the refurbishing of the soul. -Wm. Paul Young In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again. -Barbara Kingsolver If there is nothing new under the sun, at least the sun itself is always new, always re-creating itself out of its own inexhaustible fire. -Michael Sims Reborn here in this grubby old hospital, surrounded by the sick and the dying, people who deserve a second chance far more than he does. But it isn't the pink-and-white cooing kind of rebirth. It's more like being wrenched from a warm, dark, comfortable place and forced out into a bright, frightening world where nothing is certain. -Peter Blauner How do you plan a rebirth? I'm not sure you do. You just stand in the darkness until you can't endure it any long, and then you move forward until you're standing in the light. -Questlove

2 Here You always belonged here. You were theirs, certain as a rock. I m the one who worries if I fit in with the furniture and the landscape. But I follow too much the devices and desires of my own heart. Already the curves in the road are familiar to me, and the mountain in all kinds of light, treating all people the same. and when I come over the hill, I see the house, with its generous and firm proportions, smoke rising gaily from the chimney. I feel my life start up again, like a cutting when it grows the first pale and tentative root hair in a glass of water. -Jane Kenyon From The Mists of Avalon They have not forgotten the Mysteries, she said, they have found them too difficult. They want a God who will care for them, who will not demand that they struggle for enlightenment, but who will accept them just as they are, with all their sins, and take away their sins with repentance. It is not so, it will never be so, but perhaps it is the only way the unenlightened can bear to think of their Gods. Lancelet smiled bitterly. Perhaps a religion which demands that every man must work through lifetime after lifetime for his own salvation is too much for mankind. They want not to wait for God s justice, but to see it now. And that is the lure which this new breed of priests has promised them. -Marion Zimmer Bradley For a New Beginning In out of the way places of the heart Where your thoughts never think to wander This beginning has been quietly forming Waiting until you were ready to emerge. For a long time it has watched your desire Feeling the emptiness grow inside you Noticing how you willed yourself on Still unable to leave what you had outgrown. It watched you play with the seduction of safety And the grey promises that sameness whispered Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent Wondered would you always live like this. Then the delight, when your courage kindled, And out you stepped onto new ground, Your eyes young again with energy and dream A path of plenitude opening before you. Though your destination is not clear You can trust the promise of this opening; Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning That is one with your life s desire. Awaken your spirit to adventure Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk Soon you will be home in a new rhythm For your soul senses the world that awaits you. -John O Donohue The story of Easter is the story of God s wonderful window of divine surprise. -Carl Knudsen

3 After after chopping off all the arms that reached out to me; after boarding up all the windows and doors; after filling all the pits with poisoned water; after building my house on the rock of no, inaccessible to flattery and fear; after cutting off my tongue and eating it; after hurling handfuls of silence and monosyllable of scorn at my loves; after forgetting my name; and the name of my birthplace; and the name of my race; after judging and sentencing myself to perpetual waiting, and perpetual loneliness, I heard against the stones of my dungeon of syllogisms, the humid, tender, insistent onset of spring. -Octavio Paz I Will Sing a New Song from Meditations of the Heart The old song of my spirit has wearied itself out. It has long ago been learned by heart so that now it repeats itself over and over, bringing no added joy to my days or lift to my spirit. It is a good song, measured to a rhythm to which I am bound by ties of habit and timidity of mind. The words belong to old experiences which once sprang fresh as water from a mountain crevice fed by melting snows. But my life has passed beyond to other levels where the old songs are meaningless. I demand of the old song that it meet the need of present urgencies. Also, I know that the work of the old song, perfect in its place, is not for the new demand! I will sing a new song. As difficult as it is, I must learn the new song that is capable of meeting the new need. I must fashion new words born of all the new growth of my life, my mind and spirit. I must prepare for new melodies that have never before been mine, that all that is within me may lift my voice unto God. How I love the old familiarity of the wearied melody how I shrink from the harsh discords of the new untried harmonies. Teach me, my Father, that I might learn with the abandonment and enthusiasm of Jesus, the fresh new accent, the untried melody, to meet the need of the untried morrow. Thus, I may rejoice with each new day and delight my spirit in each fresh unfolding. I will sing, this day, a new song unto Thee, O God. -Howard Thurman In many respects I find an unresurrected Jesus easier to accept. Easter makes him dangerous. Because of Easter I have to listen to his extravagant claims and can no longer pick and choose from his sayings. Moreover, Easter means he must be loose out there somewhere. -Philip Yancey Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn. -Mohandas Gandhi

4 Gospel of Mark Good Friday from Chapter 15:25-26, 33-34, It was nine o clock in the morning when they crucified him. The inscription of the charge against him read, King of the Jews. When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o-clock Jesus cried My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. Now when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, Truly this man was God s son. The Resurrection Chapter 16:1-8 When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb? When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them, Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you. So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. Help us to hope that the seeming Shadow of this Death is to our human blindness but the exceeding brightness of a newer greater life. -W.E.B. DuBois from Lit: A Memoir If you live in the dark a long time and the sun comes out, you do not cross into it whistling. There s an initial uprush of relief at first, then for me, anyway a profound dislocation. My old assumptions about how the world works are buried, yet my new ones aren t operational. There s been a death of sorts, but without a few days in hell, no resurrection is possible. -Mary Karr Bluebeard So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn't like my parents. I didn't have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been of more philosophical value than in the United States... and when the [train] plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with it's lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal. -Kurt Vonnegut Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven. The Lord s Prayer Safe Passage: Words to Help the Grieving Resurrection the reversal of what was thought to be absolute. The turning of midnight into dawn, hatred into love, dying into living anew. -Molly Fumia

5 Easter, 1968 Now we have buried the face we never knew, Now we have silenced the voice we never heard, Now he is dead we look on him with awe Dead king, dear martyr, and anointed Word. Where thousands followed, each must go home Into his secret heart and learn the pain, Stand there on rock and, utterly alone, Come to terms with this burning, suffering man; Torn by his hunger from our fat and greed, And bitten by his thirst from careless from careless sloth, Must wake, inflamed, to answer for his blood With the slow-moving inexorable truth That we can earn even a moment of balm Only with acts of caring, and fierce calm. Head of an African, vital and strong, The full lips, fervent as an open rose, The high-domed forehead full of light and strong--- Look on this man again. The blood still flows. Listen once more to the impassioned voice Till we are lifted on his golden throat And trumpet call of agony and choice Out of our hesitating shame and doubt. Remember how he prayed before the task. Remember how he walked, eyes bright and still, Unarmed, his bronze face shining like a mask, Through stones and curses, hatred hard as hail. Now we have silenced the voice we never heard, Break open, heart, and listen this word. -May Sarton The River of Winged Dreams The death of a dream can in fact serve as the vehicle that endows it with new form, with reinvigorated substance, a fresh flow of ideas, and splendidly revitalized color. In short, the power of a certain kind of dream is such that death need not indicate finality at all but rather signify a metaphysical and metaphorical leap forward. -Aberjhani Life is an endless cycle of souls, swirling along the path of the universe, being reborn, but never truly dying before being reborn again. As long as this cycle continues, we will never really die. -Amelia Wolfe

6 It is no more surprising to be born twice than once; everything in nature is resurrection. -Voltaire The story of Easter is the story of God s wonderful window of divine surprise. -Carl Knudsen Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning Looking down into my father s Dead face For the last time My mother said without Tears, without smiles Without regrets But with civility Goodnight, Willie Lee, I ll see you in the morning. And it was then I knew that the healing Of all our wounds Is forgiveness That permits a promise Of our return At the end. -Alice Walker A Native Hill from The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry Until we understand what the land is, we are at odds with everything we touch. And to come to that understanding it is necessary, even now, to leave the regions of our conquest - the cleared fields, the towns and cities, the highways - and re-enter the woods. For only there can a man encounter the silence and the darkness of his own absence. Only in this silence and darkness can he recover the sense of the world's longevity, of its ability to thrive without him, of his inferiority to it and his dependence on it. Perhaps then, having heard that silence and seen that darkness, he will grow humble before the place and begin to take it in - to learn from it what it is. As its sounds come into his hearing, and its lights and colors come into his vision, and its odors come into his nostrils, then he may come into its presence as he never has before, and he will arrive in his place and will want to remain. His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them - neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them - and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again. Jesus resurrection is the beginning of God s new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord s Prayer is about. -N.T. Wright

7 Pry Me Off Dead Center O persistent God, deliver me from assuming your mercy is gentle. Pressure me that I may grow more human, not through the lessening of my struggles, but through an expansion of them that will undamn me and unbury my gifts. Deepen my hurt until I learn to share it and myself openly, and my needs honestly. Sharpen my fears until I name them and release the power I have locked in them and they in me. Accentuate my confusion until I shed those grandiose expectations that divert me from the small, glad gifts of the now and the here and the me. Expose my shame where it shivers, crouched behind the curtains of propriety, until I can laugh at last through my common frailities and failures, laugh my way toward becoming whole. Deliver me from just going through the motions and wasting everything I have which is today, a chance, a choice, my creativity, your call. O persistent God, let how much it all matters pry me off dead center so if I am moved inside to tears or sighs or screams or smiles or dreams, they will be real and I will be in touch with who I am and who you are and who my sisters and brothers are. -Ted Loder