When Resurrection Fails, And When It Doesn't Easter 2012

When Resurrection Fails, And When It Doesn't                                                 Easter 2012

For me, resurrection isn't so much a miracle because it happened....but because it...happens, sometimes still.

It was an easy ride from winter to Spring this year as winter didn't feel like winter. It didn't feel like a death to life sort of feeling. My typical winter depression was much kinder, and the snacks of sunlight and warmth kept the beating and breathing of plant and animal life just below the surface, faint enough to hear and feel the whole time.  As much as I am delighting in the life warming rays of the sun this morning, it doesn't feel so much like a resurrection happened, or is happening because the contrast is a bit missing....for me.....today. And that's okay for now, because contrasts always come. Death always visits. The curtains always fall.  

For my good friend who spent over a decade living in the woods, and then found himself inside with three squares a day for the last three years....a sort of resurrection happened and we smiled. He always smiled even when the curtain was down. I did not. But he did, and he made wonder how you do that. How do you smile after sleeping outside in the cold on a half empty stomach. But he smiled. And I wondered.

But the curtain has fallen again for my friend, who has more patience with me than I do him.  He is in the woods again, every day. And he is messy, and hungry and wild...and is he is smiling still. Resurrection has failed his twisted thoughts and the voices in his head are winning. 

And for my dear brother, who I left as a young man to follow Jesus...but am finding again because I think Jesus cried when I let go of my brothers hand. For him, resurrection is happening. It didn't always. It never "always" does, does it?  To see him smile on the other side of a hell he created for himself is like the sun I feel on my face right now. And I'm smiling bigger. And he is too. He smiled the whole time, but sometimes you can smile when you're not really smiling.  He is really smiling.

And my sweet sister and her children are remembering the failure of resurrection on this Easter five years after their daddy and husband had the curtain fall forever on his life with them on earth. And who knows how to hold the hand which has had a hand torn forever from it? I do not. But I do get to see the smiles on them all which peek through the curtain they did not drop on themselves....and the beauty of who each of them is, is not snuffed out by the grave, but perhaps is even brighter in contrast to it....and they smile of courage, with trembling lips sometimes, but enough courage to admire and to be called brave ones. 

I smell death all the time, sometimes on others, but often on myself. Curtains always want to fall on us. And some of the curtain strings are in our very own hands. When WE let curtains fall it is possibly the saddest quiet sound. It is the sound of giving up. Or of wanting to die, or to not be seen, or to not want to see.  It is the stance of hands over the face, and pillow over the head and ears. And sometimes it feels good to drop curtains. And then it doesn't anymore.  

I sit grateful this morning. I am not always grateful. I should be because I have a great life right now and the curtains are up still. But I am caught often in the noise of the props and stage noise.  But right now, I am resting in the failure of resurrection at times in my life, in our lives. But also in the success of resurrection sometimes in our days... And in both seasons, I have seen Love. 

Love lives in the grave and in the spotlight of the stage. 

Love never fails.