Nothing: 12 April 2009

Dear Friends,

For those who celebrate…Happy Easter! The long forty days of Lent and the three days known as the Triduum, the Christian remembrance of the last days of Jesus’ life on earth are over. And in the process, or progression through our observance of this liturgical season, we have most likely journeyed in our own way according to our custom and our lived experience of times past. Some of us may have taken this time to journey inward to discover how the Sacred One is present in our lives and how we can become more in tune and attuned to the movements of the Sacred all around us. We have waited for today, perhaps with anticipation, and rightly so. It is the day of yet another both/and: it is the day we look toward new life and it is the day we find nothing – an empty tomb. And we rejoice at each part of this both/and.

All four gospels tell us that women (various women depending on which gospel one consults) go to the tomb where Jesus had been laid following his death. And in each gospel the tomb is found empty – the women find nothing. We read accounts of the women going back to the disciples to inform them of what they have seen…and they were not believed. It is the women (in most of the gospels) who first came to realize Jesus had risen. Scripture scholars call this the proof of embarrassment. They tell us the fact that this witnessing by women is even contained in the gospels is one of the proofs that Jesus had in fact risen from the dead because in that day and age, women were considered unreliable sources. Thus, admitting the womens' witness as truth and including it in oral tradition (the telling of the story) and eventually in written form would would go against and be an embarassment to the "norm" of society at that time in history. In many respects and in many parts of our world, even our own to various degrees, not much has changed – women are often not (or are seldom) valued as equals with their male counterparts or are viewed as unreliable sources of information and wisdom. I suggest these gospel women demonstrated great faith and belief (as do a great many women in our present day). They witnessed the tomb, even this empty tomb, where “nothing” was found, as a womb – as a place where a most radical way of living and believing and faith was born anew; a place of rebirth and new life; a place of hope revealed.

Throughout Lent we may have taken the leap into the depths of our soul to ponder and reflect on a great many things: how we live, how we can better become who our Creator intends us to be, and/or how we can better live in relationship with the Sacred, with others and with all of creation. We may have done this willingly, tentatively, or begrudgingly, but we did it all the same while looking forward to the day – this day – when we would emerge having completed our journey. Oh how we fool ourselves! Our journey is not complete! This is a life-long journey, this path of discovering and moving, yes, back and forth, toward spiritual wholeness and peace. And today we discover that though we have made progress on our journey, we are continually called to empty ourselves – to rid ourselves of all our illusions of grandeur and arrogance and superiority and control in order to be who we are intended to be…the Beloved – just as the tomb was emptied. Perhaps in doing so, it will lead us back to the concept of dying to self in order to move toward new life.

May we rejoice in the promise and fulfillment of new life we celebrate on this Easter day and may we embrace the nothing - the women’s excited and even the fearful accounts of finding the empty tomb. Both/And.

Peace on the journey.