“How do you know that Christ is risen in your individual
life? In the life of any kind of faith
community to which you belong? In your
life with other people? In your prayer? Can it be in weakness, failure, confusion,
messy and ambivalent situations, weariness and emptiness of spirit?” (p.8-9). These questions are posed by Sr. Maria
Boulding in her book, her final book before she died of cancer, titled Gateway
To Resurrection. Here is this
amazing woman of Stanbrook Abbey, a monastic and theologian who translated St.
Augustine’s Confessions and his exposition on the psalms posing these
questions to us, questions that bring our head into our heart. Her experiential and theological response to
her own questions is that the Easter mystery is precisely experienced in ‘weakness,
in failure, in confusion, messy, ambivalent situations, weariness, emptiness of
spirit’. Christ transforms, Christ rises
right in these very human places of suffering.
There is no resurrection without the cross….the cross is the backdrop of
the resurrection; resurrected life emerges out of the cross.
What, then, does this tell us about ‘faith’, about our
‘believing’? I know that when- ever I am
faced with suffering situations, situations of turmoil or darkness that I
immediately want to escape from it, and my faith begins to weaken, the waves of
doubt begin to move in, questions of doubt prick at my mustard seed of faith. And this is ok! It is so striking that we
have on this Second Sunday of Easter this gospel passage of Jesus appearing to
the disciples with his wounds in the upper room… Jesus’ first words are ‘Peace
be with you’ and what immediately follows is that he shows the disciples his
hands and side…he shows his wounds. All
this is saying, is it not, that Christ’s peace, resurrected life and love are
not separate from suffering. As a collective body, this time, the disciples
recognize Jesus and he repeats again the words: ‘Peace be with you’. Thomas is a helpful figure for us as we
wrestle with believing…he is seeking some kind of proof or certainty and faith
in this context will always elude him.
He refuses to believe the witness of his community insisting that he
must see for himself…perhaps he is learning how to see…perhaps is learning how
to recognize the Divine not on his terms but on God’s terms…And Thomas says he
will only believe if he can touch the Divine wounds!
The wounds are reminder of what ushers forth the
resurrection….out of his wounds come forth the spring of living water….if we
interface this with our own lives we see that we are stamped with this
paradigm. No matter what our wounds are
they are the place where Christ rises with healing love, with new life…In Christ
these wounds are transformed into a new creation. Failure, frailty in the words of Maria
Boulding “is the place where the paschal mystery happens….where Christ’s Easter
is experienced as power” (p.18-19).
Sandra Schneiders in her book on the gospel of John, Written
That You May Believe, notes that the author stays away from using the noun
‘faith’ or ‘belief’. What he does use
over and over is the verb ‘believe’ and he uses this verb with varying
grammatical constructions (p.52). In one
construction, which is used thirty-six times, the literal translation from the
Greek is to ‘believe into’. We would
normally translate this as ‘believe in’.
‘Believe into’: one can feel right away what this translation is doing: it
is drawing us into the Divine mystery, ‘to believe into’ leads us ‘to live into’. ‘To believe into’ invites us to lean into, to
live into the life of the Risen One who is always coming towards us in love and
mercy. In using this construction,
Schneiders says “the evangelist tries to capture the progressive entrance of
the believer into the life of Jesus” (p.52).
We are those ‘who have not seen yet believe’, those who are living into,
led by faith in the risen life, in the One who embodies the Love that is
stronger than death. The Risen One comes
in different forms of grace…his Spirit is everywhere and ready to rise up in
those vulnerable places of our hearts, of our communities, of our world.
To conclude: Fr. Jeremy Driscoll, wrote a series of essays
titled “Monasticism and the New Evangelization”. Essentially he is putting the resurrection
front and center of any talk of evangelization.
For monastics he writes: “Monks need to be people who clearly live and
witness to the fact that the Jesus who was
is also the Jesus who is. Jesus is
because he is risen from the dead” (American Benedictine Review,
December, 2014, p.404). Our ordinary
lives are to radiate the resurrected life, this life that pulsates within
everything and that is not separate from the cross.
And Fr. Jeremy writes: “What ultimately preserves the
world—that is, saves it—is precisely the fact that every piece of it shall have
once been the particular place in terms of which the final message can be
continually uttered: ‘He is not here, he is risen’” (p.410). And this risen life now burns in our hearts
and calls us to witness in our believing, to be this word of evangelization: that
Love has been victorious over death…that what saves our world is that Christ’s
Spirit is now everywhere, enveloping us with mercy, creating life out of
suffering and death.
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