STRANGE GARDENER

It was forty days. It had to be. The “intervals” are always forty days. Forty days in the wilderness, from the baptism to the beginning of ministry’s work. For a long time, I’ve been looking at – and looking for – the shaping of Yeshua’s mind during the “lost years”, the years not mentioned in the Gospels, for him between the ages of 12 and 30. In spite of warnings from my beloved Joe Rat (Benedict XVI to you) and other Church spokespersons that we should not indulge our imaginations where the Bible is silent, nor compose in our minds a “Jesus novel”, I find myself unable to still my historian’s curiosity and my Christian desire to recapture – with my imagination since there is no other tool – wie es eigentlich gewesen, what really happened, what it was really like. 

            I tried to follow him through his young manhood, to see him in the Nazareth workshop with Ya’akov his brother, saying the blessings at Shabbat dinner with Mother Myriam, four brothers and two sisters, and then going off to join the baptism crowd around Cousin Yochanan the Dipper. I tried to follow him into the desert (Sinai?) and then to renting (or even buying) a small house in Capharnaum, near the Synagogue, from which he went out to be what he had known the Meshiach would be: an itinerant rabbi, walking around Galilee (a distant place, Israel’s Maine or Yorkshire), teaching, healing, and preaching the surprising idea that the basileia to theou, the Reign of God, had in fact come, and was right here and now.

            It is not impossible so to follow him, and we know where one ends up, so doing. One ends up on Golgotha, first, in the noise and heat and obscene unrolling of an execution; and then, after a day of stunned silence, on Easter morning with Myriam from Magdala, talking to a gardener. And from there on it becomes exponentially harder. Dare we try anyway?

 

            That gardener, then. Notice that, on a number of occasions during the forty days that follow, even those who had been closest to him do not recognise him: not Myriam, not the disciples in the fishing-boat coming to shore in the dawn, not the followers walking to Emmaus. So one thing we know is that his face was not the same. His body, though, was: he invites Thomas the Twin to touch his wounds. So how, in what details, was his face different? It could be, say, the difference between bearded and beardless; it could be that the unimaginable interval between death and resurrection had marked his features in some indelible but disguising way, like the sudden greying of hair or the carving of lines in the face. 

What is sure is that he was recognised when he spoke: his remarkable voice – remember he had addressed a large crowd from an offshore boat, without a microphone – had remained untouched. 

            Now let us go further. If we could imagine his thoughts and feelings while making scroll-cases and furniture for clients of the family business, can we imagine them in this strange between-time?

            First of all, why did he come back? He could have gone straight home to his Father, into whose hands he had commended his spirit. Instead, he comes back to spend forty days – very much off and on – with his friends and students. Why?

            Well, we know the answer. It was, in a sense, the whole point of everything. St Paul, in one of his vigorous letters, put it best: “If the Anointed One did not rise from the dead, everything we proclaim is nonsense.” Humans – his humans first, then all the others – had to know that he had conquered Death, and that Death, thenceforth, had no dominion other than an apparent one. And so he had to be there: not a ghost, not a spectre, but a human resurrected, a man who had tangible scars, a man who could make a fire and eat grilled fish. 

            What did it feel like, for him? How human was he still, in this time? Did he feel twinges of nostalgia for the old days of exchanging repartee with a foreign Samarian woman at a well, or of calming his fearful friends in a storm-tossed boat on Kinneret? Did he feel he was performing a duty, establishing the Resurrection in the minds of a core group who would then go out and proclaim it to the world? I think he felt a great wave of affection for this little group of friends who were so obviously suffering from their loss. Was he always meant to stay forty days, that Biblical interval, or did he persuade his Father to prolong it from a shorter original? He may have eaten fish, but he also walked through walls and disappeared at the dinner table. That must have felt peculiar, but doubtless in an odd way natural – a between-state in a between-time.

            I do think, though, that when Ascension Day arrived it was not a surprise to him. Interestingly, it seems to have been so for the disciples: clearly, they were not counting in forties, though they might have done. But he, I am sure, did know, if only by counting the days. We may assume that during this time, whenever he was not with them, he was in that Other Place, with the Father; and that when the moment came to go Home definitively part of him must have been deeply relieved. As he was whisked out of our dimension (they read it as “up”) he could honestly say that he had done all his duty, that he had accomplished the task the Father had set him. And the homecoming must have been joyful to a degree, and in ways, truly beyond our imagination.

Image: Rembrandt van Rijn, "Mary Magdalene and Christ as gardener" (1638)

 

NO PEACE FOR THE FAITHFUL

In Luke 24:35, Yeshua appears to the disciples even as Cleopas and his friend finish recounting their experience at the inn in Emmaus. He is suddenly there, in the way he has now, after the Resurrection, but which he had also had from time to time before, of moving in ways not common to ordinary earthlings. He is there, we may imagine with a friendly smile, and he says “Shalom!”

            The commentators tend to make much of this pax vobiscum, this “peace be with you!”, this “Que la paix soit avec vous!” But it was, as it still is, also simply a way of saying Hello. Nevertheless, it does have the unemphasised but real weight of shalom, that vast and wonderful condition we translate, inadequately,  as “peace”. It is the almost cosmic peace that results from perfect harmony, from God being in His heaven and all being right with the world; of everything and everybody in the right place, doing what God intends them to do. The peace that results from that harmony being played in the key of Love. Every little peace we make makes us “peacemakers”, who are Blessed in the Beatitudes.

            It has been a long time since the need for inner peace was as urgent as it is now. Daily, we hear that the need is not only for more nurses and hospital workers, but for psychologists and psychiatrists. The pandemic is wearing us down and Christians are not immune. So I find it alarming to see devout commentators whom I have long admired now once again insisting that no, shalom does not mean well-being, it does not mean comfort, it means taking up your cross and suffering with the Meshiach like a true disciple, it means turning your life upside down. 

            Most people are not starving swineherds with boils. There are those – always too many – who live from day to day in precarious misery, and Christians should help them in every way they can. But to assume, as preachers and commentators regularly do, that the faithful are mainly comfortable rentiers who direly need their billowy parts booted is an error that especially now causes real pain. The churches, as we know, are emptying, and so far the pandemic does not, surprisingly, seem to have reversed that trend. Could it be, in part, because they are no longer offering comfort? They are not donors, purveyors, spreaders of shalom; instead they are unrepentant purveyors of unrest, challenging believers to get off their behinds and make shalom themselves in the world. 

            This is not in itself wrong: as St Teresa of Ávila said, the only hands God has in the world are ours. But when thousands are suffering inward misery, stress, depression, frustration and grief, it might not come amiss for those who bring the word to the faithful and beyond to remind everyone of those other words: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest . . . for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Mt 11:28-30) 

 

WALKING THROUGH WALLS

          

 

Now, after Easter, we are in the Resurrection Time – a limited period between Easter and the Ascension. The time when Yeshua is back, for a specific task: to explain to the disciples and the expanding community what his ministry, passion and resurrection have all been about, so that they will understand it as a coherent whole, an act of the Father’s love for his human children; and to set the community on its future path of realising the New Alliance between God and the expanded Israel that is the whole human race. 

            It is a strange time. One of the things Benedict XVI points out in his Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week is the fact that when the disciples closest to Yeshua meet him after the Resurrection, they do not recognise him. This is extraordinary. They have lived with him every day for three years ; and yet when they land their boats and see a man grilling fish on the beach who says “Come and have breakfast!” they do not recognise him at first. Likewise the two less close disciples walking to Emmaus, who were clearly among those who had listened to him, seen him, admired him and followed him, and who now spend a couple of hours at his side, listening to him explain the Scriptural basis for the Passion: they only recognise him when, at table in the inn, he breaks the bread with the Baruch atta Adonai prayer – at which point he vanishes. 

            It makes you wonder what his resurrection-body looked like, what it was. Rembrandt painted it, and when you compare it to his paintings of the living Yeshua (probably after one of his Jewish neighbours in Amsterdam), you can in fact see a very uncanny difference. I’m not sure anyone else has imagined it so well. But would he have been unrecognisable? One may also wonder what this resurrection-body in fact was. Was it a temporary one, taken on only for this time between Easter and the Ascension? It did have the stigmata of the Passion, as the story of Thomas shows. Or was it his definitive eternity-body which he still has today, sitting at the right hand of the Father? That’s not something even the boldest theologian can answer.

            Also, this resurrection-body walks through walls. The disciples are together in an upper room; the doors are closed and locked; suddenly there he is among them. Not a ghost: feel my wounds. But suddenly, there. At table in Emmaus: whoosh, he is gone. Now this reminded me of something Benedict does not mention, although I’m sure others have – nothing that can be thought about the Gospels has not been thought and written, usually many times. When Yeshua returns to Nazareth and at first the people are thrilled by him and then turn against him, they want to throw him off a local cliff: “They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.”(Luke 4:29-30). I have always found that astonishing in its serene calmness. This is an angry mob, the kind that stoned Stephen and would have stoned the woman taken in adultery. Few things are more terrifying and more dangerous. But he passed through the midst of them. 

            In other words, even in his entirely human mortal body there was something uncanny. A touch of the resurrection-body, one might say, was always already there. This was not one of his “miracles”: it was not done for someone else, and no fuss is made about it. He just wasn’t there any more. 

            So now, in this Between-Time, this Resurrection-Time, we might wish that he would still suddenly appear among us and have a bite of fish; but that’s not going to happen. The Ascension is past, and he is now in Eternity-Time. But still patiently waiting for us, as he was on that beach at breakfast. Would we have recognised him? Do we now? He did tell us where to look: in the child holding out a trusting hand; in the lonely old woman whose children never phone or visit; in the retired psychiatrist whose days not longer make sense; and in the entirely unexpected smile of a total stranger. Perhaps, apart from the gestures such incarnations call forth in us, the thing for us to do at this time is to think and learn and discuss as we would have in that inn at Emmaus, and so come to understand the coherence of the life, calling, death and resurrection of this most unlikely Meshiach.

Images: Rembrandt, "Head of Christ" and "The Risen Christ"

THE SMILE OF FAITH

In his admirable television series “Civilisation”, Kenneth Clark titled the chapter on the eighteenth-century Enlightenment “The Smile of Reason”. Virtually all the portraits of the time, he claimed, wore a smile: neither gloom nor outright laughter, but a smile of intelligent amusement. 

Pondering this, it struck me how rarely one sees the smile of faith, and how surprising that is. We are not encouraged to think of Jesus as laughing or smiling, nor indeed of the saints as doing so. After all, the Gospels seem to deal mainly with the halt and the lame and the miserable, and their penultimate chapters deal in some detail with the gruesome horrors of crucifixion. As Stanley Holloway lamented, “Nuthin’ to laff at, at all”. 

And yet. Let’s try a different regard, Begin with the incredulous joy of Myriam, once she has understood what is happening to her. Go to the jubilation of the angels and the broad smiles of the shepherd folk who came to congratulate. Go to the attendrissement on the severe and thoughtful faces of the Magi. Fast forward to the wedding at Cana. “Yeshua, they’re running out of wine. Can’t you do something?” “Hush, Mother – my time has not yet come.” I see a faint smile there. And then, Myriam to the servants: “Do what he tells you”, again with a very maternal smile. 

Now take any of the countless episodes of his life from then on in Galilee. The formerly lame man, dancing with an idiotic grin on his face. The parents of a little girl, brought back from near death, embracing each other, and Yeshua, with huge smiles through their tears. Why do we forget that this man brought sheer blinding JOY wherever he went? Happiness. Amazed laughter. 

OK, there were exceptions. The owner of the herd of pigs at Gadara probably wished him to the devil. The people of Nazareth wondered who he, Josh, the son of the local builder, thought he was, preaching at them like a learned rabbi. And the religious professionals found him positively dangerous. But the ordinary folk who crowded him everywhere seem to have found true happiness in his company; and E.V.Rieu the Hellenist even found what he thought was the confused memory of a joke on Yeshua’s part: when he tells Peter to look in the mouth of the next fish he catches to find there a tribute-coin.

We Christians have as the symbol of our belief an instrument of torture. But the essence of our faith is Easter, is the Resurrection. Imagine the slowly dawning smile, wide as the horizon, of Myriam of Magdala once she recognises the man in the gardener’s hat. Imagine the incredulous laughter and embraces of the disciples eating grilled fish on the beach at dawn with the man they had seen slaughtered and buried only days before. 

In Lent we are asked to think seriously about our shortcomings in faith, in hope, and in love. To stop repressing them, and to beg that they may be forgiven. Perhaps one of those shortcomings may be our forgetting of the sheer, real happiness, the joy, of a faith “looks through death”. At best, the smile of reason and the smile of faith should be found on the same face. Ours.

Image: St Julie Billiart (1751-1816), founder of the order of the Sisters of Notre Dame.

THE JOY OF --- WHAT?

In the readings and general exhortations I encounter in my daily Prions en Eglise, there is constant mention of joy. “Shout and dance for joy, people of God!” “Quiver for joy!” For those of us living outside certain evangelical movements and outside Southern US black churches, this is a curious injunction. For Anglicans/Episcopalians, it is virtually unheard-of, the sort of thing to make us seriously uncomfortable. Why?

Well, we are not a culture given to loud displays of emotion, first of all. Secondly, when we assemble and meet together, we tend to do so either as a quiet, well-behaved group of friends and neighbours, with smiles and murmured greetings, or as individuals in search of reverence, silence, beauty in music and in ritual, and prayer. We may have joy in our hearts, but we remember Jesus’ injunction not to show off while performing our religious duties. 

There is another reason, I suspect. We do not glow with joy because we aren’t sure what we are supposed to feel so rapturous about. When we reach down inside us for the roots of our faith, we will probably come up with the Resurrection (cf 1 Cor. 15:14); but from there to quivering with joy on this Tuesday in June the way is not, for most of us, entirely clear. We are happy that Yeshua rose from the dead, for His sake; we know that it means something important for all Christians, and perhaps for others beyond; but let’s face it, the world seems in at least as big as mess as at any other time since, so shout and dance for joy? Is that a joke? Grim fortitude, in faith, hope and charity as among castaways on a large raft in mid-ocean might seem more appropriate.

The Psalmist, and St Paul, saw it differently. Yeshua Meshiach (“Jesus the Anointed”), in his sacrifice, death and resurrection, saved Israel and by (crucial) extension saved humanity. Saved from what? Saved from the consequences of our unbelief and our non-acceptance of God’s love for us. Not the proximate consequences, usually: shit keeps happening, the planet is in danger, and the bad guys often win. But from the ultimate consequences: from the destruction of our immortal souls, from the hell that awaits all those who have made themselves incapable of living eternally near the radiant source of all love. 

If that does not at least inwardly fill us with a certain trembling and incredulous happiness, it may be because we have trouble envisaging what we have been saved from. We need, perhaps, to pay more attention to Shaitan. Not just as an active shooter, drawing a bead on us at all times and in all places, but also as a terrifying example. He is what we will become like if we refuse the gift. Grim and greedy; eaten up with jealousy; racked with the rage and pain that contemplating beauty and love causes us. Incapable of any pleasure not guilty or corrupt. And yes, it lies in wait for all of us, not least because there is Someone always ready to convince us how much braver and more fun it is to walk the edge of the abyss, and even to dive in.

Nobody alive and breathing is beyond being saved from this, unless he refuses to. As a priest I heard the other day said, that is why the Sin against the Holy Spirit is the only one that cannot be forgiven: because it is the Spirit that saves us, that pulls us out of the deep well we fell into, that rescues us by the skin of our teeth. Refusing Him means you’ve left no chink open to be forgiven through, no pulley for the rope. So here we are, wobbling, doubting, lurching, ridiculous: but saved. Saved. SAVED.

In the light of that, a certain joy is in order. Pour the martinis. Light the candles. Sing a silly song. Dance a bit. Yup. Joy. Remember?

DIFFICULT QUESTIONS. PRAY FOR DISCERNMENT . . .

I have been reading the second volume of Pope Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth, on Holy Week, the Passion and the Resurrection, and find it staggering in its intelligence and understanding. I will be putting up a few quotations here from time to time,  but for now I’m just trying to come to terms with what it has made me understand, or understand better.

For example, the Last Supper. While Mark, Matthew and Luke see it as a Passover meal, John does not. Benedict, I think intelligently, agrees with John, as the Jewish authorities themselves at one point say, “We can’t arrest and kill him on the feast” (of Passover) as they were afraid it would cause riots and might in any case be seen as blasphemous. However, as one scholar B cites puts it, Jesus knows he is going to die, and as he is now himself both priest and sacrificial victim, he institutes a new Passover on the night before the old official one. The Last Supper is the institution of the new Passover. And the early Church understood the intense link between the Last Supper and the Resurrection in instituting the “breaking of bread”, i.e. the first Eucharist, on the morning of the Resurrection, i.e. the “first day of the week”, Sunday.

Jesus as “priest and victim both” of a new Passover leads to another thought. Our local parish priest Jean-Kamel regularly insists on the fact that "at your baptism you were made a priest, a prophet, and a king!” He is referring, of course, to 1 Peter 2:9, as well as  Exodus 19:5–6, First Peter 2:4–8, Book of Revelation 1:4–6, 5:6–10, and the Epistle to the Hebrews. He uses this mainly to encourage the congregation to witness and evangelisation (as I said earlier, he is a convert, and an enthusiastic and somewhat charismatic one). It does, though, raise the old question, more urgent in and since Luther, of the “priesthood of all believers”. This is mainly a Protestant concept, yet the Catholic church accepts it also – as long as it doesn’t interfere with the ordained priesthood.

It leads me to two questions. First: if Jesus is priest and victim in his Passover, i.e. his crucifixion and resurrection, is the “priest” that I am also priest and victim in my own little Passover? After all, I shall die, and as a believer I am promised a resurrection. Is that process my own Passover, and part of my imitatio Christi? If so, to be true my Passover, like his, must be in some way and measure for others. Second, if I am by my baptism a priest, does that allow me – for example, in an extreme situation where no ordained priest is present – to consecrate bread and wine and forgive sins? If so, my faith has just taken on a huge new dimension of seriousness and responsibility.

But if the answer to both those questions is No, then what Jean-Kamel tells us is simply a figure of speech, an edifying image. A priest? Well, no. A prophet? Not really. A king? You’re kidding.

This links up with all sorts of other difficult questions, like the ones developed in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory; but those will have to wait for another time.

EASTER WITHOUT MARKERS

For a variety of reasons, this Easter season has been very different. No church services, much busyness, absolutely nothing conducive to quiet, ritual, or contemplation. What to do in such a case?

What it has done is make me think more deeply about the Passion and the Resurrection, quite apart from ritual and in ways more individual than ecclesial. On Good Friday I awoke at 5 and spent two hours meditating on the day. I’ll share some of the thoughts.

      1.     The Anglican Communion service reads, in the Prayer of Consecration, “On the night that he was betrayed . . .” The new Catholic version says “On the night that he entered freely into his Passion . . .” At first I used to trip over this last version, but I have come to agree with it and like it (except rhythmically). It emphasises Yeshua’s willed accord with the Father’s will; his clear understanding that this death, grisly as it was, was the whole point of the Meshiach’s life and activity. Contrary to much Messianic thinking that wanted a new David to deliver Israel from its enemies, Yeshua’s interpretation was that of Isaiah. The Meshiach’s role went infinitely further than that of a political liberator: it aimed to liberate humanity from its Enemy – Satan, sin, and death. And this was possible only through the Meshiach himself becoming the Paschal sacrifice. So, human indeed, he quakes, he grieves, but he nevertheless goes forth. The Anglo-Saxon Dream of the Rood is doubtless factually wrong but also spiritually right in seeing Christ as a “young hero” voluntarily ascending the Cross.

      

      2.     I am always fascinated by the fact that his last words were two quotations from the Psalms. That shows, to cite Bonhoeffer, the degree to which the Psalter was Yeshua’s prayer-book. Having tried to say Morning and/or Evening Prayer regularly during Lent, I found reading through the Psalter one of the most moving parts of the experience. It is so wonderfully Jewish in its constant dialogue with the Creator: thankful, suffering, indignant (“Up, Lord!”), cursing, adoring and praising, it shows us how to relate to a sometimes distant and almost always (ostensibly) silent God.

      3.     The Crucifixion was necessary, because without it there could be no Resurrection. Perhaps what it teaches us is that our death too is necessary, and that we too follow him in a resurrection: not in the flesh – as his had to be, temporarily, to make people understand – but in the “body” of our post-mortem life, whatever that may look and feel like. No caterpillar, I suspect, has the faintest idea beforehand of what it feel like to be a butterfly.

      4.     Yochanan, St John the Evangelist, after whom I was named, thrills me, not only because of his mystical understanding and his poetic writing but because he was the only disciple not to have fled the Cross. He and the women stayed till the end. Perhaps that is one reason for the depth of his comprehension? It came to equal Miriam’s, which is why it was he who was detailed to look after her.

      5.     “Give us that peace which the world cannot give.” This impresses itself upon me more and more. The world can give suffering; the world can give comfort, and fun. But it cannot give true peace. When I look at those who live without faith, I mostly see a deep underlying sadness; those who live in faith are not exempt from pain and suffering, but they see meaning and coherence, and know that they are loved. 

      6.     The paradox of the Cross is inexhaustible. Its horror is bottomless, its joy is endless.

      7.     What, exactly, is the Good News that Yeshua preached? That you are not bound nor bounded by your self. That the Kingdom, the Reign, of God is here now. That it is the reign of Love, and that what you have to do, all you have to do, is relax and let it take you over. That you need to open the windows, doors and shutters of your soul and let the Ruach, Pneuma, Spiritus in. That if you live from day to day, hour to hour, by what it tells you, the Father, Son, and Spirit will come and live in you. That you are loved as you are, not as you might be if you were a better person. (That is really and truly hard to take on board!) That you can live day by day in subservience, in filial or servantlike devotion to something, Someone, greater than you are without losing your independence or your pride. On the contrary, it will increase your stature by making it irrelevant.  

THE PRAYER OF THE HEART - CONTINUED

In my last post I ended with the Carthusian saying that, in the Prayer of the Heart, the heart itself is eventually transfigured by the Crucifixion and Resurrection: a saying that if it is not simplistic is extremely profound, complex and difficult. So I have been giving it some thought, and prayer, and I think that there is perhaps a way to understand it.

            Let’s begin with that word “transfigured”. it has dictionary meanings, but in the discourse of a contemplative monk it should be taken, surely, in a Biblical, Gospel sense. There is, in the Gospel, that moment when Yeshua goes up on a mountain – traditionally Mount Tabor, on the summit of which my daughter was married – with Peter, James and John. There, all of a sudden, he is “transfigured before them; his face shining as the sun, and his garments became white as the light." Moses and Elijah appear, talking with him (according to Luke, about his fatal journey to Jerusalem); the voice of God is heard, saying “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased: listen to him.” When the terrified disciples eventually look up, Moses and Elijah have gone, and Yeshua is there looking normal and telling them not to be afraid.

            So “transfigured” implies a change not only of appearance but of nature: in the Gospel story, Yeshua’s brief and flaming change from human to divine and back again. In what way can our heart, then, be “transfigured” by the Crucifixion and Resurrection? Coming as it does after an astonishingly profound and beautiful chapter on the Prayer of the Heart and the silence that we must learn, not to create but to accept, I think this transfiguration is in a sense a reminder. The prayer of silence, it tells us, is not a cruise. It is not a peaceful, meditative, lengthy polishing of an ideal or higher self we are growing into (as it might be in Buddhism). As we are learning the prayer of the heart, the prayer of silence, the Crucifixion and Resurrection are there to add a necessary dimension of verticality, and a vivid reminder of suffering.

            I have thought a lot recently about the gradual transformation of Yeshua bar Yosef, teknon (builder) of Nazareth, into Yeshua the Meschiach, the Anointed (i.e. crowned) Saviour. Toward the middle or end of this process I seem to see something like a rage of compassion. As he looks around him with new, or gradually renewing, eyes what he sees is an ocean of suffering: I imagine him feeling like the only physician in Aleppo after weeks of bombing. It is of course a suffering he is destined wholly and entirely to share in what is perhaps the acme of his humanity.

            For us, that sharing is a message we cannot and must not evade. Yet in this context that message is not simple: it is not simply telling us to stop being Mary and become Martha. It is telling us that we must, in the midst of pursuing the prayer of the heart, let that very heart be transfigured, first by the Cross and then by Easter. The Cross will enrich our search by the hugeness of its suffering, by the enormity of its sacrifice, by the price of its blood. It will remind us that we are not embarked on a development of our self to greater heights and/or depths. We are embarked on a relationship that will lead us to places unknown and barely guessed at. And Easter, the Resurrection, will remind us that that relationship and the voyage it entails is one of our salvation, and thus of a scarcely imaginable joy.

            Coda:

           So many of these words have become counters in discourse. “Salvation”: what does it mean, really? Literally: to be safe, to end up safe, home free, saved from danger on every side, from the bullet that flies in the noonday, from the bomb that kills in the night, from the cancer that stalks us everywhere, from the inferno to which we consign ourselves daily in our great and small refusals of love. To be plucked from the jaws of peril and set down in a garden of pure raindrop love. But like Yeshua, we can only be resurrected if we go through death ourselves. That it is not eternal, not definitive, we proclaim in every recitation of the Creed. Learning the prayer of the heart may help us actually to believe this incredible promise.