Today is Holy Saturday in the western Christian tradition. Yesterday was Good Friday, the day of Crucifixion. Tomorrow is Easter Sunday, the day of Resurrection. Nothing much happens on Holy Saturday. There’s a lot of waiting and more than a little hopelessness in the gospel stories.
This emptiness makes so much sense to me.
To pause between death and resurrection is appropriate. To honor our emptiness is necessary. This pausing to honor emptiness can be uncomfortable, especially in our productivity-worshipping culture. Silence and space can be scary. We have the urge to rush to fill the pause.
Sisters, stop and take a breath today. Grieve your endings. Fully inhabit your emptiness. Give yourself space and silence. Embrace this pause as a gift.
As we lose the roles and identities accumulated during the first half of our lives, we begin to uncover who we really are, and who we want to become, in the second half. For women especially, the identities and roles of our first four to six decades are often defined by who we nurture—friends, siblings, spouses and partners, children, other people’s children, parents, institutions. When these roles are stripped away, we can come home to ourselves.
Jesus of Nazareth preached trust in this process of losing and finding, over and over. “Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” These words are in every gospel, often in several places. I conclude that he really meant them.
When we resist deaths, small and large, we stay stuck. When we cling to how life was, or how life should have been, or how we want life to be, we aren’t actually living at all. Because living happens right now, in this moment.
When we accept the endings and hold ourselves gently in the space between death and hoped-for new life, resurrection happens. It’s inevitable.
When we pause, when we wait, when we let what’s dead be dead, life will resurrect itself. Simply give it time.
This holy pause pertains in other traditions, too. Christianity does not have a monopoly on death, resurrection, and the praise of emptiness. Christianity simply echoes and amplifies the cycle of death and rebirth encoded in our earthling DNA.
Here’s the Tao Te Ching: We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the centre hole that makes the wagon move.
We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.
We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable.
We work with being, but non-being is what we use.*
Remember who you are. Return to your body and your goodness. Reclaim your authority. Take your time. Honor your holy pauses. Honor the innate wisdom of change. Recommit to your priorities. Boundless compassion thrives within excellent boundaries.
As much as you can, praise the emptiness of this moment. Honor this emptiness, this fallow field, as it is the ground of new life. Simply wait, and watch for green shoots to break through the bare earth.
New life always breaks through.
New life always breaks through, when you are ready.
PS. To subscribe to my newsletter and receive my latest updates and posts, use this link. Thank you!
Photo Credit: Wilson Arch, Utah, November 2016, Jed Holdorph *From Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao Te Ching.
Resurrection is a discipline. We live in a Good Friday world – patriarchal, consumerist, capitalist, colonialist. This world needs our Easter selves – hopeful, irrational, bursting out of the tomb, aspiring to love and kindness. Here are three poems to support you in your practice of resurrection.
Very little grows on jagged rock. Be ground. Be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up where you are. You’ve been stony for too many years. Try something different. Surrender.
Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks
Let grief be your sister, she will whether or no.
Rise up from the stump of sorrow, and be green also, like the diligent leaves.
A lifetime isn’t long enough for the beauty of this world and the responsibilities of your life.
Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away.
Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.
Mary Oliver, from The Leaf and the Cloud
When your eyes are tired the world is tired also.
When your vision has gone no part of the world can find you.
Time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognize its own.
There you can be sure you are not beyond love.
The dark will be your womb tonight.
The night will give you a horizon further than you can see.
You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness
Today is Maundy Thursday, the beginning of the Triduum, the three holiest days of the Christian church year. These three days—Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter—are the crux of the matter, literally. The story of Jesus’ crucifixion, death, and resurrection are the heart of the Christian story.
Even if you’re not Christian anymore or ever, these three days are the heart of your story as well.
Death and resurrection are the way of things. We were born to die and be reborn over and over until our physical selves can’t hold us anymore. We suffer when we resist this basic truth—to be an Earthling is to be constantly dying and rising again. Change isn’t linear or always pretty. To be alive is to die and rise again, over and over, messily, imperfectly, gloriously.
As we grow, change, and evolve, we will find that we need to shed our too-small skins. I feel like I’m shedding my skin like a snake these days. Dropping identities and stories left and right. Shreds of (metaphorical) tissue-thin skin fall off me constantly. I feel messy, imperfect, and maybe just a little glorious.
This is the Easter story. This is the human story. This is our Earthling story. Jesus’ story is our story. Jesus’ death is our death, and when he rises again on Easter, he rises for all of us. He shows us the way home.
This excerpt from the last pages of my novel Lost and Found (available for free download here) describes a dream of Martha, my peregrina hero. In her dream, Martha integrates cut-off parts of herself, sheds her now too-small skin, and becomes a new creation.
Martha wakes up before sunrise in the albergue in Foncebadón, a few kilometers down the mountain from La Cruz de Ferro. She lies in bed listening to the sounds of pilgrims waking up and getting on with their days – the rustling of convertible pants and water running in the communal bathroom. She’s tired of writing. She’s tired of thinking. Today she only wants to walk in beauty. She yearns to shed this old skin that keeps her small and tired. She feels the pinching of the chrysalis. It’s time to emerge. She feels the pinching of the too-small skin. It’s time to shed. The snakeskin is a more apt metaphor than the chrysalis. She feels more like a snake than a butterfly. She feels low to the ground and slithery and heavy, not light and airy and floaty. She feels powerful. And beautiful.
Last night’s dream floats into Martha’s awareness. In the dream, she enters a cave in search of something she’s lost. In the cave is a cage full of children, all about seven years old. They’re girls, and they’re mangy and crazed. She’s frightened and repulsed. They look up when they see her, all except one feral child who’s sitting in the corner, muttering and chewing her snarled hair. Like refugees, they crowd to the chain link fence that encloses them and reach out their hands to her.
Martha’s heart sinks. She doesn’t want to know this. She doesn’t want to know these children are here. She doesn’t want the responsibility of knowing they’re here. What is she supposed to do with them? Clearly, they can’t stay here, and now that she knows they’re here, it’s her responsibility to take care of them. Her cheese is falling off her cracker. She feels unhinged, because she knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that these girls are parts of herself.
That one’s Courage and the one over there is Creativity. Those two are Imagination and Intuition. There’s Playfulness. The feral one with the snarled hair, the one sitting on the dung heap in the corner, muttering and biting her fingernails, is Rage. She sees Desire and Tenderness, too.
Martha feels a hand in hers and looks down to see clean and tidy uncaged children surrounding her. These are the little girls who have been with her all these years – Worry, Anxiety, and Fear, and the sturdiest of them all is Sadness. They’ve been faithful companions, and they tell her they’ve missed their sisters.
They tug on her hands to show her where the gate is. They tell her that her job is to let their sisters out of the cage. She’s safe and it’s okay. It’s time to shed the skin that keeps them in. It’s time to tell the truth and to acknowledge the sadness, yes. But more than that, and even scarier, they want her to let them rest a little. Sadness, Worry, Fear, and Anxiety would like to share the burden with Play and Anger and Courage and Imagination.
They understand this means Martha won’t feel in control anymore. The parts of her who want to explore and create will take her to places she didn’t even know existed. They won’t let her stay small and quiet and hidden.
Fear says, “Martha, I’m tired of steering you and keeping you safe. How about you let me share the load with my sisters? I know you’re scared. You’re scared that you’re going crazy. You’re not crazy. You’re brave. You’ll be even braver when you let Courage out to play with us.”
“How do I love them?” Martha asks Sadness and Worry. “How do I take care of them?”
“You know how to take care of them,” says Hope. Where had she come from? “You’re compassionate and strong, Martha. You only have to let yourself be reborn.”
“Here,” Hope says, and unlocks the gate. “Come out,” she says to the caged girls, “and let’s take care of Martha.” The little girls come out – some with shouts of joy and some with trepidation – to join Hope around a pool. The pool is surrounded by ferns, mosses cling to the wet rocks, and steam rises from it.
The girls slowly and reverently help Martha disrobe and lead her to the pool. They gently urge her to lie down in the warm water. They stroke her and rub her and sing to her. Martha realizes they’re rubbing off her old skin. They raise her up and walk her to where the sun is entering the cave. They rub her dry with soft, thick, warm towels. Her new skin is thin and porous. Martha feels both raw and incredibly strong. The girls rub her new transparent skin with oil, still singing.
Martha sits down on a granite boulder and opens her arms. One by one the little girls crawl into her chest. Martha is big enough to hold all of them now. Last to crawl back in is Hope. She reaches out and hugs her mom as she returns where she belongs. Martha looks inside her heart. Hope and the little girls are playing in the grass by the side of the desert creek, watched over by their vigilant guardian.
Fully awake now, Martha emerges from her sleeping bag. Her dad’s bunk is empty. She wants to mark this metamorphosis. She digs out the scissors in her foot care kit and goes to the garden of the albergue. Her only companions are the chickens. With the scissors made for cutting bandages, she cuts off her hair so it’s sticking out about an inch all over her head, like a halo. A messy gray halo. Hair is all over the ground. Birds will use it for nests. In this windy place it will blow away before lunchtime.
Whatever your faith or spirituality, I wish you a blessed death and rebirth.
May we trust our hearts. May we trust God, whoever and whatever Holiness is for us.
Happy Easter!
Love, Barb
Image: Jed Holdorph, 16 May 2014, Camino de Santiago
We’ve domesticated resurrection. We’ve tamed its wildness.
We’ve turned resurrection into cute, fluffy sweetness. Picture the typical Easter
symbols – frolicking lambs, fluffy bunnies, downy chicks, fluttering butterflies,
waving daffodils.
But what if the green blade riseth as a knife?
Resurrection is no gentle thing.
Metamorphosis is inherently destructive. Egg shells shatter
as the chick hatches. The caterpillar’s destruction is necessary for the
butterfly’s existence.
Beloved, I am sick to death of meekness. Of pleasingness. Of niceness. I crave clarity and focus. I want to be a sharp-edged blade forged in my life’s fire.
Ask yourself: What must die for life to be freed?
What if, on your journey of rebecoming, you have uncovered
a warrior within? What then?
Will you embrace this inner warrior, or will you command her to drop her sword and spear? Will you nurture your inner insurrectionist? Will you feed her and clothe her? Or will you send her away hungry and alone?
Will you dare to speak your heart’s desire?
Will you dare to be a weapon in your own hands?
Will you dare to trust your aim?
May we whet and wield our strength. May we see clearly and give voice to truth. May we defend the defenseless. May we walk away from labels and roles that cage us. May we excise from our lives anyone who wants us small
and afraid.
May we be faithful to ourselves and each other – our comadres, companions, fellow warriors on
the Way.
Embrace conflict as a whetstone that sharpens and hones
you.
Trust yourself to throw your spear. Trust yourself to
know which suckers need to be pruned so the tree can thrive. Trust yourself to see
what needs to be done, and do it.
Most of all, trust the deep Love in whom you live and
move and have your being. Remain rooted in her. Live in and from her.
Nurture. And destroy. Both are holy. Both are required
for resurrection.
There’s a moment in the Easter Vigil that’s always struck me as wrong.
We’ve kindled the new fire of Easter. We’ve lit and processed the Paschal Candle. Someone’s sung the Exultet. We’ve sat for an hour in the darkened church, lit only by candlelight, listening to stories from the Hebrew tradition – Creation, the Garden, Noah and the Flood, the Exodus, and my personal favorite – the Valley of Dry Bones.
Then, out of nowhere it seems, the celebrant simply stands up and says “Alleluia! Christ is risen!” The people reply, “The Lord is risen, indeed! Alleluia!” and the organ starts playing and the bright artificial lights get flipped on and the altar guild carries out flowers and butterflies and suddenly, willy nilly, Lent is over and it’s Easter, even though outside it’s the dark of the night.
This moment has always seemed so wrong to me. It’s felt abrupt and fake and WAY too easy. Shouldn’t you have to work for resurrection?, I think. Shouldn’t you have to earn it somehow?
Then, this year, I got it.
No, you do NOT have to work for resurrection.
Yes, it IS just this easy.
All you have to do to get resurrection is show up and turn on the lights.
The hard part for most of us, I think, is letting it be Easter.
All we need to do to get resurrection, to let Love Life God Whatever flow, is go to our tombs, the places where we keep our dead things, allow ourselves mercy, then let go. Love will do the rest.
Resurrection is easy. It’s also scares me, just like it scared Jesus’s followers that first Easter morning.
I know the contours of my tomb and the heft of my dead things – my wounds and my stories and my suffering – all too well. They’re familiar to me. I know who I am when I’m wrapped in them.
Who will I be without my wounds and stories and suffering?
Who will I be if I’m not forever trying and working and efforting?
Who is Easter me?
Who will resurrected you be?
This is perhaps the work of faith – to show Love to the door of our deadness, allow her access, and watch her transform the dead things into Life.
