From the Executive Director
Thomas E. Little, Ed.D.
Executive Director
Bon Secours Spiritual Center
This Easter We Rise.....From Fear
As you read this letter we are celebrating the end of the Lenten season and entering Easter time. And this Easter we are reminded in the Gospel of Luke of the disciples who were "beating it out of town" on the road to Emmaus on their first Easter. The story tells us earlier that day they heard the story from the women who had been to the tomb. Jesus had risen, the women said. Yet, somehow they could not see what the women saw or believe what the women said or trust what the women told. They were too afraid to see, believe or trust what was just not possible! Their imagination stunted their vision.
They chose instead to walk away, disappointed in their hope. They could not see because their fear, honed during the previous days, was already too well settled in. They had wanted Jesus to match their vision of his mission. He was a mighty prophet made in their image. He would surely inaugurate the redemption of Israel, and return them to power, privilege and control in their world. What they did not want to see was Jesus overcome by the worst of life’s lousy losses at the hands of his enemies.
They had walked away because what they had endured was all too much. And no word or witnesses could change the terrible reality they accepted in their disappointment and fear. Indeed, their hope died with him and without hope they could not imagine a better end or believe in a promise fulfilled or even recognize him walking with them. They had succumbed, not to death, but to fear.
The gospel tells us that, even unrecognized, Jesus stayed and walked with them, interpreting the Scriptures and explaining the purpose of God in what had happened to him. And showing why it was needed that he do what he had done in those terrible days. I have often wondered what he said during that walk to explain the great story of God’s remarkable action in his and their lives. Many years later St. Gregory of Nyssa would write that those who would walk with God must move beyond what is visible to discover the invisible and be open to see the incomprehensible. But fear destroys our capacity for the incomprehensible, and our pain can prohibit us from seeing Jesus walking with us to open God’s purposes and to help us to recognize God’s imagination in our lives.
I wonder if he explained to them how Moses had walked up the wild mountain in Sinai where, as Belden Lane suggests, he was “...brought to the boundary of what our minds and bodies can sustain.” There Moses saw life as God did and walked in that vision to show Israel their promised land. Did he compare the mountain of Moses veiled in smoke and fury with the cross that Jesus climbed, where choked with pain, abandonment and derision, he saw life and its solution as God saw it? Did he explain how both the mountain and the cross reshaped human endeavors and reunderstood the power and the actions of God even in a mystery that was veiled from so many? Did he tell how both Moses’ Sinai and Jesus’ cross challenge the poverty of our imaginations and confront our preconceived notions of what God is about in us and in our world? Did he help them see how fear restrains us from encounteringGod, who is able to bring out of the worst
of life’s encounters and circumstances the very best for us, beyond anything any of us might anticipate?I am sure Jesus tried on that walk to help them see what they could not comprehend. I am also struck that when the words somehow were still not fully successful, he chose to complete the sharing by opening himself to them in the breaking of the bread. There they finally saw and knew God’s consolation, compassion and care. There the words came alive and in the shared bread they tasted the difference between what is dying around them and what is trying to be born. Only with that insight "…will the wilderness and the dry land be glad, the desert rejoice and blossom abundantly and rejoice with joy and singing" (Isaiah 35:1-2). Only then can the imagination of God come fully to life in our world and can we become, as Walter Brueggemann suggests, ";agents of God’s imagination," who see the Word exploding into new meaning and opportunities in our lives and in our world.
On the night before Easter, in the darkness of the great Vigil of Easter, we hear these words in the "Exultet: "… Rejoice, O earth, in glory, revealing the splendor of your creation, radiant in the brightness of your triumphant King! Christ has conquered! God’s life and glory fill you! Rejoice, O Mother Church! Exult in glory! Darkness vanishes forever!
When the darkness finally vanished, the disciples hurried back to tell what God was doing in their lives. This year you are invited to see and step into the radiance that recreates and reignites God’s promise of life and hope in us and in our world. This Easter I invite you: Rise from your fears and leave behind the stories you believe that keep you from walking into new life. Recognize the one who breaks open his word and his bread with you. Then run back and tell your friends the story of the companion who walked with you, opened your heart and taught you God’s imagination that overcomes all your fear and invites you into the splendor of God’s new world this Easter.
Be well! Happy Easter.
Thomas E Little, Ed.D.
Executive Director
