Choice

“Grandmother, how do you know there is a God?”

“Oh Honey!  You hear the birds sing and see the flowers grow and you know there’s God!”

“But Grandmother…I hear the birds and see the flowers…and I don’t.”

Grandmother Page was a—perhaps the—pivotal person in my life.  She lived out the example of unconditional love.

When I was a child I suffered from severe attacks of asthma.  My lungs would close off to the degree that I was sure, even when I was quite small, that panic would kill me and I had to remain still, both physically and emotionally.  Nights were worse; lying down brought me a level of distress similar to a sailor in a sinking submarine.

Grandmother would sit with me and hold me upright all night long.  She’d sing to me, and tell me stories from her childhood and from the Bible, and most of all she’d keep her light blue eyes focused on mine so that I was drawn into her spirit and her heart.  To this day I don’t see blue eyes without thinking of her.

Her faith burned like a star; through losing my grandfather, the love of her life, in her early 40’s, through ensuing decades of poverty and constant physical pain, she loved.  Her love, and her faith, seemed effortless.

The exchange of words I share with you now occurred in the kitchen of my parent’s home when I was sixteen.  When I told her honestly of my emptiness I ran out of the room and sat in a car and cried.  She didn’t follow me; she didn’t have to.  I’m certain she prayed for me, and we never spoke like that again.  Somewhere along the line, faith came to me.

I suppose we might call that a kind of resurrection.  And though it’s not as monumental, nor as preposterous, as Jesus leaving his tomb in Jerusalem 2000 years ago, I’d argue that it’s a related miracle.

A miracle is something we can’t explain, can’t get our minds around, an experience that brings us to awe and wonder.  It may be that we’re never supposed to grow fully comfortable with a miracle, that we always need to stand—or kneel, or fall on our faces—in front of it, and later process the whole experience with questioning and even with tears.

The Resurrection is not dogma, it’s not religion—it’s revelation.  It’s there.  It happened; we can and should wrestle with how, what and why it all happened, but that it happened strikes me as undeniable.  Mary Magdalen said it happened.  Peter and John experienced it too.  Did they see the same thing?  They each saw through their own eyes, but they saw something that transformed them from terrified, lost sheep to lions willing to die rather than deny what they’d seen.

I haven’t seen—yet—the physical form of Jesus risen from the dead.  But I have had a revelation, and it involved my Grandmother, long after she’d taken her last breath on earth.

I was praying.  I was about to ask God for help as I faced a situation involving career and ego and emotional turmoil and a large amount of money.  I knelt by my bedside and suddenly none of that seemed pressing.  A different prayer—not a prayer of petition but simply the desire to be open and honest—came to me.

Then came a revelation, and sharply along with it surged something both spiritual and physical—so physical my lungs expanded like the breath of God blown into them.  The revelation was an insight, and more—it was a purpose.

What struck me was that I’d had it easy; I’d been blessed, surrounded, bathed in love.  Believing in God was a gift I’d been given.  I’d always seen myself as struggling for faith.  But I had experienced God’s love from my earliest moments; both spiritually and physically I’d felt and seen it.

And I saw at that moment that other people have a different road, and some a viciously different one.  Some children are abused by parents or grandparents; some people, when they are smothering as I was as a child, have their teeth knocked out.

My duty—my opportunity, my calling, as God let me know on my knees that night—is not to convince anyone of the supreme miracle of God’s endless, eternal love.  I am simply to love them, to contribute in any way I can to the possibility that they can experience enough love to believe that Resurrection—Jesus’s, and their own—might just be possible.

And that they, and you, and I all might say together, “He is Risen!  He is Risen indeed!”

-Randall

Mary Magdalen

In Palestine 2000 years ago, women did not testify before judges in legal actions because their word was deemed untrustworthy.  

I’ve already said that we in modern times find the Resurrection preposterous—and in those times people were the same way.  Even the disciples themselves, the men Jesus hand picked to learn directly from him, stumbled over the idea though Jesus told them multiple times it would happen, and then when it did happen they themselves didn’t believe it.  Even when Peter and John, the two disciples closest to Jesus, heard the tomb was empty and ran to it and saw for themselves that Jesus’ body was gone, they had no thought whatsoever that Jesus had come back to life.

So why, when the earliest followers of Jesus began to declare this preposterous story, did they identify the first witness of the event as a woman?  And not just any woman, but one who was fallen?

Fallen, not just because all of us are fallen, but fallen in the fuller sense because the narratives and traditions suggest a complex woman with a difficult past.  The Bible says Jesus had cast demons out of her; she was the one who broke a jar of expensive ointment to anoint Jesus’ feet as she washed them with her tears and dried them with her hair—and what an image of emotion and devotion that is!  She may have been the woman who was dragged before Jesus by a mob intent on fulfilling their tradition of stoning to death any woman caught in the act of adultery.  (Yes, men got away free.)

Mary Magdalen…her name itself strikes me as beautiful, and I have always thought of her as physically attractive.  But was she, if in fact she was a demon-possessed sex worker in Roman-occupied Palestine?

When I was a boy my father sometimes took me along to work on Saturday mornings (my father worked 6 1/2 days a week).  As a salesman he called on wholesalers who worked out of warehouses in areas known as rough.  Most of the time he’d take me in with him; sometimes he’d tell me to stay in the car with the doors locked.

One Saturday morning when I was sitting in his car alone I noticed a commotion on the sidewalk behind me; two young police officers were arresting woman for prostitution.  I understood this, even at age 12, because she was trying to seduce her way out of the situation by throwing her arms around the waist of the younger of the cops and saying, “Please, honey, let me go!  Even a dog will lie in the bed for greenbacks!”

That was enough to brand my brain with the memory, but what really burned was how she looked.  Her teeth were gone—either rotted or punched out, so that her mouth had the caved-in look of a crone, though now I’d guess she was no more than 40.  Her hair was stringy, her body had the collapsed look of abuse.

She was a woman at the Bottom—mentally, emotionally, physically, she was in living hell.  Even the policeman were trying distance themselves, one of them trying to squirm from her embrace while his partner stood back and smirked.  To say she was a prostitute is too polite; she was a whore, possessed with everything even we moderns would call demonic.

What if Mary Magdalen was like her?

Mary Magdalen met Jesus.  And Mary Magdalen became new.  Mary Magdalen knew with absolutely clarity that Jesus could—and already had, in every dimension of  her own life—accomplish something everyone else found impossible, even unthinkable.

Even she found it unthinkable!  When she discovered the tomb empty on the morning we now celebrate as Easter, she thought someone had taken his body; it didn’t occur to her that he might have returned to physical life and walked out.

The she saw him.  Saw—not felt, but saw him.  She didn’t recognize him until he spoke.  Then she had no doubt.

So here is one reason for believing the preposterous story of the Resurrection:  Mary Magdalen believed it.  She saw it first.  Even the disciples couldn’t deny that.  She told them.  At first they couldn’t get their minds around the truth of it.  Later, they believed her.

So do I.

-Randall