Tag: Resurrection

Luke 8:26-56 – The Way of Light

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Now we arrive at three tales of resurrection, although only one of them is a literal resurrection.  The Christian life may be said to involve two major movements, the via crucis or Way of the Cross and the via lucis or Way of Light.  The via crucis is that depth of despair that is experienced by a man possessed by demons, a woman who has been hemorrhaging for twelve years, or a man who is watching his beloved daughter die.  We all know our own versions of it – those periods of loss and grief that threaten to overwhelm our individual lives. We also experience the via crucis collectively. Numbers are important in this passage from Luke’s Gospel.  The woman has hemorrhaged for twelve years, Jairus’ daughter is twelve years old, and twelve is, of course, the number of the tribes of Israel. The whole Jewish people is suffering, walking the way of misery and despair. But the gentiles are suffering, too.  The Gerasenes are gentiles, settlers whose city is part of the Decapolis, the league of Greek cities in the region of the Sea of Galilee. They, like the Jews, know what it means to be oppressed by legions, and the five thousand demons that roil around inside the demonaic will not let the people forget their oppression.

Fortunately, we won’t be left walking the way of the cross forever.  In these three stories, Jesus brings each person through their travail and onto the via lucis, the path of resurrection.  Sometimes there’s a cost involved.The Gerasenes aren’t just angry about pigs. They have been oppressed by the Romans for so long that such oppression has become commonplace, easy to hide in the ravings of a lunatic in the cemetery.  When Jesus heals that lunatic, he makes the oppression obvious, even as he sets them from it. But the thing about our oppressions is that they are familiar. We come to accept them, and can even be reassured by them, because the alternative is a step into the unknown. Who are we once we give up the identities that the via crucis has pressed upon us? I might worry that I don’t know how to be someone who no longer grieves. Or that I won’t know how to be sociable, now that the reason for my social exclusion has been taken away. Or that I won’t know how to participate in a just society, when injustice is all that I’ve known.  To be resurrected is to step into a new version of the self, and this is often frightening and confusing.

 

What does it mean to be wise in today’s world?

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

The night before, someone had asked me if I thought that life was primarily comedy or primarily tragedy. I said comedy, without really knowing why. Then, as sometimes happens in the most surprising way, I found myself sitting at our Ministerium lunch the very next day, listening as Rabbi Roger Klein supported my sense that life is more comic than sad. Rabbi Klein was talking about wisdom. He had just finished speaking about Richard Sewell’s book, The Vision of Tragedy, in which Sewell asserts that wisdom is a recognition of the tragedies and problems of life, with a corresponding refusal to avoid them, and, most importantly, refusal to submit to them. Now he was speaking about Socrates. Socratic wisdom, he told us, has two main aspects. The first is humility. The second is the sense that life is comedy.

Not, the Rabbi assured us, comedy in a “laugh out loud” mode, but comedy as an ordering principal. He described tragedy and comedy as two species from the same genus. Comedy reflects a fundamentally ordered universe. Tragedy reflects a fundamentally disordered universe. Tragedy reflects the unacceptable contradictions of life, comedy the acceptable contradictions of life. I’ve been taking improv classes for awhile now, and I instinctively understood what he meant. When an improv actor steps out onto the stage, she doesn’t know what prompts she’ll be given or what her scene partners will say or do. She steps out prepared to create a scene from whatever comes her way. She has dedicated herself to the task of finding order in the raw materials of words and emotions and movements, and when we find improv funny, it is not only because of the incidental jokes and ridiculous situations that arise. The true joy that we take in improv arises from the fact that we’re watching order take form out of chaos, and the form that order takes is surprising, sometimes even shocking, but also deeply reassuring, because we human beings can do this. We can, through the simplest actions, reflect a fundamentally ordered universe.

Before talking about Sewell, Rabbi Klein led us through an investigation of David Brooks’s thoughts on wisdom, and Robert Nozick’s. He described Brooks’s point of view as primarily theoretical, given that Brooks is more concerned with thinking through what wisdom is than what it does. There’s a need for the cultivation of factual information and knowledge as we grow to be wise, but also a powerful need for experience. Knowledge gives us the capacity to create and evaluate, but the cultivation of wisdom takes time – it emerges from experience, and, unlike knowledge, it can’t be taught or transferred simply from one person to another. Differing from Brooks, Nozick is more interested in the practical aspects of wisdom. It comes about when we make meaning out of the practical truths that we encounter in the world, and through doing so change our perspective on life. Some of these practical truths are revealed when we attempt to achieve certain goals. We craft means of doing so, become aware of lurking dangers, and eventually come to accept unavoidable limitations. Through this we gain glimmers of self-knowledge. But also through it, if we’re truly wise, we detect, and even participate in, a current of joy. The wise person takes delight in wisdom itself and loves to share it, so that wisdom becomes an overflow of love.

All of these aspects of wisdom are found in scripture. Scripture speaks of the cultivation of the virtues as part of wisdom – do good deeds over and over again until they become your disposition, part of your temperament, inseparable from who you are. Scripture speaks of the transformation of loss, which is part of wisdom. The right response to loss, scripture tells us, is holiness – the redemption of the bad by turning it into something sacred. But most appealingly to me was the idea of comedy. The Bible, Rabbi Klein told us, is comedy, not tragedy. Again and again in both the Jewish and Christian scriptures, the contradictions of life are reconciled and a necessary order is reasserted, even in the face of violence and horror. The Sinai event is a comedic act, an act of creating a new order out of a devastatingly destructive old order. Resurrection is a comedic act, the act of reconciling the contradictions of life and death. In all cases, these acts of God are an overflowing of love, and in the grand comedy, creation itself flows out from God’s wisdom, and we are invited to learn and imitate it.

At the Memorial Service

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Last night I went to a memorial service at the Newman Center, for Brittany and Courtney, two students who died in a car wreck on their way back to campus at the end of Spring Break.  The Newman Center is a very modern church building, with big abstract stained glass windows and a large video screen positioned above the band.  I sat towards the back and watched a slide show of the girls’ lives while waiting for the service to begin.  The room was full, and people shifted in their chairs, had murmured conversations, tilted their heads up towards the screen.  Music was playing from the speakers in the center of the sanctuary, and the songs that the kids who put the slide show together had chosen were cheerful.  They played Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds,” a song I love, and while an old, stiff part of my soul wondered about it’s appropriateness, I found myself surrendering to it, to the sentiment it expresses.  Every little thing will be all right, even in the face of death.

The priest continued that theme once the service began.  He lit the Paschal candle and talked about its meaning, a symbol of new life in baptism, a symbol of continued life at burial.  A visual reminder of the hope of the resurrection.  I was aware that not everyone in the room was a Christian.  My life as a college chaplain has been about meeting the spiritual needs of a wide variety of people who are at different places in their lives of faith, or living lives entirely without faith.  But I was glad that the priest took time to explain the meaning of the ritual.  I think that everyone, believers and unbelievers alike, can accept an authentic ritual, and that sincerity of belief is more welcoming than attempts to hide it.

These assumptions were challenged, however, when the priest offered the mike to the people there, inviting them to memorialize Brittany and Courtney.  The first person to get up was a girl who had known one of the students, and the first part of her talk was a true memorial, a list of memories that honored the dead.  But then she began to preach.  She said that she’d come to Christ in the last year, and that everyone should follow her lead if they wanted assurance of heaven.  She said that her faith had “saved her from a gay lifestyle.”  I cringed.  And I felt sorry for her.  This poor child was being taught that she was somehow unacceptable to God, and that God is not loving, but judgmental and cruel, always weighing our actions and all too willing to send us to hell.  But she didn’t make me angry.  This was how she was dealing with her grief, and people who are sorrowful cast about for certainties.

The next speaker made me angry.  This was a tall young man, who had been sitting next to the first speaker.  He got up and came forward and told us that he didn’t know either of the dead girls.  He said that we couldn’t honestly know if they were in heaven and hell.  They may have claimed to be Christian, and members of their Catholic and Methodist churches, but that didn’t mean they’d really “come to Christ.”  Nor, in his mind, did it mean that Christ would have any inclination to save them.  He threatened us.  Come to Christ or you’ll go to hell.

Fortunately, the priest stopped him before he went any further.  “This is about Courtney and Brittany,” he said.  “This isn’t an altar call.”  The young man returned to his seat.  I watched him.  He was obviously angry at having been stopped in the middle of his tirade.  His friends tried to reassure him.  The memorial service went on.  Real friends of Courtney and Brittany got up.  They talked about the specific truths of the girls’ lives, how Brittany was always singing, how Courtney’s smile could give solace at the end of a hard day.  They honored the specificity of the girls’ lives, and I honored them for it.

This morning I woke up thinking about that tall, angry young man, and the girl who proceeded him.  Did they think they were being loving?  How is it that they could be so indifferent to grief, so hopelessly callous towards the wounded souls in the room, so ignorant of God’s true love for the world?  I began wondering, and I wonder now, if they haven’t been abused in some way, at some point in their lives.  Maybe they’ve chosen a form of Christianity with an abusive ethic because abuse is familiar to them, so familiar that it’s almost comfortable.  Maybe they’ve been told that they, as individuals, don’t matter, and so they assume that individuals don’t matter to God.  Maybe they’ve been taught to run away from the specificity of their own lives, and therefore can’t imagine that God would care that both Courtney and Brittany liked to wear bathrobes in the morning, that Courtney always made Brittany’s coffee, that they were kind and loving people, and full of joy.

My perfect church would be a community of people who supported each other in their lives with God, and didn’t try to control the direction in which anyone’s faith led them.  A community of saints, that was concentrated on God’s love for the world, and therefore tried to imitate that love.  Jesus tells us that God knows every hair on our heads.  Because God loves us so much, the specificity of our hair matters.  The specificity of our bodies matter.  We matter to God, in all of our moments – at a bar, drinking coffee on the sofa in the morning, when we’re with our loved ones, whoever they may be.  That’s how one remembers the dead.  By trying to see them through God’s eyes, in all of their glorious and wonderful variety.  The truer Christians were the friends who got up with no purpose other than to tell stories about Brittany and Courtney.  Truer, because they acted more like Christ, whatever their faith may be.

Lazarus

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

He is still wrapped in burial clothes as he exits the tomb.  He sees the world come back to life around him through strips of cloth that are white and loosely woven.  The faces around him are ghostly, as if they were wrapped in gauze.  There is a one thick thread cutting across his vision.  It makes him think of Martha, his efficient sister, the spinner of competent threads.  As soon as he thinks of her, he hears her.  He hears her voice, saying his name, but there’s something odd about the way she says it – its choked with tears at either end.  “Lazarus.  Lazarus.”  And he hears Mary’s louder, more emotive weeping.  Hands are touching his face, pulling away the burial wrappings.  He wonders who it is, who could be brave enough to do it.

Once he found a dead man beside the road.  He dug a hole in the earth, yards away from where the body was lying, and even the act of digging made him feel a little sick.  He didn’t know if he could bring himself to touch the body.  It was unclean.  It would make him unclean for seven days, and he would have to purify himself with water on the third and seventh days.  But he knew that he couldn’t leave the man to the birds and the scavenging beasts, that it would be an act of charity, to touch the dead.

The person who touches him now isn’t concerned with uncleanliness.  Maybe it’s Martha or Mary.  They would be unclean already, from having had to prepare his body for burial.  But he doesn’t think so.  These hands feel different, somehow.  They don’t tremble or shake.  They aren’t the hands of someone who is weeping.  But when the gauze is pulled away, the first thing he sees is tears.  Tears against sun-weathered skin.  He concentrates on them because there is too much light.  It comes pouring in, drowning his vision and shifting even the tears out of focus.  But a voice speaks and he knows who has unwrapped him.  “Take off the grave clothes and let him go,” the voice says, and he feels other hands, touching his arms and shoulders, his waist and ankles, pulling away the bands of cloth.

Everyone wants to know what it was like to be in the grave.  Did he travel to the land of the dead?  Did he see their pallid faces?  They tell him that Sheol is a gray place, a place of wanting.  That the dead stand in pits with uplifted faces, that their faces look like they’ve been molded out of wet clay.  He tells them that he doesn’t remember what it was like to be dead, and he doesn’t.  But because of their stories, he begins to picture the faces as they say they should look, dark and gray and waiting.  He doesn’t remember sights or sounds, only a terrible numbness, and because of this, he imagines the faces as numb.  Not longing for anything, not waiting for anything, not looking at anything.  That is what he wants to forget.

He never wants to feel that numbness again.  When he is entirely unwrapped, he sits by himself on a stone and looks at the sunlight on the skin of his arm.  His sisters cleaned him well before burying him.  His skin looks virgin, like an infant’s skin, pale brown in the heavy sun.  He lifts his eyes and watches the way in which the sunlight makes dense shadows fall from rocks and feet and scrub bushes.  Heavy shadows against the light tan ground.  People are pressing food at him.  He sees white dust against the sheen of grape skins, and flour dusting flat pieces of bread.  He isn’t ready to eat yet.  He’s surprised that they’re not afraid of him, that they’re not standing at a distance, but pressing close, and he knows that it is because of Jesus.  If he had come walking from his grave under his own power, he would have been accursed.  Children would have run from him, women would have screamed and fled.  It’s because they know the reason for his new life that they want to touch his bare arms, to press cups of watered wine into his thin hands.

But he feels the fear that they seem incapable of.  He looks for Jesus’s face in the crowd, but he sees Mary first, moving along the fringe of the press of people.  He tries to stand.  Immediately Martha is by his side, asserting order.  “He doesn’t want the food,” she says.  “Thank you, but he doesn’t want it.  Give him room.”  They stand aside for him, although some can’t keep themselves from reaching out to touch him.  Martha walks beside him, echoing his slow step, but she doesn’t touch him, and he realizes that she feels the way he feels, afraid and uncertain of the miracle.  Mary’s face bobs up in front of them.  She is smiling and holding a crown of flowers.  He gasps when he sees it.  Tiny flowers with open faces, white and red.  She lifts it to put it on him, but he jerks his head away.

Then Jesus is there, taking his hand.  His grip is strong and leading, and as they walk he keeps his face down, as if his mind is elsewhere.  His eyes are unfocused,  as if unaware of the adulation of the crowd.  The crowd keeps gathering.  Children run through its fringes.  All of Bethany has come out into the street.

Then they are ducking through a doorway, entering a cool, shadowy room, and he looks up and understands that he is home.  Martha has gotten there ahead of them, and is already laying out a clean tunic for him.  She has taken it out of a trunk, and he realizes that she has packed away all of his possessions, that her efficiency emptied the house of him, even as she mourned.  He sits on a carpet and Jesus sits beside him.  The other disciples crowd in.  Light falls into the room from a high window, and he remembers being a boy and standing on top of stacked boxes to gaze out of that window.  Nothing had been preventing him from going outside, but he had wanted to see the world from the window, to see if it looked different from that vantage point.  He eats food when Jesus hands it to him.  He glances at the faces of the disciples, and sees their wonderment, and realizes that now he is different to them, that he won’t be able to just sit and listen and be part of the crowd.  “He wept for you,” Andrew tells him, and that fact seems as amazing to Andrew as the resurrection itself.  Lazarus turns and looks at Jesus, who has raised his head and is listening to the sounds of the crowd through the open window.  And Lazarus thinks, ‘I didn’t know that he loved me that much.  That he would weep for me.’

He finds that he can’t stand to be far from Jesus’s side.  Thomas implies that the world is dangerous for him now in a way that it wasn’t before.  “The pharisees are talking about you to the chief priests,” he says, and smiles, because Thomas wants a fight with the pharisees as soon as possible.  But Lazarus isn’t worried about the danger.  He is trying to understand why Jesus raised him, and why Jesus wept.

He asks Martha about it and she says, “He was late in coming here.  We sent word to him when you got sick.  You remember that, don’t you?  Do you remember how we waited, how we prayed that he would come?  But he didn’t.  They say that he told the disciples that God would be glorified through you.”  And now Martha’s hands begin to shake as she straightens the room.  “And He is, Lazarus.  Your being here is a sign from God.”

He wakes in the night and hears the disciples talking.  Word has reached them that the Sanhedrin has met, and that Caiaphas and the other chief priests are planning to murder Jesus.  Jesus sits quietly and looks at the ground.  He lets them talk.  He lets them make decisions.  They will go the Ephraim, where they can hide and be safe.  Lazarus wants to go with them.  He knows that he will always be safe when he’s in Jesus’s company, near to Jesus’s love.  Martha wants him to stay.  Mary wants to go with him.  He goes, and Mary stays.

He is always by Jesus’s side.  When he feels nervous, he reaches out and touches Jesus’s clothing.  He thinks that he can remember more of what it was like to die.  That gradual unmooring, that slipping away.  He wants Jesus to anchor him to this world.  But Jesus’s gaze lifts to more distant horizons.  It is a dark time in Ephraim.  The winter is long.  There are only twelve hours of daylight.  The Passover is growing near.

Six days before the feast in Jerusalem, Jesus tells the disciples that they are going back to Bethany.  He says it while looking at Lazarus, giving him a little smile, as if Bethany still means anything to Lazarus, as if he cares about any particular place.  He doesn’t care about Bethany.  Its safety, its familiarity, are empty things to him now.  Only in Jesus is there safety.  He’s sure of it.  Jesus will keep him safe.  Jesus cried for him, and raised him from the grave.  The disciples murmur and worry, afraid that Jesus will suffer in Jerusalem.  But Lazarus knows that he won’t.  Jesus will keep himself safe out of love of Lazarus.  He will keep himself safe so that he can keep Lazarus safe.

They return to Bethany in the late afternoon, and it is as if Martha and Mary have been expecting them.  Perhaps Jesus told them that he would come back on this day.  Martha has prepared a feast, and Mary flits around the room, speaking quietly to the disciples, a secretive smile on her face.  They recline on rugs to eat, sharing the dishes that Martha has made, splitting the bread between them.  Near the end of the meal Mary emerges from the shadows, carrying a small box.  She kneels in front of Jesus and he watches her quietly, waiting.  Lazarus reaches out and touches his sleeve, hoping to have a share in his sense of calm, his obvious peace.  She opens the box and, smiling, turns it over.  Oil washes out of it and over Jesus’s feet.  The smell of nard fills the house.  Lazarus gasps with the others.  Where did she get it?  Nothing of its value has ever been in the house.  She bends over his feet and begins to move her hair back and forth, taking it in her hands, scrubbing at his skin with it, and the oil shines on her dark locks.

Judas is angry.  “Gifts like that should be sold,” he says.

But Jesus says, “Leave her alone.  It was intended that she should save this perfume for the day of my burial.”

Lazarus feels his breath go out of him.  The day of Jesus’s burial?  Is this it?  He glances quickly around at the shadows, looking for assassins.  But then he catches Jesus’s eye, and sees Jesus’s reassuring smile.  ‘No,’ that smile says.  ‘Do not be afraid.  I am with you.’  And Lazarus relaxes, reassured.  Jesus won’t die.  And if he won’t die, then Lazarus won’t die.  He will be kept safe.

There are crowds gathering outside of the house.  Thomas reminds the people inside that crowds mean danger.  There are spies from the Sanhedrin in those crowds.  Jesus turns to Andrew and Philip and gives them special instructions.  They leave, carrying the smell of nard with them into the night.

Its scent follows all of them when they leave the house in the morning.  Andrew and Philip are waiting in the predawn light.  Andrew holds the bridle of a young colt.  The crowd hasn’t dissipated in the night.  They are sleeping on the ground, leaning against the walls of the houses.  They stir and begin to stand as Jesus emerges.  He places a hand on Lazarus’s shoulder and steadies himself as he swings up onto the back of the colt.  Andrew hands the bridle to Lazarus.  The smell of nard dissipates slowly in the cool air as they walk towards Jerusalem.  It spreads out among the crowds who walk and murmur beside them.

As they come nearer to the city, the crowds grow and line the way.  People are carrying palm branches, waving them in the air.  They shout loud hosannas.  Their faces are strange to Lazarus.  Everywhere he looks, people have their faces raised and are staring up at Jesus.  Small children have climbed into the trees.  Lazarus clutches the bridle.  It’s alive in his hand, connecting him to Jesus on the colt.

Philip is walking beside him.  “Why are they all here?” he whispers.

Philip looks at him strangely.  “Because of you,” he says.  “Because they heard that he raised you.”

‘But,’ Lazarus thinks, ‘I don’t want them here.  This isn’t for them.  This is only for us, for those who really love him.’

Jesus spends the day sitting on a raised platform in the Court of the Gentiles, teaching.  Lazarus stands by his side, watching the faces of the people who come to speak with him.  He feels them pressing all around the cluster of disciples.  He feels their weight on his shoulders.  He feels bound by it, as rigidly bound as he was when he first came from the grave.  He doesn’t know how Jesus can bear it.  When he feels the weight grow to much, he reaches out and touches Jesus’s shoulder.  And the weight lifts, the smell of nard comes back into his nostrils.

At the end of the day, Jesus goes off by himself.  Lazarus follows and sits at a distance.  He watches Jesus kneel and pray, and he sees the tiredness of Jesus’s face, and knows that Jesus, too, bore the weight of the pressing crowds.  But as he prays, the weight seems to lift, the tiredness to lighten and fade.  And the next day he is back with the crowds, speaking and listening to them, walking about the temple.  He argues with scribes and pharisees when they approach, but always gently, as if more saddened by their arguments then angered by them.  This goes on for three days.

On the day before the passover, Jesus leads his followers into the upper room of a house.  The wind brings the scent of seared lamb from the temple.  Mary and Martha are there, and so are Joanna and Mary Magdalene and the women of Galilee.  The disciples are there, and others, old followers and new people who have been beside him in the temple these last few days.  Jesus reclines on a rough rug, eating from a small table.  Lazarus reclines beside him, and tries to eat when he eats, to dip his bread into the same small bowl of oil.  Jesus begins to talk, telling those who are nearest to him that one of them will betray him.  Lazarus stares at his face, and then stares past him, to Peter’s stricken eyes.  Peter lifts his hand and gestures to Lazarus, and Lazarus understand.

“Who will betray you, Lord?” he asks.

Jesus mutters, so that only Lazarus can hear.  “The one who I hand this bread to, after I’ve dipped it in this dish.”  Then he reaches out, dips the bread, and hands it to Judas of Iscariot, who smiles as he accepts it, thinking that its a sign of special favor.  “Do what you have planned to do,” Jesus tells him, and Judas’s eyes change.  His face looses all expression, and he stands and leaves the room.  Lazarus stares after him.

Before Lazarus can act, before he can stand and follow Judas and prevent whatever he is planning to do, Jesus begins to speak.  He talks about where he is going and what will happen to him.  Lazarus wants to look away from the utter calm on Jesus’s face.  He feels a gauze across his vision, and realizes that it is his own tears.  He watches Jesus and sees his eyes scan the room, resting on every face.  Spending the same time studying features, looking into eyes, the same time on every face.  “Before long,” Jesus says, “the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me.  Because I live, you also will live.”  But Lazarus understands that Jesus is talking about his death.  That the dark time in Ephraim has come to stay.  He still smells the nard, but understands now that it is the smell of loss, a perfume made from the death of flowers.

“How can this be?” he wonders.  “How can this be?”  He watches Jesus look into every face, and realizes that he is not the only disciple that Jesus loves.  That they are all beloved, every one.  He looks towards the window.  The smell of sacrificial meat pours through it, invading the room.  It is met by the scent of nard.  The scent of nard pushes past it, overcomes it, and flows out into the city.  As if the weeping of Jesus was for all of them, not just for Lazarus.  As if the miracle of Lazarus’s resurrection was a universal miracle.  As if he, whom Jesus loves, is meant to represent everything there is, the whole world.

Mary Magdalene

~ KPB Stevens ~ 2 Comments

Magdala was a town of almost forty-thousand.  It was a town of white pigeons hatched from three hundred shops, birds for sacrifice that sometimes escaped to roost in eves and on rooftops and descend in flocks on a piece of dropped fish.  Magdala was a town of fish.  Mary watched the fishermen heave them from the sea in shaking nets and deposit them in the midgals, the little stone towers in which layer upon layer of fish flopped and died.

Mary hated the arrogant purity of the pigeons.  They were supposed to be without blemish, but light itself blemished them, catching out the iridescent colors in the fibers of a wing.  The same colors she saw on the enamel of the seashells she picked up on the shore.  But seashells never claimed that they were clean.  Seashells were allies of fish, whose scales caught those colors also, the oily blues and greens that looked like bruises turned to water.

Mary left Magdala like she always did.  One moment she was squatting beside the boats, a small, disquieting figure with her long face and chewed over lips.  The next moment she was gone.  The fishermen shrugged.  She was unclean.  She belonged to no one.  No Jew would touch her, and no Greek either, unless he was insane, unless he heard her babbling out the voices of her seven demons and found it, somehow, exciting.  Who could know.  Since Herod Antipas had built the city of Tiberias, with its pagan gods and Roman baths, many unclean things came down the road.

It was summer.  The hot winds had already come and killed the blue and red anemones.  The plain of Gennesaret had turned gray, dead with too much light.  Mary carried this seer landscape within her, even though the land had rebounded, even though figs and olives hung on green trees.  The memory of the dead ground was like a veil that the demons had settled over her.  A long veil that fell past her face and then blew outward, draping the landscape.  She laughed at it as she walked, held up her hands to shake it, tried to bite it.  People ran away from her, except for a group of children who followed, daring each other to run up to her and try to step on her shadow.  They were called away by their fathers, who told them that she was unclean.  Everything she saw had too much light.  Not gentle light, but imposed light, light that denied the colors that it touched.

She came to Capernaum without noticing it, without noticing the huts on the outskirts, the goats and sheep that spread across the road.  She didn’t even notice the others who were like her.  Bedraggled, slouching shapes.  Women and children.  A man, tied to a litter, was carried past her.  A wan girl fell to the ground and shook against the dirt.  Mary’s demons didn’t leap to see the demons within these others.  Her demons lay still, and that is what she noticed.  And because they were still, she suddenly noticed the town around her, the small basalt houses, the returning smell of fish.  But no pigeons.  The bleating of goats, but something more.  Something the demons had blinded her to.  Small glittering pebbles in the road.  The fleece of a passing sheep, its dirty gray nap, the small resilient curls of its wool.  She saw the exact lines in the weave of the shepherd’s cloak.  She saw a surprising number of faces, too many for a town this size.  Too many people, and yet her demons lay silent.  Cowed.

She remembered why she had left Magdala and walked through the orchards.  She remembered a name.  They said that a man had been lowered to him through the roof of a house.  She turned to study the roofs.  She kept turning, her eyes seeking, unaware of the circumference of her steps.  A body brushed past her, then another.  She was borne along, still turning, her eyes trying to take in every angle of roof, looking for a pile of masonry, a slab of broken stone.

The crowd slowed.  There were others before them, and there was nothing they could do but stop.  The sun beat down on them.  Mary lowered her eyes from the roofs and looked at the coarse grain of a nearby man’s cheek, the varying colors in a nearby girl’s hair.  She wanted her veil back.  She wanted these details to be bleached and neutered by light.  But the demons were not only quiet, they were crawling away.  She hissed at them, trying to get them back.  A woman standing next to her began singing in a high, soft voice.

She didn’t see him that night.  She let the crowd move past her and stood alone in the growing cold of the darkening street.  Someone gave her bread, which surprised her.  It was in her hand and the man was moving away before she could see his face.  She ate it, and then thought how easy it would be to do what she had always done.  She hunched her shoulders, drew her face down and stared out, darkly, from under her brows.  She chewed her lips.  No one noticed.

She saw him the next day.  She shuffled into the house where he was staying, one in a line of many others, but he looked at her and saw her.  “Seven demons,” he said.  She stopped and stared at him.  “They’re gone now,” he said, “but it isn’t enough.”

“Rabbi?”

“Your house has been swept clean, but they’ll only find that more inviting when they come back.”

“Rabbi.”

“You need something else.  Something else has to happen.  A singing breath entered Adam.”

“Rabbi!”

“A singing breath entered Adam.  Let me breathe on you.”

But really, he was already breathing on her.  As he spoke the whole room became breath.

It is not enough to merely lose our demons.  We must experience resurrection, be filled with the Holy Spirit.  Joy.  Joy is at the root of it.  The great carved places inside of Mary were filled with joy.

She followed him up the mountain and sat in the diminishing evening light with the other disciples.  They were silent for a long while, listening to the voices from the lower slopes, the people who had come out the cities to see him.  At last he spoke.  “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.  Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.  Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.”  Every word he spoke terrified her.  He spoke of light and she knew that light, but she also knew that she had been Mary the Skulker, Mary the Unclean, and she feared for the light inside of her.  In the dusk, as his voice continued and the profiles of the seated disciples became blurred with shadow, she feared that there was something in the world that could take her joy from her.

He wasn’t speaking to her alone, but she knew that he meant her to hear him.  His face turned towards her and she lifted her head to look at him in the semi-gloom.  She clutched her knees to her chest.  “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in Heaven.”

“Lord,” she mumbled in her rough voice.  “Lord, I pray for my seven demons.”  And she felt surprising pity for them.  They were wandering over the plain of Gennesaret, looking for a home.  They were shaking the long black veil out to cover the trees, insisting on the insulting light that had no interest in the sheen of green olive skins.  They would be despised beside the fishing boats, and pecked about by holy pigeons.  She began to laugh, but not maliciously.  She began to laugh because she knew, in her pity for them, that she was free of them.  They could never pity themselves.

And when he told her and the other disciples not to worry about their lives, she laughed again.  She had never worried about her life.  The demons had never allowed her fine clothes, or the taste of good food.  And now that they had left her she was a lilly of the field, a bird of the air, trained by desolation not to care for vanities and suddenly given into the keeping of God.

As they walked towards Jerusalem, she noticed patterns on the ground.  The scuffed over prints of many feet, the calligraphy of mule droppings.  There were grasshoppers in the grain fields.  She paid attention to the way the husks of wheat rasped against her fingers when she picked them.  There was a slow design to the way the disciples walked.  Matthew held his slight wrists at his side and swayed them back and forth like the beads of an abacus.  Philip pushed his face slightly forward.  Joanna, dressed in plain clothes that she’d bought to be plain in, was still aware of her neck’s length and softness.  Her hands still gestured to show their beauty.  “We are so small,” Mary thought.  “Every one of us.  We are like heads of grain, or ripe olives, or the rain.  And God knows every hair on our heads.”  She thought of God’s attentiveness.  She thought of her mother, who surely hadn’t remembered every loaf of bread she’d shaped with her hands, and her father, who couldn’t have remembered each net he’d woven.  She looked at the sky, and it was as if it was speaking to her.  She knew the sense of the words, but not their phrasing.  God was in His creation, complete.  Human beings might create, but no one created like God.

Jesus began to say that he would suffer when they got to Jerusalem.  Mary was not afraid.  When Peter argued, and when the Sons of Thunder tried to settle their place in the hierarchy, she walked calmly beside them.  She measured her stride to Jesus’ own.  She would have taken his hand if she could.  Would have stood on her toes so that she could whisper in his ear, “I know what it’s like.  There is a great hollowness, but then there’s breath.”  Wherever they buried him, she’d go there to wait.  No one should be alone in that hollowness.  She’d wait beside his body until he rose.

But when they came to arrest him she ran like the others.  She hadn’t expected the soldiers or the jeering priests.  She hadn’t expected this evil to be accomplished by men.  Maybe she had never known that men could be evil like this.  The veil of her demons had protected her.  It had turned the details of each day to chaff, had allowed the words and touch of men to blow away.  She watched a soldier strike him and she wanted her veil back.  She crept away.  Maybe the other disciples hid together.  She wandered away from the city, alone.

She moved across scarred ground, the seared slopes of the land around Jerusalem, and she tried not to look at anything.  She wanted her eyes to fill with blank light that would deny the russet stone, the green scrub.  She muttered to herself.  “Unclean!  Unclean!”  But these words had no meaning.  She wanted them to chisel her flesh, to create places for the demons to return to.  But they were dull words, and she saw the world despite them, the white hairs of a donkey’s muzzle, the slim arms of the boy who waited, so patiently, for the animal to drink.  The vision that Jesus had given her wouldn’t leave her.  It drew her back to the city.  It is impossible for us to ignore our resurrections.

She learned of his sentencing and was there at his death.  She stood beside Joanna and the other women.  She watched his mother, and was curious to know if the light could subsist even now, if she could see its varying shades settle across Mary’s anguished face.  She turned to watch him as he died on the cross, and felt the smallest touch of his breath reach her.  Was it possible that God was creating even now?  She studied him and saw an iridescent sheen, his sweat laid across the bruises of his skin.  A fish, a shell, a bird of sacrifice.  But it wasn’t her who was sacrificing him.  It was the men standing near the cross, the soldiers and the priests.  How could God, who was aware of each husk of grain, each movement of her breath, demand the death of living things?  She looked at the soldiers and the priests, and she said what he said.  “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

The women wept, but she remained quiet, watching with lifted gaze.  When they took him down there was a commotion, argument over his body, the flashing of coins that moved from hand to hand.  Somebody’s servants were carrying him away.  The women gasped with consternation.  They followed, walking quickly, pushing through the crowds, afraid of losing sight of him.  Mary was swept along with them, her legs moving briskly, her eyes looking everywhere.  She felt anger, and it was the first time that she remembered feeling anger.  Her demons had kept her from being aware of other people, but now she saw that other people were blind, indifferent, lost within the empty light of their many errands.  She wanted to grip them, to hold them to her and breathe on them.  She remembered the young man who had come to Jesus in his clean robes and oiled hair, his slaves standing a little way off, and who had gone away weeping, and she remembered Jesus’ sorrow, and understood that now that he had left them she could finally see with his clear eyes.

They laid him in a tomb and she sat beside it until sundown.  Sabbath, and the other women bade her come away.  She couldn’t tell them how little it mattered, how no one could convince her that she was unclean even if she spent the night resting with the dead.  She went with them out of pity for them.  They needed her peace.  And as they spent the long day in a dusty room, she tried to send her peace out to them, so that it could rest on them.  She prayed for each, staring at every face, at Joanna, and Peter, and James, and Mark, and Mary, Jesus’ mother.  And on the morning after the sabbath, she arose and went to the grave.

Can we be surprised by resurrection when each of us has known it?  When, at some moment in our lives, we each have noticed the depth of light, familiar objects suddenly suffused with intricacies, with shapes and patterns we never knew were there?  Can we be surprised by resurrection when we have felt the breath of grace arrive at unexpected moments, when we’ve done nothing to bring it and don’t deserve it, and yet its there?  When we feel it enter into us and blow past the filaments of chatter, of every day life to show us something waiting beneath the world’s skin?

We have all known little deaths.  The ends of relationships, of eras of our lives, of long-held dreams that we’ve finally put to rest.  Or stranger, more subtle deaths.  Incisions made in our souls to remove some tumor of doubt or anger.  The exorcism of some preference for self-destruction that we’ve clung to because we’ve been afraid of what redemption might demand of us.

And yet we are all here.  Resurrected at some moment or another, brought together to witness and celebrate the one resurrection with Mary and the other disciples.  We are here because we know that, despite death and doubt, despite our desires to hide with our familiar demons, God’s favor is life, and joy cometh in the morning.

She met him in the garden.  She was weeping because the resurrection had already happened when she arrived, because the tomb was empty and there were two men there.  Or maybe his body had simply been moved, and she didn’t know where to go to witness the resurrection, to feel the breath of God, as she had felt it when he healed her and cast out her seven demons.  When she saw him, she thought that he was a gardener.  But she should have known, from the way that the morning light cast a shadow on the tomb’s wall behind him, a round shadow that circled his head, a halo, that this was her risen Lord.  From then on she saw that halo everywhere, appearing on the walls behind the apostles as they ate and spoke and healed.  Surrounding the heads of the people as they gathered together and prayed.  She saw it on new converts as the apostles went out from Jerusalem, and the light spread, and the world’s cold, pitiable demons fled to wander in the barren places.  The world was haloed with new light.  Our world is haloed with new light.  May it help us see and understand and love.