Like most people, Easter was weird for me. There was sadness over not being with my family and not worshiping in person with others. And yet, there were moments of laughter. Mostly, I don’t think I was strong enough to go through the full emotions of Holy Week. There is just too much surrounding me right now to really participate with my whole self. I’m just too tired. So, I did what I could and “celebrated” Easter with as much as I could muster.
This week a whole new form of grief began. Tom Baker and I went about the daunting task of informing our beloved students and their families that our summer ministries, including Summer Stretch and our junior and senior high travel plans, are canceled. Tom and I knew these announcements were coming and I was expecting to make some difficult decisions regarding our summer plans soon. And still, the grief is thick.
I don’t know where the Easter is in this moment. I believe with my heart that God works in and through all things. I believe that we can and will have a summer that will be meaningful and even joyous. But right now, I struggle to see the details, and therefore struggle to hold onto that hope.
I can’t imagine the Easter. But I can still believe in it.
I recently heard someone say that our hearts, the hearts that were made and blessed by God, are so big that we have enough room to hold on to both grief AND hope. We can grieve the death of Christ. We can grieve our lost opportunities, jobs and events. We can grieve the loss of loved ones. And we can grieve our own loneliness and our need for connection. But our hearts are big enough to hang onto the promise and hope of the resurrection.
I think this is the tension we feel with grief. Our hearts are full because we love even when we are at a distance. Our hearts burst with both love for something or someone and ache with emptiness. This Easter Sunday, my heart was full of my love of our congregation, our youth, our staff and our traditions. And yet, it ached with emptiness. Through that tension my heart still has room to hold onto the hope of the resurrection.
A friend of mine, Annie Langseth is a pastor and poet. Years ago, she wrote this poem about the wounds and scars that our bodies hold while we also hold onto the promise of the resurrection. I wonder what wounds COVID 19 will leave on our bodies. It’s good that we, still, believe in the resurrection of the body.
My Body Is
By Annie Langseth, used with permission from the poet
My body is crime scene.
Wounds like chalk outlines,
scars like yellow tape.
But I believe in the resurrection of the body.
My body is flooded home.
Wounds like buckled floorboards,
scars like high water marks.
But I believe in the resurrection of the body.
My body is cemetery.
Wounds like gaping grave holes,
scars like headstones.
Pierced by sin,
saturated in suffering,
death has been dug into my flesh.
But I believe in the resurrection of the body.
So I come,
wounds, scars, and all
because He bared His so that I might believe.
So I go,
wounds, scars, and all
because there are those who have not seen.
And so I come,
hands open like fields to receive.
To eat of this bread and drink of this wine.
And so I go,
hands outstretched like shoots of wheat to share
because I know there are bodies
like shot up schools, like hospital rooms, like prisons.
Bodies like battlefields, like refugee camps, like morgues.
And they, like me, are hungry
for resurrection.
