EASTER REFLECTIONS

Fr Jim Cogley

A simple truth from nature points to a profound reality. Two birds can only fly together if they are free of each other. Tie those birds together and although they have four wings, they will be unable to fly. The message of Christ to Mary Magdelene, when overjoyed at seeing him alive, she wanted to reach out to hug and embrace, was, do not cling to me for I have not yet ascended. In life if we are possessive and cling to someone too much we call it control. This is a factor, more than anything else, that can undermine any relationship. When someone passes over to the other side, for some reason, we feel justified in trying to hold onto them. In the early days of a grief process, that may be understandable; long term while it may hold the soul back from its journey, it will certainly hold us back from ours. To remain in a clinging mode is to condemn ourselves to isolation and loneliness. The way to enter into communion with the one who is departed is to avoid clinging and release them to the light. Death breaks an earthly tie but love survives when grief has passed because love can never die. The grief process is not about saying farewell but it is about releasing and giving freedom.

In the well-known story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus after Jesus death, the importance of there being two of them cannot be overstated. Jerusalem represented all their hopes dreams and expectations but just now hope was hopeless; their dreams had become nightmares, and their faces were twisted with grief. They were now going in the opposite direction away from Jerusalem. As they walked along together, they were telling the story of what had happened to Jesus and trying desperately to make sense of it all. Jesus joins them as the third party and places everything in the context of a bigger story where he shows them that it was necessary that the Christ would suffer in order to enter into his Glory. Remaining too isolated and thinking we can figure something out on our own rarely ever works. We can never be objective to our own subjective reality. It is only in opening up to a significant another that the Spirit of Jesus becomes present as that third party offering us the awareness or wisdom that we need at that time.

A significant detail of the Resurrection accounts is that when the Risen Jesus appears to his disciples he still has the wounds that killed him. One might think that they should have disappeared during his process of transformation. Yet they remained to the point of being part of his new identity as the Crucified Christ. It was these very wounds that when touched by his fearful disciples that dispelled doubt from their hearts and reawakened their faith. From being sources of death, they had become sources of life. In life we all carry wounds, but we carry them in different ways. The ones we don’t or won’t deal with we continue to inflict on others. It’s hurting people that hurt others. Then there are those who have transformed their wounds and found healing. Having come out the other side they are now are able to use the wounds of their experience to bring healing to others. In the presence of someone who has suffered there is no judgment.

Our memories are so much part of who we are. Some are pleasant while others are far from being so. These are the ones we try to repress and deny yet the more we do so the more they come back to haunt us. The Resurrection accounts show this happening quite clearly. After a night of fishing the disciples catch nothing. The Risen Jesus stands on the shore and tells them to try again and when they do, the nets fill up. This awakens the positive memories of when they were first called to be disciples, also by the Sea of Galilee. The next memory is not so pleasant, for Peter at least. The sight of a charcoal fire was definitely going to bring him back to the night of Jesus arrest. Earlier in the day he had protested undying loyalty, but Jesus had told him that before the cock would crow he would have denied him three times. Standing beside a charcoal fire, and afraid of being found guilty by association, he swore three times on oath that he didn’t know Christ. Suddenly he was now being confronted by the memory of his betrayal, but this time it was for healing.

Healing is not pretending that the hurt never happened, but it is about coming to the place where it no longer affects us.

A common feature of the Resurrection accounts is the failure of the disciples to recognize the Risen Lord when he appears to them. Even Mary Magdalene who was his closest companion and who had always accompanied him on his travels failed to recognize him at the tomb on the Easter morning and thought he was the gardener. This seems strange since many of them had already heard reports that he had risen. Surely it was, not that their sight was bad, or that Jesus had changed beyond recognition. For to understand what is happening here we need to draw on our own experience. There is physical seeing with the eyes but there is also an emotional seeing with the heart. When our hearts are wounded it has the effect of distorting the way we see with our eyes. Like those wounded disciples we can be so focused on death that we are unable to see life; we can be so trapped in our inner darkness that the light cannot penetrate. In all the resurrection accounts Christ led his disciples through a process of healing before their eyes were opened and they could see the reality of his resurrected self.