Easter comes.  

Into all of creation groaning for God’s salvation, Easter comes.

Into a weary world whose natural resources are squandered or hoarded or sold for profit, Easter comes.

Into communities and neighborhoods marred by poverty and violence, scarred by hopelessness and fear, Easter comes.

As an emphatic answer to our human and holy quest, Easter comes.

Into the deep yearning of our lives, lives that like exquisite garments bear the moth-eaten pock marks from betrayal, duplicity, pettiness, callousness, and moments when like Jesus we felt completely abandoned by God, Easter comes.

Out of nowhere, out of death, out of the heart of darkness which was caged and cradled in the heart of God, Easter comes.

As the too-good-to-be-true good news, as the inconceivable new possibility, as the answer of amazing grace, Easter comes.

But does Easter not also come as an ongoing question, as even more than the great gift from the great mercy of God? Once graciously and jubilantly received, does Easter not also ask something of us, dare I say it, require something of us? And is that not too an amazing surprise, an equally unexpected and unearned gift? Was it not already an embarrassment of riches to be created as images of God, to be deemed children of God, to be called people of God without also being showered with this final bequest, to be invited to be partners of God? But how do we do this? How do we give away even a piece of the garment of new life with which God has so lavishly clothed us? Perhaps the words of the poet Wendell Berry are enough food for thought and action during this season of the Rising Son: “Practice resurrection.”

By Dan Miller, PhD

 

Dan Miller is a Catholic Christian with an ecumenical spirit who is a spiritual director, supervisor, teacher, retreat leader, and writer. Trained at the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation where he completed the spiritual guidance program in 1988, Dan founded a monthly spiritual formation community called the Human and the Holy in 2003, which he continues to lead to this day at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Pomona, California.  CenterQuest was privileged to have Dan as the first School of Spiritual Direction residency speaker back in January 2015. You will see more of Dan’s writings in future CenterQuest posts.