HERE AND NOW

Have you ever slept so deeply that it was hard to remember where you were when you woke up?  I suspect that most have had the experience.  Recently, while traveling, I woke up in a hotel room and had a panicky minute and a half trying to remember where in the world I was.  That’s happened before.  But this time I had the feeling that I couldn’t even quite remember who I was.  It was a surreal moment when I had to try and reconstruct myself, waiting for the pieces of my life to fall back into place.  Who we are, of course, changes every day and depends upon the context in which we find ourselves and what our recent experiences have been.  Without remembering that context, our very sense of self is incomplete.

Descartes once wrote that sleep is a rehearsal for death and every morning is a resurrection.  That’s a great reminder to us that the resurrection miracle that we celebrate next week is not about some magical event that did or did not happen two thousand years ago.  It is instead about the way in which resurrection is a power of God in our lives in the here and now.  Usually we think about death and resurrection as a metaphor for the big and catastrophic events of our lives.  When a loved one dies a part of us dies with them and, over time, God resurrects our spirits.  When we face some life-changing illness a part of who we are dies and, over time, we pray that our wholeness will be resurrected.  A divorce is like a death to us and we hope for the power of God to resurrect our lives again.

But sleep is a wonderful way to understand that this power is more present in each of our everyday moment than we usually think.  Every night when we grow tired, we literally “go away” for a time.  We are no longer conscious, or functioning, or “present” in any of the ways that matter.  And what goes on in our sleep is a bit of a mystery as most of our dream-life is only half remembered.  We are for all intents and purposes “gone.”  And every morning we awaken to a slightly different world.  No, it doesn’t take a miracle of God to wake us up again (even though sometimes it feels like it might), but the point is that each morning is a new thing.  Sleep has been a break in the continuity.  The old day, even the old life, has passed away and something new is therefore possible.

That “newness,” bursting with possibilities and fecund with fresh potential, is what the power of resurrection is.  And it is available to us every moment.  We are not bound to the past—past patterns that feel dreadfully permanent, old hurts and grudges, bad and tired old habits, or the determinisms of our nature that we can’t seem to escape.  All of those things can die with each day and the new self that awakens every morning does not need to take them up again.  The good news of our faith is that when we let the past die, when we lay down the dead places in us, God raises us up, new and reborn every morning. 

So this Easter, don’t just think about celebrating a miracle long ago and imperfectly remembered, think about participating in the miracle that can happen every morning.  God makes all things new.  Yesterday is gone and the person that lived it is gone with it.  You are right here and right now, a new creation.

In Resurrection Faith,

David