Whenever people ask me my denominational affiliation, I answer, “I’m denominationally confused.” I was baptized Episcopalian, confirmed Presbyterian, married Congregational, and now worship in a non-denominational church. Oh, and I worked for a parachurch ministry for five years. I hope this confusion has enhanced my appreciation for the Church worldwide and the particular strengths of different Christian traditions, from high-church liturgy and hymns (smells and bells, as it’s sometimes called) that emphasizes the grandeur and otherness of God, to low-church simplicity and praise songs that draw my attention to friendship with Jesus.
But at Eastertime, I return to an appreciation for the liturgy. I need the structure of the words, to create some boundaries and reminders that Jesus died on a cross for our sins, that he rose from the grave and offers new life. Because there are years, like this one, where I don’t feel the passion of the cross, and the liturgy and Scripture draw me back to the reality, whether I feel it or not. There also have been years where I don’t feel the joy of the resurrection, where I feel as though Jesus, and the rest of the world with him, is stuck on the cross. I’m going to share an excerpt from my book, Penelope Ayers, from one of those years when I needed the liturgy, the hymns, the Scripture, to do the feeling for me. The scene occurs after Penny, my mother-in-law, was given a diagnosis of terminal cancer:
“We sang together, as the priests processed toward the altar, Christ the Lord is risen today… Our words of celebration wafted toward the gilded ceiling. The penitence of Lent was over. As far as the church was concerned, the grief of Good Friday had passed. We sang Alleluia, “Praise the Lord.”
The service contained all the familiar words—the Apostle’s Creed, the Lord’s Prayer—but this time I hesitated to speak them aloud. Do I really believe? Questions that had simmered in my subconscious for months began to boil over. Is this God of grace and healing real? Is this resurrection from the dead true? As doubt and faith began a wrestling match within me, the priest invited us to receive communion. We rose from the pew, knelt at the railing, ate the wafer, sipped the wine. We took Christ’s body into our bodies. We drank from the cup of salvation. Back in our seats, we sang the words Jesus spoke to his disciples, I am the resurrection, I am the life. He who believes in me, even if he die, he shall live forever.
As I mouthed the words, I wondered, What does it mean to have hope for Penny? What does it mean to have hope in eternal life? I knew it had to do with the resurrection—that if Jesus truly had been raised from the dead, then I could believe others would be raised with him. So hope meant believing in a promise, in a future that didn’t contain the wrenching reality of pain, and death, and separation. And yet hope involved more than the future, was more complicated than a denial of the hurt and confusion of the present moment, more complicated than trite condolences about death bringing us to a better place. Somehow, I thought, hope had to connect the present and the future, bind them together.
Earlier in the week, during our long drive south to New Orleans, I had read an article that said the Hebrew world for hope is similar to the word for spider’s silk. And I remembered reading elsewhere that spider’s silk is stronger than steel. So that Easter morning, as I thought about hope, I began to envision it as a bridge of silky steel, strong as armor and fragile as a thread. To hope meant to stand in the place between—feeling the pain of the present while, somehow, still trusting in God’s goodness, in the reunion yet to come.
The darkness of the cross and the light of the empty tomb collided within me that Easter Day. I grasped the pew, the smooth wood cool against my palms. Peter passed a handkerchief to me, then to his mother, and then used it for his own face. Thomas and Sarah brushed their cheeks with their fingertips. We managed the refrain, And I will raise them up, and I will raise them up, and I will raise them up on the last day.”
May the structure of this Holy time hold us together, in our sorrow and our joy, in our wandering and our coming home, in our grief and in our praise.
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