Today’s readings: Click on today’s date at http://www.usccb.org/bible/
Lazarus come forth
Sunday, April 6, 2014
Fifth Sunday of Lent
John 7:40-47
Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came, tied hand and foot with burial bands, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said, “Untie him and let him go.”
The readings today make this the first of three Resurrection Sundays. Life is stronger than death. Love is stronger than death. God is stronger than death.
Actually death is only the absence of life, love and God. It has no substance, no matter the fear we feel or the power we attribute to it. In our absence of Mind, we build it up into a terrifying tower that reflects our own instability. Fear of death completes the takeover of our false self. The fearfully wonderful Me that God made seems like such a shadow, far away, unreal, dream.
Which is a lie.
Let yourself lay in the tomb if you can, alongside Lazarus on the other side of the first death. It’s dark. The burial cloths are soft. They cover my face, I am content, because I don’t breathe just now. My heart’s not beating, there is nothing my body needs.
Weeping outside, and gnashing of teeth, but here I feel (feel?) peace. I am peace. Peace is me. This is an experience of presence, not absence. I knew peace as merely a lack of anxiety, in the mirror darkly. Now I know it face to face.
Peace, love, and joy, and hope … my body touched these only in the shallows, and now I’ve been drawn into the depths. What is there, where I thought was death?
Under these waves, my body “matters” in a whole new way, joining my spirit to the energy of God. Listen to the song by Carman, be in those communions. Let death back away into its corner, knowing its defeat.
The words that bring me wholly from the tomb are only faint at first, before they ring. But I feel a small breeze of freedom. There is love in it and hope. I know it has something to do with home. *
The nine tailors are silent. Death has died and Jesus stands with joy to greet my bandaged body. Broken while I re-member, and then all one. Body, spirit, fearfully and wonderfully, all alive, all one.
Lord you open my grave. You put your Spirit in me, and I live. Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again.
http://www.christiancounselingservice.com/archived_devotions.php?article_id=1267
* from Addiction and Grace, Gerald May, p. 150
