Reflections for Easter Sunday

From  Girl Meets God:

The Last Battle, the final volume of Lewis’s Narnia chronicles, pictures the end of time. Aslan—the lion who represents Jesus—has returned, folding all of culture and humanity into his kingdom. In the novel’s lasts pages, he tells Lucy, a child from London, that everyone she knew back in Blighty is dead and raised to new life. And as Aslan spoke, writes Lewis, “the things that began to happen…were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beninning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were begining Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better that the one before.”

On Easter, we glimpse the beginning of Chapter One.

-Lauren F. Winner, Girl Meets God (193-194)

Descending Theology: The Resurrection

by Mary Karr

From the far star points of his pinned extremities,
cold inched in–black ice and blood ink–
till the hung flesh was empty. Lonely in that void
even for pain, he missed his splintered feet,
the human stare buried in his face.
He ached for two hands made of meat
he could reach to the end of.
In the corpse’s core, the stone fist of his heart

began to bang on the stiff chest’s door,
and breath spilled back into that battered shape. Now
it’s your limbs he longs to flow into–
from the sunflower center in your chest
outward–as warm water
shatters at birth, rivering every way.

“Descending Theology: The Resurrection” by Mary Karr, Sinners Welcome, HarperCollins, 2006.

Joy is radically different from happiness, for it does not depend up on the “ups” and “downs” of our existence. It is the constant moving away from the static places of death toward the house of God, where the abundant life can be recognized and celebrated.

Lifesigns, Henri Nouwen (102)