Easter Vision

Let me keep my distance, always,

 from those who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say

“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,

 and bow their heads.

     — Mary Oliver, in Thirst

Easter:  it’s a moveable feast, like the Passover Seder in which it is rooted.  To get to Easter you must first look for the vernal equinox, a sky-defined event, and you must look for the full moon, a night vision.  Easter comes after these things.  And so you must look into the night to find this day.  The resurrection also takes place in the night.  Dawn may be when weeping women and shaken men could not find the dead Jesus, but what had happened emerged in the hours of  darkness.  So, Easter, like Passover, rises in the night.

Jesus has always been about rejoining darkness and light.   The shunned, the seedy, the sick, the shameful, all those who had been driven away from the community of the day, were brought by him into a life he called heaven, where light and shadows mingle.  The restored brought their darkness with them, for it had been their home and was now part of their light.

And now, at Easter, Jesus brings his light out of the deep darkness of his death.

Twelve tales, in four gospels, struggle to show us Easter.  No two are alike.  Some are about the absence of death.  Some tell us they saw him alive.  In these ‘seeing’ tales, they had trouble recognizing him.  He did not look as he had.  On the Emmaus road, they walked with him all day – all day! – and did not know him till the day’s end.

The tales raise questions:  Were these visions?  Was he really there?

And there is another question:  are visions delusions ?  Or are they part of reality?

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose book One Hundred Years of Solitude introduced the west to the magical/realism thinking of Latin America,  in which physical reality and spiritual experience intermingle in ordinary days, said in an interview in The Paris Review,  It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.

And so does Easter.  Who but Jesus had such imagination for life?  Earning big praise for thousands of years (every Easter is a standing ovation, how he boggles our minds!),  Jesus walks between the clarity of belief and the shadow world of imagination, showing us that life is not defined by Caesar’s reign, Pilate’s grasp, conventional pieties, corporate rules, public approval, or what your mother said.  Jesus colors outside all those lines, showing life that cannot be seen within them.

Easter giggles with  joy.  It can only be told in unimaginables:   chocolate-bearing bunnies, fasting turning to feasting,  intricate painted  eggs from Russia and the Ukraine, children dip-dying eggs in small towns in America, people who never go to church showing up for life that boggles the mind.  Easter is death becoming a cradle, rocking the world to new life.

In the final Harry Potter book, in a desperate hour, Harry’s teacher and friend, Prof. Dumbledore, who died a few years before, appears by surprise and talks with him for a long time.  They are in a train station, though how they got there Harry doesn’t know.  At the end of their conversation Harry asks, Is this real?  Or is it just happening in my mind?  And Dumbledore answers:  Why would what is happening in your mind not be real? And he disappears.  Harry gets on the train.

Imagination is not delusion.  Ask Bill Gates, Walt Disney, the Beatles.  Ask Philomena, who never stopped imagining her little lost boy, until at last she discovered his life and his death.  And then she lived.

Easter is not just Jesus, looking different but back again.  The thing is, he said little, and he did not stay long.    He has not come back to talk about what happened, nor to be haunted by memories.  Neither does he lop off the past.  His scars are part of him now.  He lives with them, in joy.

Joy is an indescribable thing.  As are love; peace; hope.  As are fear and death.  As is heaven.

Jesus wraps them all up, in the expanding universe of his heart, in which even the soldiers who beat him, even Judas who defied him, even those who threw dice for his clothes, are enfolded.  Now, the signs of the presence of God are no longer limited to the beautiful and the good.  Now even death can be a sign.

And we are invited to expand our own hearts.  To grow in imagination.  To see Easter, and to love between all the lines.

Even beyond what I see, I imagine more . . . .

Well, we will all find out, each of us.

And what would we be, beyond the yardstick,

beyond supper and dollars,

if we were not filled with such wondering?

~Mary Oliver, in Evidence

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Illustrations:

1.  Easter Christ.  by He Qi, 2001, Nanjing, China.  Vanderbilt Divinity School Library, Art in the Christian Tradition.

2.  Christ Pulls Adam and Eve from their Tombs, Kariye Museum, Fresco, 1310, Istanbul, Turkey.  Vanderbilt Divinity School Library, Art in the Christian Tradition.

3.  Noli Me Tangere, by Fra Angelico.    Vanderbilt Divinity School Library, Art in the Christian Tradition.

4.  Children with Easter Eggs. Google Images.

5.  Supper at Emmaus. by He Qi.  2001. Nanjing, China.  Vanderbilt Divinity School Library, Art in the Christian Tradition.