Friends

We are headed around the final turn and going for the finish line. Soon the somber darkness of Lent will be replaced by the joyous light of Easter. That process of movement from darkness to light, from somberness to joy is a metaphor for our lives and it is dramatically played out in the story we live on Palm Sunday, Holy Week, and The Great Vigil of Easter. It is the story of moving from death to life—the story of Resurrection.

How does the story of Resurrection hold up in this age of quantum physics, string theory, the completion of the human genome, and discovery of planets around other stars? Is it no more than mere fable? Or does it’s mythology still have deep truths to yield to our incessant longing?

As Christians we can live with a static idea of Resurrection as simply a historical event, albeit a very powerful one. We can wonder at that event and try to feel its resonance over the centuries. Try as we might this approach to Resurrection leaves us in stasis. The drama we experience in our Passion/Holy Week/Easter Vigil cycle calls us to be in a story that unfolds even now, it calls us beyond inertia. So how can we move towards Resurrection?

In Jung and Religious Belief, Psychology and Western Religion, the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung said, “The self or Christ is present in everybody a priori, but as a rule in an unconscious condition to begin with. But it is a definite experience of later life, when this fact becomes conscious. It is not really understood by teaching or suggestion. It is only real when it happens, and it can happen only when you withdraw your projections from an outward historical or metaphysical Christ and thus wake up Christ within.”

I believe that this is a statement of Resurrection as a spiritual dynamic. The historic remembrance of Resurrection points to the potential reality of the emergence of Christ in you and in me: emergence from our tombs of lust, our tombs of self-pity, our tombs of egotism. Hence we begin Lent confronting our mortality, we journey through Lent uncovering our personal tombs, and we move from the somberness of those dead waste lands to the fertile joy of Christ rising in your heart and mine pulling us out of whatever tombs we uncover in our life.

The desire of Christ is Resurrection—your’s and mine. We can either lean up against the stone of our tomb and chat about an event in a faraway past or we can drop the projections and awake Christ within us and in awesome grace roll away the stones of despair and death and step bravely out into the new world of Resurrection.

Joel t