I'd been very unsocial for months, like a turtle withdrawn into its shell, or an animal licking its wounds. But, looking at Claire, I made an inner choice. I got up, walked to Claire, embraced her, and told her she would be fine. As I sat back down in my pew, I gave her a big smile. Tim, fingers traveling lightly over the keys, watched me with pain in his eyes - he'd played at Peter's funeral - and then surprise as my smile turned into a glow that suffused my face. I was losing myself in the sheer delight of experiencing the inner and outer beauty of my grand-daughter!
I'd made a conscious choice that was a turning point in grief for me. I'd consciously decided to rejoin the land of the living and be present for and enjoy the people who were still here with me. My grieving was not ended, and it never will be. But that day I'd resolved that, although a part of me had died wth my son, I also could and must continue to love and keep loving in a new way. The miracle of transformation was that I discovered at that moment that though I was dead, I was also alive, resurrected in a new way: I still had love to give. God, invoked in prayer, would keep the grace of love continuously flowing through me. I also had much love in my life to receive! Today after four years of adjusting to the reality of my new identity, I have finally received a new spirit from the Holy Spirit: the spirit of a mother who has lost a son, but still has much to be grateful for. I can embrace life with a totally distinct gift for compassion and joy. I have embraced the SPIRIT OF WHO I AM NOW - TODAY.
This was also an experience of death, new life, struggle, and then new spirit for Claire. She had to undergo the painful death of the dependent child, comfortable in allowing her father to lead and guide her. She had to undergo the moment of rebirth and new life: her first experience as a solo artist. She had to choose to battle through fear, nervousness, and self-doubt for months during a painful in-between struggle of change, grieving the old, embracing the new, to finally find her way to new spirit as an independent, seasoned professional music minister herself. Which today she is! But - she is Claire, not Paul - a new, totally unique embodiment of the Holy Spirit's gift of music.
Christian spirituality is, at its heart, an embracing of all of our life as being part of Christ's Paschal Mystery: Death, Resurrection, Pentecost. "The paschal mystery...is a process of transformation within which we are given both new life and new spirit. It begins with suffering and death, moves on to the reception of new life, spends some time grieving the old and adjusting to the new, and, finally, after the old life has been truly let go of, is new spirit given for the life we are already living."(Fr. Ronald Rolheiser, in his book "The Holy Longing.") Rolheiser describes the five distinct experiences in the Paschal Mystery which were true for Jesus and his followers, and are also true as a challenge for us:
1) NAME YOUR DEATHS: GOOD FRIDAY
Jesus didn't pretend to die. He underwent fear, trembling, the agonies of betrayals and abandonment, torture, and physical death. We all undergo many deaths in our lives.... the death of youth, the death of dreams, the deaths and illnesses of loved ones, the death of our wholeness, the death of our honeymoons, even the death of a certain idea of God and the Church. It can be easier to run away from death than to face it. Yet when life, which is not fair, wounds us, our task is to mourn. Mourning shakes the foundations of our lives and shakes loose the bitterness so we become open and ready for the joys and delights that life also offers us. Fr. Henri Nouwen famously said
" Mourn, my people, mourn. Let your pain rise up in your heart and burst forth in you with sobs and cries. Mourn for the silence that exists between you and your spouse. Mourn the way you were robbed of your innocence. Mourn for the absence of soft embrace, an intimate friendship, a life-giving sexuality. Mourn for the abuse of your body, your mind, your heart. Mourn for the bitterness of your children, the indifference of your friends, and your colleagues' hardness of heart.... Cry for freedom, for salvation, for redemption. Cry loudly and deeply, and trust that your tears will make your eyes see that the kingdom is close at hand, yes, at your fingertips!"
2) CLAIM YOUR BIRTHS: EASTER SUNDAY
Easter is about the reception of new life. Jesus, at his resurrection, did not get his old life back. He received a new, richer life, which he would never lose - he would never die again. It was a life in which his wounds remained, yet they shone, glorious, because the wounds had formed whom Jesus WAS. When he appeared to his apostles and breathed on them, they too received a new life through him, a life capable of living through their daily experiences of suffering and rejection and wounding with hope and patience and courage and even joy because now nothing could ever separate them from the love of Christ. Through Christ, they were capable of suffering but also capable of loving and being loved.
Being resurrected daily is finding new life within the new reality of life - and God - that day. Every day we experience the limited, painful quality of life yet we can receive new patience, enthusiasm and joy through God's tender mercies. If we recognize God!
Many people, for example, grieve for the God and the Church of their youth. Yet God's Church is ever changing through time, circumstance, and culture, as the Catholic Church has changed since Vatican II, and is changing again under Pope Francis. People can grieve yet find a new life, a new place for themselves, a new enthusiasm, in the Church of Today - where God still is active and at work.
3) GRIEVE WHAT YOU HAVE LOST AND ADJUST TO THE NEW REALITY: THE FORTY DAYS AFTER EASTER
Think of how disoriented the apostles were after Jesus died. They had to grieve the death of the Jesus they had known and adjust to the new reality of the resurrected Jesus.
We see a poignant example in Scripture when the resurrected Jesus meets and walks with the disciples on the road to Emmaus. "What is curious in this incident is that the disciples, the friends of Jesus, do not recognize him, even though he has been dead and absent for only a day and a half. Why can they not recognize him? Because they are too focused on his former reality. They are so focused on their former image of him, their former understanding of him, and the way he was formerly present to them that now they are not open to seeing him as he walks among them." (Rolheiser) Then - when they finally recognize him in the breaking of the bread, what joy for them! What new life! Yet this process of bouncing back and forth between grieving and trying to understand their new life with Jesus goes on for forty confusing days.
How often do we, after grief, find a new life and yet keep sliding back to the old ways of thinking, feeling, and doing things! The old ways of understanding reality? WE WANT CHANGE AND NEW LIFE - BUT NOT YET. NOT IN THIS WAY.
4) DO NOT CLING TO THE OLD, LET IT ASCEND AND GIVE YOU ITS BLESSINGS: THE ASCENSION OF JESUS INTO HEAVEN
The disciples were startled and unbelieving when Jesus ascended into heaven, even though he had breathed on them, given them new life, and now was blessing them before he left. Yet it was time for them to stop clinging to him, and to say goodbye. He had to leave in order to send the Holy Spirit to them! It was time for them to prepare to receive the new spirit which would aid each of them in a totally unique way in living his/her new life of going forth and bringing the Good News to all nations. This is why Jesus in John's Gospel tells Mary of Magdala not to cling to him, not to cling to her old understanding of him, because he was ready to ascend to the Father. Jesus' disciples had to let go of him so they could prepare for Pentecost.
Fr. Rolheiser speaks of how often we long to cling to the Church of our childhood and yet must let go:
" I can try to cling to the church of my youth. This clinging can take different forms. If I am of a conservative bent and lament the passing of the church of my youth, I can try to restore that church - 'Give me that old-time religion!' - by challenging the changes that Vatican II has asked for, by denying the changes that have in fact already taken place, and by living in an unhealthy nostalgia, yearning always for the good old days. If I am liberal by temperament and am happy that the old ecclesiology has died, I can still cling to that church and not receive the spirit of the present one, through my hatred of my past, through continually lamenting how bad things were, how much change was and is needed, and how my conservative brothers and sisters are narrow and backward. In both cases, I am still Mary Magdala trying to cling to an old body even as she is looking at a new reality.
"On the other hand, I can accept the paschal mystery as it applies to the God and the church of my youth. I can look at the church that gave me the faith, recognize that it (like my own youth) has died, grieve its passing, let it bless me, let it go, and then receive the spirit for the church within which I am actually living....The church is not dead. It is very much alive, bursting with life in many ways. However, it is alive with the life of today, the life that we are living at the turn of the millennium.... " (Rolheiser)
5) ACCEPT THE SPIRIT OF THE LIFE THAT YOU ARE IN FACT LIVING; PENTECOST/THE COMING OF THE HOLY SPIRIT
Pentecost is all about not clinging to our pasts, our yesterdays, but instead forgiving them, recognizing what they've done for us, letting our roots and our pasts bless us by making peace with them, letting go of what we've lost, and then, having let go, willingly embracing the Holy and Wholly Individual spirit which God longs to give us. "...The Holy Spirit is not a generic spirit, but a spirit that is given to each of us in a most particular way for the particular circumstances that each of us finds himself or herself in." (Rolheiser)
"Some years ago, in spiritual direction, a woman shared with me: 'My husband and I never understood fully what ascension and pentecost meant until I had to have a double mastectomy. There was, at first, a lot of anger, a lot of grieving, over what we'd lost. Eventually though we had to let go of a wholeness we once had. Now our relationship is great again, in every aspect, ....but my husband had to learn to see me differently and I had to learn to see me differently too! We know now what it meant to have to let a body float up to heaven so as to receive a new spirit." (Rolheiser)
Here's another example: imagine today is your seventieth birthday. "This is your status: Good Friday has already happened, your youth has died. Resurrection too has happened; you have already received the life of a seventy year old, a new life, different from and richer than the life of a twenty year old. And now you have a choice: You can refuse to grieve and let go of your lost youth, and, like Mary Magdala on Easter morning, trying to cling to a Jesus she once knew, try to hold on to your youth. If you do that, you will be blocking ascension and you will be an unhappy, fearful, and frustrated seventy year old....Pentecost can never happen for you.... However, should you let your youth ascend, should you be able to say: 'It was good to be twenty, good to be thirty, good to be forty and fifty and sixty; but it's even better to be seventy!" - then pentecost will happen. You will receive the spirit for the life that you are already in fact living, the life of a seventy year old, which is a different spirit than for somebody who is twenty." (Rolheiser)
You see, living the Paschal Mystery yourself is all about fully inhabiting who you are and where you are in your life, not trying to be someone else or go to some place else. And that's a difficult balancing act for us all!
How do we fully accept those daily deaths?
Or accept that there is new life waiting for us beyond suffering and death?
How do we patiently endure through those periods of struggling to let go of the old, or our much loved dead, or our much loved wholeness, forgiving the past, allowing it to bless us for the ways in which it changed us?
How do we live through clinging to our old ways of thinking, feeling, and acting because we're emotionally frozen and/or stuck?
How do we find the courage to finally accept and embrace the new person we have become, to drink in the spirit of who we really are - NOW - in this place?
Through the grace of God. Through His tender mercies. Through the blessed death and resurrection of Jesus and the gift of His Holy Spirit, the gift of His eternal life, bubbling over with vitality, available to us daily, minute by minute. Wait quietly before Him, for all our hope is in Him. Amen. Let it be so.