Easter Sunday Reflection
Waiting for Resurrection
Easter Sunday morning began with Jesus' companions still in a time of waiting in despair and bewilderment. Read the following poem prayerfully, and spend some time responding in prayer in your own words.
IN THE BREATH, ANOTHER BREATHING
Let it be
that on this day
we will expect
no more of ourselves
than to keep
breathing
with the bewildered
cadence
of lungs that will not
give up the ghost.
Let it be
we will expect
little but
the beating of
our heart,
stubborn in
its repeating rhythm
that will not
cease to sound.
Let it be
we will
still ourselves
enough to hear
what may yet
come to echo:
as if in the breath,
another breathing;
as if in the heartbeat,
another heart.
Let it be
we will not
try to fathom
what comes
to meet us
in the stillness
but simply open
to the approach
of a mystery
we hardly dared
to dream.
—Jan Richardson
End your time of prayer by listening to the following song:
Lyrics:
Darkness cover me
like a blanket of night
Oh, cover me lightly
Shadows gather around me
Deepening darkness,
Whispering softly
Holy Maker of Moonlight
Singing through starlight
Keeper of all life
Hidden Seed deep in the dark soil of the earth
Fertile Ground, Womb of the Night, bring us new birth
Reading:
I invite you to spend sime time reading the following verse from John's gospel.
John 20:19
On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the religious leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!”
Spend some time in quiet prayer and then listen or sing along with the following chant:
Quotes from the talk:
Below are some of the quotes from the talk for you to follow along with and reflect on further.
John 12:24-25 "Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over."
Sue Monk Kidd: "By repeatedly entering the spiral of separation, transformation and emergence, we're brought closer each time to wholeness and the True Self.”
Valerie Kaur: “What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb but the darkness of the womb? What if our [country] is not dead but a country that is waiting to be born?”
Thomas Merton: "They will run away from the darkness, and do the best they can to dope themselves with the first light that comes along."
Sue Monk Kidd: "I'd like to be rid of this darkness. To unwrap the cocoon. Get busy. Do something to take my mind off my "suffering", latch onto some easy, neon answer that will camouflage the shadows. But I have the sense lurking inside that there's a mystery unfolding in the darkness that can't come any other way." … "Bright wings don't just happen. They require the courage to let go and spin the chrysalis. In soul making we can't bypass the cocoon. Wherever there are bright new wings, there's always the husk of waiting somewhere in the corner." …
"The darkness is part of the trip. Too many of us panic in the dark. We don't understand that it's a holy dark and that the idea is to surrender to it and journey through to real light." …
"Crisis, change, all the myriad upheavals that blister the spirit and leave us groping - they aren't voices simply of pain but also of creativity. And if we would only listen, we might hear such times beckoning us to a season of waiting, to the place of fertile emptiness." …
“Suspended upside-down in the heart of the question, we touch the sacred spaces of real becoming."
Meister Eckhart: "God has sowed God’s own image, the seed of the divine nature, within us. If the seed had a good, wise and industrious cultivator, it would thrive and grow up into God."
Sue Monk Kidd describes this as “turning ourselves upside down so that everything is emptied out and God can flow in. It's curling up in the fogged spaces of the listening heart, sinking into solitude, wrapping the soul around some little flame of hope that God has ignited. It's sitting on the windowsill of the heart, still and watching. Such interior postures are themselves the prayers that transform, heal, and yield the answers in our waiting."
Thomas Merton: "When they stay quiet in the muteness of naked truth, resting in a simple and open-eyed awareness, attentive to the darkness which baffles them, a subtle and indefinable peace begins to seep into their souls and occupies them with a deep and inexplicable satisfaction ... What is it? It is hard to say: but one feels that it is somehow summed up in "the will of God", or simply "God"."
Revelation 21:5 “Behold I am making all things new"
Questions for reflection:
-
What is the invitation to me in this time?
-
Can I let go of my expectations of how things should be, and remain open to the possibilities of new life, whatever form this takes?
Spend a while in quiet prayer, in the surrender of waiting in silence, letting go of the demands that our small, constricted selves place on God, allowing these to gently give way to the presence of the Risen Christ with us and within us.
End with listening to the following as an ending song: