The
Paschal Mystery
by Donne Hayden
I
don’t usually do so, but on my day off last Friday, I watched some of the
morning news shows. It was, after all, a
royal wedding. The contrast in images that morning was striking: for most of the time, the screen filled with
images of wonderful England and the dream-come-true, fairy-tale wedding of a
“commoner” to a prince—the beauty of the event undeniable. Interspersed with these, however—during “news
breaks”—we saw nightmare images of rubble scattered across acres where whole
neighborhoods were flattened by the tornados that swept through the American
South last Wednesday. These two
dramatically different situations—one, a dream-come-true, and the other, a
nightmare-come-true—have an essential commonality: for the families involved, both end one way
of life and begin another way of life. To
put it another way, any life-changing event requires the death of the previous
way of life; any life-changing event is the birth of a new way of life.
I
am not suggesting any other equivalency.
Given a choice, all of us would choose marrying royalty over losing
everything we own, including, in some cases, our loved ones. But life doesn’t
offer such choices in life-changing events.
The only choice we have is how we will handle the change, how we respond
to the various “deaths” and “re-births” in our lives.
One
of the best discussions of this I found in a book titled The Holy Longing by Ronald Rolheiser.[1] You may find this amusing—I do. After struggling to talk about Easter the
past two Sundays, and being determined that I don’t have to address it anymore
this year, I found myself led to open The
Holy Longing, a harmless-looking book which has been lying on my bedside
table for about a month. When I picked
it up, the book fell open to a chapter titled “A Spirituality of the Paschal
Mystery.” (The Spirit moves in
mysterious ways, indeed, so not being a fool, I read it.) Rolheiser’s book
has given me a new way to think about the meaning of Easter. And since the
lectionary continues to refer to the Easter event for another few weeks, I will
pass along to you these new insights.
To
begin with, Rolheiser quotes John 12:24, in which
Jesus tells his disciples, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and
dies, it remains only a single grain; but if it dies it yields a rich harvest.”
In this, Rolheiser says, Jesus defines the paschal
mystery, i.e., that “. . . in order to come to fuller life and spirit we must
constantly be letting go of present life and spirit.” To fully understand this,
we must distinguish between two kinds of death and two kinds of life, and
between life and spirit. “Terminal death,” Rolheiser
writes, “ends life and ends possibilities”; “paschal death,” on the other hand, is a death filled with possibilities.
Though it ends “one kind of life,” it “opens the person undergoing it to
receive a deeper and richer form of life.” Rolheiser
identifies two kinds of life as “resuscitated
life” and “resurrected life.” A
resuscitated life “is when one is restored to one’s former life and health,”
like Lazarus, for instance, who “got his old life back, a life from which he
had to die again.” “Resurrected life is not this,” writes Rolheiser,
“It is not a restoration of one’s old life but the reception of a radically new
life.” Of “life” and “spirit,” Rolheiser says, they
“are not the same thing and [they] are often given to us at a different
time.” For instance, he says, “after the
resurrection of Jesus, the disciples are given the new life of Christ, but only
some time after, at Pentecost, are they given the spirit for the new life that
they are already living.”
Having
made these distinctions, Rolheiser defines the
paschal mystery as “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, only after the old life
has been truly let go of, is new spirit given for the life we are already
living.” This process, which every living person must go through at some time, Rolheiser says, reflects the “great mystery of Jesus’ own
Passover from death to life.” He frames
the transformation with “five, clear, distinct moments” in the paschal
cycle: Good Friday (suffering and the
loss of life); Easter Sunday (receiving the new life); the Forty Days before
Pentecost (a period of adjustment to the new and grieving the old); the
Ascension (“letting go of the old and letting it bless you, the refusal to
cling”; Pentecost (receiving the “new spirit for the new life that one is
already living.” This cycle repeats
throughout our lives as we grow and mature.
In fact, Rolheiser claims it is “something we
must undergo daily, in every aspect of our lives.”
Some
of the “deaths” he names are the death of youth; the death of wholeness (for
instance, through abuse or illness); the death of our dreams; the death of our
honeymoons; and the death of “a certain idea of God and the church.” Phrased in these ways, does all this begin to
sound more familiar?
Here
are a few examples. Some of us in this room today have experienced the death of
our youth. Whenever I catch a glimpse of
myself in a mirror, I still experience a mild shock—who is that old white-haired woman?
We discover aches in parts of our bodies we never knew existed. Though
we know exactly how something is done, our bodies simply can no longer do
it. One of my favorite stories is about
a minister who went to visit a woman in her congregation who had fallen out of
bed and broken her hip. The minister
asked her what happened, and the woman replied, “Well, I woke up yesterday
morning and the sun was shining, the birds were chirping—it was a lovely
day. So I threw back the covers and jumped
out of bed. But I forgot I have this old
body on.”
Probably
most of us have experienced a death of wholeness of some kind. Loss of a cherished parent or grandparent can
leave us feeling incomplete. A death of wholeness can originate from being in
an abusive relationship of any kind, or any situation in which the self is
violated. A serious, incapacitating
illness that makes it difficult for you to what you used to do with ease is a
death of wholeness. My handsome,
swaggering stepfather who loved to dance, suffered two
such “deaths” in his life. At twenty, he
broke his leg running up the stairs at a VA hospital where he was being treated
for a broken wrist that refused to heal.
Eventually the wrist healed, but his knee was shattered and he had to
wear a leg brace for the rest of his life. At 36, after a severe beating, he suffered permanent
brain damage from which he never fully recovered. He was in a wheelchair for a year or more and
had to learn to walk and talk again. He never danced after that, but he also
never complained. He went on—he
refinished antiques, tinkered with and kept running a series of cars and
trucks, and eventually, he became a voracious reader in the last ten years of
his life.
The
death of our dreams—when you were seventeen, what did you think your life would
be? What did you always want or plan to
do that you, so far, have never done and probably won’t? When I was seventeen, I wanted to be a
translator at the United Nations and live in Paris. Throughout my youth and early middle age, I
held on to a dream of being happily married to the one love of my life. Anyone else having trouble
with that one? This leads rather
naturally to the death of honeymoons, for those of you who have succeeded in
finding and keeping a partner. At some
point, you realize the honeymoon is over—you have been married fifteen years,
not fifteen minutes—and your love is different.
If you are addicted to infatuation and refuse to let go of the honeymoon
feeling, you may end up like my wonderful aunt, Connie, who was married eight
times.
And
the death of a way of thinking about God and the church. This happens to us at different times in our
lives—some of us early on reject what we are taught in childhood. Others come to this change later in life, as
Phil Gulley did. Phil is a Quaker who
spent many years as a minister in an evangelical Friends church. Over time he realized he no longer believed
what he was saying. He was “re-born” as an agnostic, more comfortable with
questions than answers. Fortunately for
him, most in his congregation made this change with him, and they have continued
to support his ministry against all attackers and critics who would have him
“de-frocked” (if Quaker ministers wore “frocks”).
Consider
the paschal mystery of your own life.
Can you name various “deaths” you have experienced? Not the death of loved
ones, but a death of one version of yourself.
Can you remember becoming a significantly different person, i.e., being
“newly born” as yourself? Do you
remember how long it took to let go of the old life, grieve it, and adjust to
your new reality? Can you remember at
some point recognizing and valuing what you learned through living and losing
your old life, but letting it go finally? Can you remember “accepting the
spirit” of a changed way of life?
I
leave you with these words from Rolheiser:
Unless we mourn
properly our hurts, our losses, life’s unfairness, our shattered dreams, our
radical inconsummation, and all the life that we once
had but that now has passed us by, we will live either in an unhealthy fantasy
or an ever-intensifying bitterness.
. . .
We face many deaths
within our lives and the choice is ours as to whether those deaths will be
terminal (snuffing out our life and spirit) or whether they will be paschal
(opening us to new life and new spirit).
[1] Ronald Rolheiser,
The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian
Spirituality (New York: Doubleday,
1999), pp. 141-166.