Sunday
Easter is the feast of hope, direction, purpose, meaning, and community. We’re all in this together.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
Resurrection is just the way things work! When we say hallelujah on this Easter morning, we’re also saying hallelujah to our own lives, to where they’re going, to what we believe in, and hope for.
—Richard Rohr
Tuesday
We’ve been ordained, just like Mary, by the One who knows all about us. I’m inviting you to look in the mirror and see yourself. Recognize yourself as deputized by the Living God.
—Jacqui Lewis
Wednesday
None of us crosses over this gap from death to new life by our own effort, our own merit, our own purity, or our own perfection. Each of us is carried across by unearned grace.
—Richard Rohr
Thursday
The radiant Jesus who leaves the tomb challenges our complacency with the forces of death, be they hopelessness, fear, discouragement, or lack of will. Don’t let death have the last word in your story.
—Mary Lou Kownacki
Friday
Easter could be the annual affirmation of our ongoing resurrection from violence to peace, from fear to faith, from hostility to love, from a culture of consumption to a culture of stewardship and generosity … and in all these ways and more, from death to life.
—Brian McLaren
Week Seventeen Practice
How Am I Resurrection?
Theologian Matthew Fox explores how we can choose to live resurrection each day:
Who does not seek Resurrection? Who does not seek a full and fuller life? Did Jesus not promise, “I have come that you may have life, life in abundance?” (John 10:10)
How am I Resurrection for others?
How am I Life for others?
To be Resurrection for another I need to be Resurrection for myself. That means I cannot dwell in darkness and death and anger and oppression and submission and resentment and pain forever. I need to wake up, get up, rise up, put on life even when days are dark and my soul is down and shadows surround me everywhere…. I have to listen to the voice that says: “Be resurrection.”
“Break out of your tombs; do not settle for death. Break out. Stand up. Give birth. Get out of easy pessimism and lazy cynicism. Put your heart and mind and hands to creating hope and light and resurrection. Be born again. And again. And again….”
Resurrection is a commitment to hope and being reborn. It is a commitment to creativity, to the Spirit who “makes all things new” (Revelation 21:5). Resurrection is the Spirit’s work. It is life of the Spirit.
And what about Life? How am I Life? How living and alive am I? How much in love with life am I? Can anyone or any event separate me from my love of life? Paul the mystic asks (and then answers), “Who shall separate us from the love of God? Neither death nor life, height nor depth, neither present nor future” (Romans 8:35, 38). Is my curiosity alive? My gratitude? My mind? My imagination? My laughter and sense of humor? My creativity? My powers of generosity and compassion? My powers for continually generating and regenerating life?…
Yes, I am, yes, we are, the Resurrection and the Life. We bring aliveness and rebirth and plenty of hope into the world, however [troubling] the news becomes. That is what it means to believe in Easter Sunday and the Resurrection. We become Resurrection and the Life. Christ rises anew.
Reference:
Matthew Fox and Marc Andrus, Stations of the Cosmic Christ (Unity Books, 2016), 138, 139.
Image credit and inspiration: Krista Joy Montgomery, Unknown (detail), 2019, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. We carefully tend the blooms of bright resurrection after the pain of our Good Fridays.
