Resurrection
Summary: Sunday, May 7-Friday, May 12, 2017
The Resurrection is not a one-time miracle that proved Jesus was God. Jesus’ death and resurrection name and reveal what is happening everywhere and all the time in God. (Sunday)
If we are honest, we acknowledge that we are dying throughout our life, and this is what we learn if we are attentive: grace is found at the depths and in the death of everything. (Monday)
I choose to believe in Jesus’ bodily resurrection because it localizes the whole Mystery in this material and earthly world and in our own bodies. (Tuesday)
The diamond of love will always be stronger than death. Diamonds, once soft black carbon, become beautiful and radiant white lightning under pressure. (Wednesday)
Love is all that remains. Love and life are finally the same thing, and you know that for yourself once you have walked through death. (Thursday)
We all return where we first started, with the great school of life and death ushering us back home. (Friday)
Practice: Visualizing the Pattern of Reality
Using Friday’s meditation as a guide explore what each of these points on Jesus’ Life Map mean to you, in your own personal journey. You might create a collage (cutting and pasting pictures from magazines, or by creating a digital collection), draw, paint, or journal this map. Gather all the materials you’ll need and give yourself an hour or two to fully enter this practice in silence and solitude.
Follow the spiral in six key experiences or realizations: from conception, to growth through suffering, to a big fall or crisis where Someone held you, to a small death to self, and finally to resurrection into fuller life. At each point along the journey, listen and look for the ways in which God was revealing God’s presence and participation. Represent these moments in pictures, symbols, colors, or a few words.
This is just a snapshot of your life so far; the pattern will continue to unfold, ever wider and deeper, until the final return home to the source of all life and love. You might choose to repeat this practice at regular intervals, perhaps every five or ten years, as a way of remembering and giving gratitude for the ways in which you’ve been led.
“My dear people, we are already the children of God. . . . All I know is that when the whole pattern is revealed, we shall all be like him” (1 John 3:2).
Gateway to Silence:
Alleluia, alleluia, amen!
For Further Study:
Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self (Jossey-Bass: 2013)
Richard Rohr, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2009)
