A Reflection for Easter
Sister Catherine Walsh, OP
During the Easter Vigil we are witnesses to the panorama of God's creative and redemptive acts. We celebrate deliverance and redemption, the movement from darkness to light, from dryness to free-flowing water.
I invite you to look at a symbol of this season—not at the lily or the candle or the egg; rather, I invite you to look at the stone. We hear in the Scriptures how the women found the stone rolled back from the tomb. Perhaps we, also, are invited to roll back the stones from our own tombs and face the empty places of our being to let the light of God's transforming love come in. We are invited to walk into our empty, vulnerable selves and find the freedom to go beyond the tombs into new life.
That is the message of Easter, the message given to all we meet in the readings of the season. Did you ever notice that no one seems to recognize Jesus after the resurrection? Had he changed so much that Mary, the disciples on the road to Emmaus, the apostles on the beach, don't know him? Or is it, rather, that each of them was caught in his/her own preconceptions of how he should have been? They wallowed in their grief, confusion and dashed hopes—the stones of the reality of the death of Jesus. How often do you and I miss Jesus in the garden for the same reason? We are wallowing in our own reality, preoccupied by it and miss the Jesus among us. The stones of ill health, anger, jealousy, or perhaps change, seal us in. To see and experience new life we have to roll back these stones. But we do not do it alone. For Ezekiel tells us God promises to give us a new Spirit and remove our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. All we need do is to desire to roll back the stones that keep us from entering the emptiness of the tomb. For in going into the emptiness we free ourselves to do what needs to be done. We free ourselves to let new life come in.
Then we will hear the voices saying, "Why do you seek the living among the dead?" For new life is always trying to emerge, but we often ignore it because we cling to parts of life that have died. Until we are willing to bury what should be dead and walk to new life we are sealed by those stones.
So, I invite you this Easter to spend time with the witness of the stone. Go and find one, take it, name it. Call it pain, change, give it person's name if you must. Perhaps it will be called anger, guilt, challenge, weakness, or fear. Hold it. Experience it and begin to roll it back. Work at moving it over. Eliminate your preoccupation with it. Then when it is rolled aside go out into the garden; and, if you are no longer sealed by that stone, Jesus and new life will be recognized and you, like the disciples, will be amazed at what has happened. And the very stones will cry out with you, "Alleluia, alleluia. I have risen. I am with you once more. Alleluia."