Easter in Three Parts

I slid into the back pew, grateful to be anonymous and alone. Another friend had just had another perfect baby and I was thrilled and then I was sad. The hole, this void, opens up sometimes and it feels like a vacuum where my heart just was. Like a black hole in my chest, threatening to pull me in, to engulf all of me, folded in from the center. It happens less often now, but it leaves me quiet, a little hollowed out.

So I came alone. I sat in the back and watched the bare black branches melt into the darkening sky. They read the story, the one I’ve heard ten thousand times, its gruesomeness made less so by familiarity. Its sharp edges dulled by repetition. I want to be undone, torn open by this sacrifice, broken with grief and gratitude. There is no great rush of evangelical emotion though. There is just me, sitting in the last row, palms lifted, offering my dead and dying things.

Three babies have lived and died in this body of mine. My Lenten experiment in humility only heightened the rotting stench of pride that permeates me. Relationships are changing shape and I can’t heal people I love.

The Bible ends with this invitation: “Come!” Let the one who is thirsty come; and let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of life (Revelation 22:17). I sat in a booth this week in front of a young woman, clawing her way to God through a mess of religious legalism, and it was one of the privileges of my life to be able to say to her: all you have to do is be thirsty.

And there it is, hidden in this too-familiar story, Jesus, dying horrifically, says it: “I am thirsty” (John 19:28). I come and I find the God who thirsts.

There is no great breaking-open. I still feel the hole at the center of me. But here I am now, alone, thirsty, with the God who ends the story with an offer of free water. A God who know what it is to thirst.

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We tell it at funerals. When people have died and the grief is suffocating, we clutch this hope: He will wipe away every tear from our eyes (Revelation 21:4). Teaching this recently, I mentioned how intimate this gesture is, how very close you must be to wipe away someone’s tears, to reach out and place your fingertips on damp cheeks, how very gentle this motion is. And how very not like the God I usually know.

The Great Vigil of Easter, it’s called. We sit in darkness, made all the more cavernous in this giant cathedral. We hold our little candles, defiantly and hopefully. And when the lights turn on, we ring our bells and exhale and laugh with strangers, we practice proclaiming the resurrection while it is still dark outside.

And we celebrate baptisms. Tonight a middle-aged man who looks like he belongs here in Washington, DC. The bishop held his head above the water and gently lapped water over it. Then she cupped his face in her hands, rubbed oil on his forehead with her fingertips, and pronounced him sealed to God with so much tenderness, I had to look away.

It was one of those thin moments in time, when the curtain is pulled back, and God says, this is what I’m like.

(And please, isn't this why we need religious leaders both male and female? How much do we miss when we only see half of the image of God?)

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I cooked while she followed me around the kitchen cleaning up after me and we tried to keep her ten month old from pulling himself up on the oven. Others showed up and we popped open bubbly wine and the sugary drinks given up for Lent. My potato casserole earned me a kiss on the cheek. We laughed until we cried at a game of cards and at each other laughing at the game of cards. I covered a tired tech guy with blankets. We reheated the leftovers and talked of promises to each other and moving to England someday.

And then it was much too late and I laid there on the couch alone, exhausted, leftover peeps hardening on the counter and my house smelling of Easter ham, thinking of how often I have begged Him for a table full of people to feed, for a family. And how just like Easter it is of God to answer my prayers in ways I didn’t expect.