Jim Campbell made me aware of how much of life lies forever dormant and unexplored in the normal course of events. When one dares to enter deeply into life’s potential, one sees quickly just how little of that potential is ever realized. “In the midst of life we are in death” far more often than most of us imagine. Yet many people do seem to dream and to yearn for something more. All of the human relations experiments (group life laboratories, transactional analysis groups, marriage encounters, personal witnessing groups, communal living experiments, even some of the bizarre group sexual activities) seem to be attempts by human beings to get beneath the barriers and to explore the mystery, the meaning of life. Jesus’ promise in the Fourth Gospel, “I have come that you might have life in all its fullness,” is not a promise that frequently finds fulfillment in the ordinary life of the church. Indeed, not infrequently, life in the institutional church is quite closed, authoritarian, and seems organized to control life and feelings.
As a parish priest, I was always drawn to the “Easter Christian.” I deplored the kind of judgmental and caustic remarks that so many members of my profession frequently seemed to level at these people. I remember as a seminary student attending a church in Alexandria, Virginia, on Palm Sunday and hearing the rector urge his congregation to come to the earlier Easter services on the next Sunday so that there would be enough seats at the major service “for those who want to make their semiannual peace with God.” I think we fail to recognize the motivation that causes people to swell the ranks of worshipers on Easter Day.
There is, of course, the attraction of the music, the pageantry, the flowers, the spring fashions, the burst of new life in nature that exalts the human spirit. But I am convinced that the Easter worshiper is compelled to come to church for deeper reasons than any or all of these.
There is in the heart of every human being a yearning, a hope, a desire to taste life on levels that few of us achieve. It is a fearful, threatening, haunting desire. The group encounter experiments scare far more people than they attract. While most people are unwilling to risk the anxiety of personal exposure that they cannot control, they still yearn for that community where they can know and be known, love and be loved, accept and be accepted, forgive and be forgiven. To find this on any level expands life; to find it on maximum levels calls us into nothing less than a new being.
Human life is lived within all sorts of safety barriers, protective fences, and limiting forces. These barriers create our loneliness, our isolation, our fears. They enable many of us to exist without living or to content ourselves with living on the safest and most shallow oflevels. The ultimate barrier of death creates the deepest fear, the deepest vulnerability; but perhaps worst of all, the presence of death lurking with its sense of inevitability on the edges of our consciousness prevents many of us from daring to live at all. Hence, the Easter story touches a very deep chord inside us, for if the ultimate barrier of death can be breached or has been breached, then perhaps there are countless levels of life that can be experienced.
So Easter appeals to hidden dreams, forlorn hopes that life is more than we experience it to be in living and that all of the barriers of life, including the final barrier of death, may be finite. There is enormous power in that possibility. This power, this yearning, this unadulterated hope is, I believe, that which fills the churches of Christendom year after year on Easter Day.
The Easter Christian comes to church on that special day. But he or she most often is not convinced, and the Sunday after Easter is still “low” Sunday. The symbols of Easter have an inexorable magnetic appeal that for at least one Sunday a year are able to set aside the doubt, the rational objections of a scientifically oriented, secularized nonbelieving society. But it does not last, and old patterns return.
I do not want to see these persons dismissed by the church, for I am convinced that the Easter Christian’s inner need dwells in the life and heart of every child of the twentieth century. They are not hostile to the church or to the Easter story; rather they come on that one day more eager than they themselves seem to know. They listen to the mind-boggling claim made by the church for its Lord: the claim that death has been and therefore can be conquered; the claim that onewho was dead lived again with a life that was indestructible; the claim that if we are touched by this life, we can share resurrection power; the claim that we can be set free to live in a way we have never lived before, free from fear, free from death. That is what the Easter Christian yearns to believe. There is not a life so calloused or a heart so cold that does not join in this yearning.
But no one wants to be deluded. We do not want to pretend to believe or to practice a kind of self-hypnosis. Our attitude toward the issue of life itself cannot rest on the flimsiness of our wishing that certain things were so. Yet we hope, and this hope is annually fed by the symbols and the appeal of Easter. To explore that symbol and its truth is now our task.
When relationships grow and deepen, language takes on a new and different meaning. The more open, honest, and real a relationship is, the less important the rational limits of language seem to be. I am not drawn to the charismatic phenomenon we call glossolalia or “speaking in tongues.” Yet I can understand the black preacher who suggested that if lovers in the act of lovemaking can communicate with sounds that are nonsensical to anyone other than themselves but deeply communicative in the ecstasy of their own relationship, so a worshiper of the living God might speak to that God in a nonsensical language. Only outside the context of the ecstasy of that relationship and moment of worship would it be nonsensical.
So without being anti-intellectual, let me suggest that a rational exposition of the language of Easter might not be the doorway to the truth that lies under that language. I do know that the more Jim Campbell shared his life and his inner struggles with me, the less myability to interpret or explain that life in rational words became essential to our relationship. My words also became less effective vehicles for conveying the meaning of that experience with Jim to others who did not share in it. When I began to understand that, I also began to understand something of the problem that faced the biblical writers. How can mere words give rational shape to the experience they had, an experience that broke every barrier of their previous life experience? For that was what Easter did.
If Easter is truth as I believe it is, it is truth that stretches the mind beyond the limits of finite rationality. It is the perception of a new realm breaking in, a new creation being born. It is a truth that calls us to dream, to soar, and to express our dreaming, our soaring with words that also dream and soar, with symbols that are open-ended pointers, with poetry that frees the spirit. It is this language that we confront in the biblical narratives of Easter. Listen to these symbols:
There was darkness over the whole land.
The veil in the temple was split from top to bottom.
There was an earthquake.
The massive stone before the tomb was miraculously rolled away.
The resurrection message was spoken by the lips of angels.
Suddenly he was in the midst of them.
Touch me not, for I have not yet ascended.
All power is given to me in heaven and on earth.
He breathed on them, and they received the Holy Spirit.
First we must learn not to literalize the language. Rather our task is to go beneath the words and explore the power they seek to portray. We open ourselves to that power. We test it in other relationships. That is the way to explore the meaning of Easter.
Second, I would suggest that for many people in our age God is not real because they look for God in the wrong place or in an inadequate form. They are captives of their own traditions and images. Resurrection seems absurd because they conceive of it only as an event that occurs after death in what appears to be a fairyland of make-believe. These concepts have to be destroyed before the reality of God and the power of resurrection can be experienced.
The biblical God is not a kindly, comfortable father figure who lives beyond the skies and who protects, watches over, and guides our lives, eliciting from us warm, childlike feelings. The God of the Bible is creator. In his own image has he made us, to live at one with him, with each other, and with ourselves. Life in all its fullness, love with all its inclusiveness, being with all its potential are attributes of this God. The biblical narrative pictures God as a living force in history, not as a removed deity met in mystic contemplation.
The call of this God to us is a call to live, to love, to be. We do not confront or encounter this God when we retreat from life into something isolated like religion and designated by the word holy. We find God, rather, when we enter life, when we penetrate through life, when we dare to have the courage to be ourselves with another. So if God is to be found, there must be a commitment to live, to risk, to love, to be outside our self-imposed security shells. When we take this step, the meaning of resurrection begins to dawn.
Resurrection is not just something that occurs beyond time in a moment we symbolize as the mythological day of judgment, but we are resurrected into ever-expanding cycles of life every time love touches our lives, calls us out of our shells, and dares us torisk living while endowing us with the courage to be ourselves.
All of us have experienced loneliness. We also know misunderstanding, isolation, shame, fear, alienation. We know what it means to be hurt, to be rejected. When we live in these dark moments of life, we become closed, inward-directed, fortress-like. We become insensitive. We want to retaliate. Relationships are broken. Loneliness is enhanced. We cannot deliver ourselves from these emotions of hurt and fear. We can only wait and hope.
Then across the chasm of our isolation there comes the gift of love, and this love heals; it accepts, it dispels fear, it embraces with understanding. Love lifts us up and stands us on our feet. It gives us the courage to live again, to dare again, to risk loving again. That is resurrection. It is love giving life, love breaking into our loneliness. When we know love, we are lifted into life, resurrected life, life that can never be totally destroyed again.
When one has received a diagnosis of death and discovers that in the brief time left to live he or she can meet another on levels of friendship not ever before experienced, something startling occurs. One may discover that the hidden fears that have been harbored for a lifetime can be shared, and a new level and a quality of life is met that in its power destroys the fear of dying. The quality of life outweighs the quantity of life. That is what Jim Campbell taught me. To enter the depth of life, to explore the quality of life became for me the clue, the angle of vision by which the finitude of life might be viewed and the power of resurrection might be explored.
If one can find reservoirs of life and love that areavailable in human relationships, it is not quite so difficult to begin to search for the source of these gifts: a source of life, a source of love, a ground of being that is eternal, unchanging, and intensely personal. Can any name other than God embrace this reality? And can any path to this God be found other than the path of discovering the power that enables the recipient to have the capacity to live, the ability to love, and the courage to be?
When one of us stands inside this experience it is not so strange or so miraculous for us to envision one life lived among us who was totally alive, completely loving, perfectly being what he was created to be. In this life, all that God is might be seen, met, engaged, revealed, experienced, worshiped. This life we call the Christ.
We examine the records we have that tell us about this Jesus. All portray a life before whom barriers fall away. His capacity to love embraced all of those whom others regarded as unlovable. His ability to live was so powerful, so complete that there was both a constant and magnetic attraction as well as a deep and sinister fear that he elicited from those who long ago traded life for security. His willingness to be all that God created him to be gave him an unearthly freedom from needs, either physical or those of status. His security of being was so deep that he could give himself away totally, completely.
If God is the source of life, love, and being, then to meet the fullness of life, the completeness of love, the totality of being in a human life is to meet God. In his life the fullness of humanity was also seen. In the narratives of Holy Scripture, we watch that life as it prepares to confront the ultimate barrier of death. Perhaps life is more than any of us has dreamed, we say. Perhaps there are untold riches to life that we could explore, but no matter how high we fly, there still seems to be the ultimate barrier of finitude, the last enemy called death against which we collide and finally lose. Can we experience a reality that will break that barrier? Could the completely alive Jesus?
His capacity to love revealed that he had received an infinite amount of love. His ability to be open appeared to be uncompromised by religious, national, or racial exclusion. His ability to restore that which was broken or distorted to the wholeness God intended inspired all sorts of miraculous stories about him. He lived out a freedom and a personal wholeness that was both powerfully attractive and deeply threatening. This threat led his enemies finally to nail him to a cross. He was executed.
But even as his life was being destroyed, from him there continued to flow a love that embraced those who wielded the power of death. As he died, he was far more alive than those who were still to live a few years longer. In the moments between Good Friday and Easter, this life seemed to test that ultimate barrier of death, and somehow people were convinced that Jesus prevailed. He was known to them not as a fading memory, but as an Eternal Now.3 He was to them not a subjective presence but a generating power.
In age after age, other lives have been convinced that they have met this power afresh. They have been set free to live by this power. They have begun to press the limits of their potential because of this power. They have become real persons, selves they never dreamed they could be. They have been willing to risk and meet and know and love in a way that called them again and again into a resurrected life.
It is because of these experiences that Christians can and do dare to suggest that the barrier to life we call death is not an ultimate barrier at all. If this barrier has been tested and broken by the fully alive Christ, then in him and through him we can touch that which is eternal and share in it. If in life we find many moments of resurrection, it is not quite so difficult to imagine or to believe that there is one ultimate resurrection and that in Jesus the Christ that resurrection has dawned and our hope of sharing in it is not a fantasy.
We are born to live, not to die, and in Christ we are restored to our own truest, deepest destiny. We share in eternity and in an ever-expanding life both here and hereafter.