Wesley Tingey/Unsplash
RESURRECTION
I never suspected resurrection
To be so painful
To leave me weeping
With joy to have met you, alive and smiling, outside an empty tomb
With regret – not because I've lost you
But because I've lost you in how I had you –
In understandable, touchable, kissable, clingable flesh
Not as fully Lord, but as graspably human.
I want to cling, despite your protest
Cling to your body
Cling to your, and my, clingable humanity
Cling to what we had, our past.
But I know that … if I cling
You cannot ascend and
I will be left clinging to your former self ...
unable to receive your present spirit.
For some reason, we needed all the time legally given to a parent to name our daughter, or perhaps as I think back, the name chose her. She was Kristina, our little spark of the divine child on this earth. She died at the age of 15 on Easter Sunday such that if we mark linear and not spiritual time, we experience the anniversary of her death twice each year. A dear spiritual companion hoped that one day we would no longer associate Easter Sunday with her death but with resurrection. And a dear friend sent me Rolheiser’s poem some time later.
But thirty-three years later, I know that a coin’s two sides co-exist in symbiotic relationship. The seasons – spring, summer, fall and winter – are all contained within each other as well, held in a continuous flow of life and death. Even our thoughts and beliefs would not exist without the teacher who led us to them. Surely, we would not know the Resurrection if Christ had not experienced the Crucifixion. The continuing miracle of Kristina’s life and death as One is our family’s ongoing, sacred lesson in the unity of All.
Christ has died. Christ has risen.
-Susan Hendrick, csj Associate