Dear Friends,
The great festival of Easter is here, a festival bursting with light and joy, and dancing and singing, and hope and colour and, well, just LIFE! This is the great turning point around which the world revolves, as TS Eliot put it ‘At the still point of the turning world/Neither flesh nor fleshless/Neither from nor towards; at the still point/There the dance is…’ He is referring to the interweaving and never-ending Dance of joy and love and peace of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in which dance the Three are One and the One is Three, who are filled with so much life and love that it spills over to create the revolving cosmos, our solar system, the Earth, the plants, the animals, and us; a life and a love that nothing can stay, nothing can tame or chain down, not even death. It is the revealing of this Dance of Love in God by Jesus that lies at the heart of Christianity, and that distinguishes it from every other form of faith.
Yet this is also where we are faced with the extraordinary event that so many folk struggle to accept – that God could overcome death through the power of his Love. And sometimes it is difficult to believe, when we look at the world, that there is a God of love. Our news bulletins are filled with stories of the hubris, arrogance, stupidity, cruelty and violence of ‘leaders’, of people being bombed, or shot, or mutilated, or violated. Or stories of how greedy corporations oppress farmers, destroy landscapes, leave pollution and poison behind in pursuit of profits, and try to cover it up. Or social media, politicians, and parts of the Press that tell about ‘invasions of foreigners’, stirring us towards anger, hatred and bitterness, even if we’ve never met a ‘foreigner’, let alone been personally aggrieved by one. Or perhaps its much more personal. Someone we love or know well has suffered through a fatal illness and died. Perhaps it was a child. Perhaps it was your child. And the pain is still as raw as the day it happened.
I met a lady a few weeks ago who said she had lost her faith in God. I will call her Dawn. How could there be a God of love, Dawn said, that would allow her daughter to suffer a terminal disease in her early teens. She nursed her through her increasingly difficult days until her end. She carried the pain as if it was yesterday, still mourning, some fifty years later. She was waiting to die; ‘anything has to be better than this living hell’, she said. Her other children, now all grown up, sat around, listening. My heart nearly broke.
Dawn is not alone. Hers is the story of myriads of others around the world, and through the ages. And it seems there is a great wave of sadness, pain and hurt that people carry, some silently, others loudly and abrasively, trying to find a way to cope. The injustice of suffering, particularly of the young and innocent, the seemingly pointless deaths of those who have been robbed of the chance to live, wells up and spills over, creating an aching sense of loss and anger in those left behind. And we long for justice and rightness to be restored, for suffering and pain to end. We long for LIFE, not just for ourselves, but perhaps even more for those we have loved.
The great paradox is that this pain, itself, is only there BECAUSE of love. We feel the pain because we love. The heart that hurts does so because it was joined to another by love. And when it is ripped apart, the rawness of the wound is intense – the greater the love, the greater the pain. And we are angered by the injustice because we care. But love and compassion only exist, only matter, because God is. If there was no God, nothing would matter for everything would just be accidents of chemistry and biology. There is no place for love in a world without God, a merely mechanical world where nothing matters, no such thing as ‘free will’, ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘justice’ or ‘cruelty’ or ‘beauty’ or ‘love’ or ‘pain’, only chemical reactions. There is no such thing as evil if all that exists is atoms and molecules. All our anger, frustration, brokenness, all our joy, delight and sense of freedom and love, can only exist, can only have meaning, in a universe created by God. Otherwise there is nothing but the blind force of chemistry.
There are no easy answers as to the ‘why’ of pain. Pretending God does not exist is certainly not one of them, and doesn’t solve anything at all. It’s like burying your head in the sand and thinking you’ve found safety. But I am certain it has something to do with the brokenness of our communion with God, each other, and the natural world – our ‘trinity’ of relations.
But what the Easter story tells us is that God is intimately involved with us in the midst of our pain. Because God exists, love exists, is real. It is really real. But more than this, our love for each other actually derives from the source of all Love, God himself. And that means that when we feel the pain of loss, it is felt in the heart of God too.
So Dawn is not alone. Neither are any of us. All our suffering and the injustice we experience are taken up into the great Dance of the God of Love, and healed. Healed. That is why, at the heart of the Dance, the Risen Christ still bears the healed wounds of the Cross in his hands, his side, and his dancing feet. And so the Easter story is actually the ONLY one that can give us real hope that ‘all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.’
Have a blessed Easter.
Your friend and priest, Robert.
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