Resurrection Riff

Resurrection –  say it softly, as one must after the softening notes go wherever notes go when they no longer sound.

The day has gone by for me
carrying the Word
and the cello’s intensity

Resurrection
It doesn’t come from nothing
It has a past.

We heard it in the music
That last clasped note of cello and piano
held everything that soared and dipped toward it
just as the the clasped names of Mary and Jesus
held the notes of their dipping, soaring lives.
Everything that came before that moment of mutual naming
is part of them.
They have a past
and it is resurrected in this morning

Today the rushing, bending,
the bobbing in and out of Simon Peter and the other beloved disciple
the bending and the seeing
and even the believing
have no hold on me
though they may catch my heart some other time.

Today again it is Mary
whose life poured through her in tears;
weeping the past that would sculpt the shape of her rising;
rising with the One she thought she had lost.

Resurrection has a past.
And really isn’t it that that makes us glad
Jesus rises still bruised and marked
still holding all the betrayal and the terror
the compassion and the self-offering
that is his
and ours.

There is nothing wiped away in resurrection
but there is everything held differently;
everything made new.

Resurrection brings a textured joy.
It is a pastiche of colours swept smoothly on with brushes
but also thickened by the joyous daubing of colour
or the etching groove of the wrong end of the paint brush
dragged through all the colours of his life
and ours
to expose their layers.

Resurrection has a past
and we are glad.

It is not sterile.
It does not avert its eyes.
It holds the doubts and questions,
the joys and hopes of us all.

It rises out of all our secrets
and betrayals.
It lays our lives bare and shines on them
so we too, in each moment of dying
can rise again, whole.

Resurrection
does not come from nothing.
It has a past with ours in it

And resurrection has a future
We do not leave the notes of cello and piano as we came to them.
The emotion of their movement has continued our creation.

Resurrection has a future
because Jesus has risen
carrying everything in a new way,
we can in every moment of our life begin again.

And we can write our own twined music with all creation.

Resurrection has a past and a future
Christ is risen
Alleluia
Thanks be to God.

*This reflection was originally written and posted two years ago after hearing the Bach Gounod Ave Maria.

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