[This is Part 3 of a blog post that I realised was becoming far too long to write, or read, in one go. Parts 1 and 2 reflect on living through COVID-19 as an experience of collective trauma, and Holy Saturday as the liturgical time that 'fits' much of life right now.]
Easter dawns slowly
Easter dawns slowly
One of the most sensible pieces of practical advice in the first few weeks of lockdown was that 'this is going to be a marathon, not a sprint'. While the adrenaline was pumping fast, the encouragement to slow down the pace, to resist trying to do everything at once, has turned out to be wise and helpful. As a vicar, this week after Easter has always been a week for annual leave and family holiday time; rest, play and recovery from the exhaustion that has gone before. This year is no different - even though the exhaustion is a result of a slower, less frantic, but equally emotionally demanding lead-up to Easter; and 'annual leave' and 'family holiday' looks and feels rather different when it's spent at home, with only a daily walk from the house as the opportunity to 'escape'.
Nevertheless, 'slowing down the pace' is a wisdom that remains, in this time. In many ways, it's hardly a novel idea. There are good reasons why the Christian season of Eastertide is seven weeks long (and not just because Pentecost is literally 50 days on from Easter Day). Easter dawns slowly, even in ordinary, non-COVID, non-locked-down time.
It's been a tradition for some years at Hodge Hill Church that every Sunday of Eastertide begins in a kind of darkness. Without blackout blinds, and at 10.30 in the morning, physical darkness in our church building is rather difficult. But we have had a habit of beginning our services with no candles lit other than the Easter candle. We've spent time, as part of our act of Confession early in the service, each of us holding a heavy stone, and bringing to mind the things that weigh heavy on us, on our neighbourhoods, and on our world. And then we've brought our stones to our Easter garden, and laid them around the tomb - the empty tomb, its heavy stone rolled away - remembering God's ongoing power to remove the weighty stones that entrap, burden and imprison us. And, having laid our stones down, we have lit our little candles from the Easter candle - the light spreading around the church week by week, just in the way it did for the first time on Easter day.
Easter dawns slowly. For the first, frightened, confused, anxious disciples, it took time to sink in, repeated encounters with the risen Christ, repeated conversations between them to begin to make sense of what was now happening. It wasn't, for them, a single moment in time, across all places, in which everything was suddenly different.
I've been particularly struck this year by the number of people who have talked of the 'gentleness' of Easter. If it's a 'revolution', then it's been named as a 'quiet' one - resurrection that is 'whispered' rather than 'shouted'. There are a number of reasons for this, I think. Unable to gather together, our shouts of 'Christ is risen!' find only a faint echo when delivered from our doorsteps - rather than the usual crowd of Easter-happy Christians. When we're counting national daily deaths in the hundreds, if not thousands, shouting our Alleluias is also pastorally insensitive, if not hollow.
But even the original Easter Day happened quietly. While rocks may have split on Good Friday, according to some accounts, even Matthew's Easter morning earthquake, that opened the tomb, clearly caused barely a tremor beyond the garden. And all the other Easter appearances are indeed quiet, gentle, barely registered even - often - by those who were their primary witnesses. A companion on a walk. A breakfast on a beach. A presence in a locked room. The gentle breath of an un/familiar friend, a gesture with wounded hands, the soft tearing of bread.
Easter dawns slowly, gently, quietly. In the midst of trauma, it is this kind of resurrection, with its necessary bodily 'grounding', that will enable the dawning of new meaning - not a dramatic resurrection that will simply add to, compound, the previous trauma. Slow, gentle, quiet is the resurrection we need.
The Paschal candle's journey - towards Pentecost?
This year, it was only on Holy Saturday morning that we worked out what we were going to do with the Paschal candle which, at that point, was sitting in its unopened box, at the home of our head server.
We couldn't bring the candle into the church building on Easter morning this year. It, and we, would have to wait. Weeks, maybe months. But whereas on an 'ordinary' Easter morning we would light it on the same patch of waste ground on which we had met for our Holy Saturday vigil the night before, and then walk it through the streets of our neighbourhood on the way before finally ending up at church, we decided that this year we would extend that journey. Just as we often do with our Mary and Joseph 'Posada' figures during Advent, we would take the Paschal candle from house to house, leaving it overnight in each home, inviting those who live in that place to have their own Easter dawn ritual on the morning of their 'hosting'.
Eventually, on our 'Back to Church Sunday', whenever that might be, we're all going to bring the many and varied candles we've been lighting every day in our homes in our times of prayer and reflection, along with the Paschal candle that has been travelling around our parish, and - reversing the normal Easter dawn liturgical flow - we will light our focal candle from the small, scattered flames that will have been burning through this long Eastertide.
Whenever it might fall in the calendar, what we are journeying towards is surely Pentecost: a moment both of gathering and of sending out. Pentecost is the day when the disciples were 'all gathered together in one place'. Pentecost is also the day when they are driven out, by the Spirit, into the streets of the city, to join the crowds and discover that the 'normal' divisions (of language and nationality) had fallen away and that they could be heard and understood, and that the message of Easter made sense. Pentecost is surely where we're heading.
The Spirit that persists
But that would be to get ahead of ourselves. Shelly Rambo again: 'Between death and life, the Spirit's witness can be described in two movements: tracking the undertow and sensing life. These movements of Spirit attend to suffering that remains long after an event is over. They also witness to forms of life that appear tenuous and fragile... The Spirit persists... This persistence is an oscillation between death and life, tracking what remains and sensing a way ahead. This persistence, this abiding, is the witness not just to death's remaining but to love's survival.' (Rambo, Spirit and Trauma, p.160)
This dual movement that Rambo charts is worth letting unfold further. The 'undertow', she reminds us, 'refers to an underlying current that lies beneath the surface of the water. Though waves move toward the shore, the undercurrent pulls in the opposite direction. This pull is not visible, but its force can be great'. Rambo calls us 'to track the movements of the Spirit's witness to the undertow, to death's pull in life' and, with Catherine Keller, to a theology of 'the deep' - the Hebrew word is tehom - that 'attends to the losses, grief, and the chaos of life', realities which 'remain but, in and through the Spirit, … are witnessed'. 'Tracking' the undertow involves 'discerning what does not rise to the surface. It accounts for the force of institutions and persons that do not want certain truths to be told.' (Rambo, p.161)
But alongside 'tracking the undertow', Rambo calls us also to the work of 'sensing life', recalling Jesus' promise that the Spirit will lead the disciples into truth: 'Jesus tells the disciples that they will not understand the events that will take place; but they will, in the Spirit, be guided in relationship to them'. The 'life' that is to be 'sensed' is 'not miraculously new but instead is a mixed and tenuous process of remaining' - the Spirit's witness is 'to forms of life that are less discernible, more inchoate and tenuous, than visible and secure'. 'Sensing' requires 'embodied practices of imagination', 'involves an encounter with what is not recognizable. In this encounter, there is a movement to reorient oneself in relationship to what is not immediately familiar. This movement involves interplay of the senses in an attempt to find one's way. Sensing is a way of aligning oneself in the face of what is unknown... trying to grasp a sense of things in the darkness, attempting to move toward life without knowing its shape' (p.162-3).
What will 'remain' for good, out of this crisis - what will remain in/of our communities, what will remain in/of our society, what will remain in/of our church - we do not know, can not know, as yet, what it will look like, however confident our community-building theory, our politics, our ecclesiology might usually be. But the work Rambo calls us to - of 'tracking the undertow', 'discerning what does not rise to the surface'; of 'sensing life', 'attempting to move toward life without knowing its shape' - is a labour of love that can, and must, begin in the present, however wearily and falteringly we might be able to begin it. This is the work of Easter, 'from the middle', seeking in all our encounters - distanced and fragmented as they inevitably are in the present - to track, sense, discern 'what remains'.
[continued - in Part 4]
Nevertheless, 'slowing down the pace' is a wisdom that remains, in this time. In many ways, it's hardly a novel idea. There are good reasons why the Christian season of Eastertide is seven weeks long (and not just because Pentecost is literally 50 days on from Easter Day). Easter dawns slowly, even in ordinary, non-COVID, non-locked-down time.
It's been a tradition for some years at Hodge Hill Church that every Sunday of Eastertide begins in a kind of darkness. Without blackout blinds, and at 10.30 in the morning, physical darkness in our church building is rather difficult. But we have had a habit of beginning our services with no candles lit other than the Easter candle. We've spent time, as part of our act of Confession early in the service, each of us holding a heavy stone, and bringing to mind the things that weigh heavy on us, on our neighbourhoods, and on our world. And then we've brought our stones to our Easter garden, and laid them around the tomb - the empty tomb, its heavy stone rolled away - remembering God's ongoing power to remove the weighty stones that entrap, burden and imprison us. And, having laid our stones down, we have lit our little candles from the Easter candle - the light spreading around the church week by week, just in the way it did for the first time on Easter day.
Easter dawns slowly. For the first, frightened, confused, anxious disciples, it took time to sink in, repeated encounters with the risen Christ, repeated conversations between them to begin to make sense of what was now happening. It wasn't, for them, a single moment in time, across all places, in which everything was suddenly different.
I've been particularly struck this year by the number of people who have talked of the 'gentleness' of Easter. If it's a 'revolution', then it's been named as a 'quiet' one - resurrection that is 'whispered' rather than 'shouted'. There are a number of reasons for this, I think. Unable to gather together, our shouts of 'Christ is risen!' find only a faint echo when delivered from our doorsteps - rather than the usual crowd of Easter-happy Christians. When we're counting national daily deaths in the hundreds, if not thousands, shouting our Alleluias is also pastorally insensitive, if not hollow.
But even the original Easter Day happened quietly. While rocks may have split on Good Friday, according to some accounts, even Matthew's Easter morning earthquake, that opened the tomb, clearly caused barely a tremor beyond the garden. And all the other Easter appearances are indeed quiet, gentle, barely registered even - often - by those who were their primary witnesses. A companion on a walk. A breakfast on a beach. A presence in a locked room. The gentle breath of an un/familiar friend, a gesture with wounded hands, the soft tearing of bread.
Easter dawns slowly, gently, quietly. In the midst of trauma, it is this kind of resurrection, with its necessary bodily 'grounding', that will enable the dawning of new meaning - not a dramatic resurrection that will simply add to, compound, the previous trauma. Slow, gentle, quiet is the resurrection we need.
The Paschal candle's journey - towards Pentecost?
This year, it was only on Holy Saturday morning that we worked out what we were going to do with the Paschal candle which, at that point, was sitting in its unopened box, at the home of our head server.
We couldn't bring the candle into the church building on Easter morning this year. It, and we, would have to wait. Weeks, maybe months. But whereas on an 'ordinary' Easter morning we would light it on the same patch of waste ground on which we had met for our Holy Saturday vigil the night before, and then walk it through the streets of our neighbourhood on the way before finally ending up at church, we decided that this year we would extend that journey. Just as we often do with our Mary and Joseph 'Posada' figures during Advent, we would take the Paschal candle from house to house, leaving it overnight in each home, inviting those who live in that place to have their own Easter dawn ritual on the morning of their 'hosting'.
Eventually, on our 'Back to Church Sunday', whenever that might be, we're all going to bring the many and varied candles we've been lighting every day in our homes in our times of prayer and reflection, along with the Paschal candle that has been travelling around our parish, and - reversing the normal Easter dawn liturgical flow - we will light our focal candle from the small, scattered flames that will have been burning through this long Eastertide.
Whenever it might fall in the calendar, what we are journeying towards is surely Pentecost: a moment both of gathering and of sending out. Pentecost is the day when the disciples were 'all gathered together in one place'. Pentecost is also the day when they are driven out, by the Spirit, into the streets of the city, to join the crowds and discover that the 'normal' divisions (of language and nationality) had fallen away and that they could be heard and understood, and that the message of Easter made sense. Pentecost is surely where we're heading.
The Spirit that persists
But that would be to get ahead of ourselves. Shelly Rambo again: 'Between death and life, the Spirit's witness can be described in two movements: tracking the undertow and sensing life. These movements of Spirit attend to suffering that remains long after an event is over. They also witness to forms of life that appear tenuous and fragile... The Spirit persists... This persistence is an oscillation between death and life, tracking what remains and sensing a way ahead. This persistence, this abiding, is the witness not just to death's remaining but to love's survival.' (Rambo, Spirit and Trauma, p.160)
This dual movement that Rambo charts is worth letting unfold further. The 'undertow', she reminds us, 'refers to an underlying current that lies beneath the surface of the water. Though waves move toward the shore, the undercurrent pulls in the opposite direction. This pull is not visible, but its force can be great'. Rambo calls us 'to track the movements of the Spirit's witness to the undertow, to death's pull in life' and, with Catherine Keller, to a theology of 'the deep' - the Hebrew word is tehom - that 'attends to the losses, grief, and the chaos of life', realities which 'remain but, in and through the Spirit, … are witnessed'. 'Tracking' the undertow involves 'discerning what does not rise to the surface. It accounts for the force of institutions and persons that do not want certain truths to be told.' (Rambo, p.161)
But alongside 'tracking the undertow', Rambo calls us also to the work of 'sensing life', recalling Jesus' promise that the Spirit will lead the disciples into truth: 'Jesus tells the disciples that they will not understand the events that will take place; but they will, in the Spirit, be guided in relationship to them'. The 'life' that is to be 'sensed' is 'not miraculously new but instead is a mixed and tenuous process of remaining' - the Spirit's witness is 'to forms of life that are less discernible, more inchoate and tenuous, than visible and secure'. 'Sensing' requires 'embodied practices of imagination', 'involves an encounter with what is not recognizable. In this encounter, there is a movement to reorient oneself in relationship to what is not immediately familiar. This movement involves interplay of the senses in an attempt to find one's way. Sensing is a way of aligning oneself in the face of what is unknown... trying to grasp a sense of things in the darkness, attempting to move toward life without knowing its shape' (p.162-3).
What will 'remain' for good, out of this crisis - what will remain in/of our communities, what will remain in/of our society, what will remain in/of our church - we do not know, can not know, as yet, what it will look like, however confident our community-building theory, our politics, our ecclesiology might usually be. But the work Rambo calls us to - of 'tracking the undertow', 'discerning what does not rise to the surface'; of 'sensing life', 'attempting to move toward life without knowing its shape' - is a labour of love that can, and must, begin in the present, however wearily and falteringly we might be able to begin it. This is the work of Easter, 'from the middle', seeking in all our encounters - distanced and fragmented as they inevitably are in the present - to track, sense, discern 'what remains'.
[continued - in Part 4]
Thank you - really appreciated the idea of Easter dawning slowly
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