Sunday Afternoon Prayer: A Prayer of Resurrection

It has been a long winter for me, and a friend knew I needed some beauty in my life.  She gave me Mary Oliver’s newest book of poetry, A Thousand Mornings: Poems.  In this book I found a poem that gave me an image and a prayer for my life.  It points to the hope of resurrection, which makes it a good prayer for today.

Hurricane

It didn’t behave

like anything you had

ever imagined.  The wind

tore at the trees, the rain

fell for days slant and hard.

The back of the hand

to everything.  I watched

the trees bow and their leaves fall

and crawl back into the earth.

As though, that was that.

This was one hurricane

I lived through, the other one

was of a different sort, and

lasted longer.  Then

I felt my own leaves giving up and

falling.  The back of the hand to

everything.  But listen now to what happened

to the actual trees;

toward the end of the summer they

pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.

It was the wrong season, yes,

but they couldn’t stop.  They

looked like telephone poles and didn’t

care.  And after the leaves came

blossoms.  For some things

there are no wrong seasons.

Which is what I dream of for me. 

              

The Waiting of Holy Saturday

Entrance to Church of the Sepulchre,
where tradition says Jesus died and was buried

Today is Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  I keep seeing things on Facebook starting to celebrate Easter, and it seems too soon for me.  I wonder what that it was like for the women and disciples on the day after Jesus died.

I imagine them huddled together, maybe in the same upper room where just a few days before they had celebrated Passover together or maybe they went back to Mary, Martha, and Lazarus’ home in Bethany.  It was the Sabbath, so maybe they went to the local synagogue to pray.  I wonder if they could get the words off their tongue, or if they just got stuck in their throat.  Or maybe they stayed at home so the religious authorities wouldn’t decide to come for them next.

They were grieving.  There was no other choice.  They couldn’t know that when the women went to the tomb the next morning, they would find it empty.  They couldn’t even dream that it would be a possibility.  And so they waited, full of grief and questions.  Unsure of what was happening.  Unable to see beyond the darkness.

There are times in life that feel like that day.  When darkness and questions surround us and we can’t see what the future might hold.  Times of waiting and wondering, when we can’t see beyond the darkness that surrounds us.  

For the women and the disciples, God was working in an amazing way.  Preparing to change the world with the resurrection.  But they couldn’t see that yet. 

This week, I found this quote: "We thought waiting was a parenthesis. It was not. God was working, only we couldn't see it" (The Emotionally Healthy Church by Peter Scazzero, pg. 173).  God was working on Holy Saturday.  I trust that God works in the dark times of our lives, the times that feel like parenthesis, the times we can’t see beyond the darkness. 

I don’t want to skip to celebrating the resurrection yet, because the times of waiting and wondering are important.  They are times that the Holy Spirit can work in us, preparing for new things to come.       

Photo by Michael Plutchok, used under a Creative Commons License.  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_Talit,_Keffiyeh_and_Palestinian_scraf.jpg