Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message
April 17, 2013
Sara Miles on
Resurrection
Here is a short snippet from Sara Miles’ fine book, Take this Bread. She describes her feelings after
the return of a friend, Martin, who she thought had died but instead had
surprisingly recovered from a deadly illness.
“I didn’t believe in
miracles. And yet I had begun
to believe in healing. I saw
you could be changed, opened to experiencing your life differently, made
more whole, even as your body was falling apart. That you could be healed from fear
by touch, even when you remained sick.
“And I had begun to believe
in resurrection. I didn’t
mean, by resurrection, having Martin stand up alive from the operating
table and walk: I saw no cause and effect between our prayers together and
his improbable recovery.
Resurrection didn’t mean what I still yearned for in my loneliest
moments: to see my best friend, Douglas; … or my beloved father
materialize again, even for just a moment, next to me. I actually couldn’t imagine that I
would see them again, in the flesh, in a drift of pink clouds in a place
called heaven. Resurrection,
to me, was mysterious and true in a way I could glimpse only for a second,
before my mind refused to stretch that far. It passed, as the Bible said,
human understanding. But I
sensed that it had to do with time, like the time Marshall lay in my lap
and we were both present and connected. It was about eternity available in
a fully lived instant” (p. 231).
Faith is a gradual, partial thing. Faithfulness is living out and
responding to the small glimpses of the true, the beautiful, and the
health-giving life behind our lives that God graces us with from time to
time. If you cannot believe
in God hearing and answering prayers, or in the resurrection of Jesus, or
in a general resurrection of the dead, then trust the calming effect of
prayer on your worries, and the glimpses of God’s grace and of
resurrection you see in your lives.
Do not try to work up a condition of belief; such efforts are
doomed to fail or produce contrived and inauthentic results. True faith comes naturally as a
gift from God, sometimes in a massive and life changing flash of insight,
sometimes in bits and pieces, the small dim glimpses in the world we see
about us of the bright unseen world.
Grace and Peace,
Fr.
Tony+
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