Resurrecting new joy

A quote from www.sacredspace.ie, a Jesuit daily prayer and meditation site:

“Everything has the potential to draw forth from me a fuller love and life.
Yet my desires are often fixed, caught, on illusions of fulfillment.
I ask that God, through my freedom, may orchestrate
my desires in a vibrant loving melody rich in harmony.”

I fear that there will come a time when I will not be able to care for myself and no one else will be there to care for me. Old age, disease, disability; some misfortune will leave me facing discomfort, neglect, suffering, and most terrifying of all, isolation. I think we all, to some degree, have this place, this imaginary desolated place where we see ourselves alone and helpless. There’s a story in Luke about Jesus coming upon a funeral procession (Luke 7:11-17). A woman, a widow is burying her only son. Her son is an adult. She is no longer a young woman. He has died and she is a widow. Her heart is filled with grief overshadowed with fear.

My security today is no more certain than that of the widow in the story. All of my efforts, past, present and future can never be enough. Nothing I do can assure me that I will not someday be left alone and never can I exist without needing someone else. That is one of those facts of life that I ‘know’ but do not believe, or at least I’m not willing to admit to most of the time. I keep holding on to the belief that if I’m smart enough, work hard enough, plan far enough ahead sometime I’ll arrive at that magic day, a day when I’ll look at my retirement account and the calendar and say, “At last, I’ve arrived. I can start living today. I am certain I have enough to live comfortably until the day I die. I can buy all that I need.” I am stuck on an illusion of fulfillment.

Another author writes, “The task of Christianity is not to teach us how to live, but to teach us how to live again and again and again”; to constantly experience rebirth, to let our old beliefs die and let new songs rise in our breasts, to die to our old self and resurrect our new self. It is my task to choose to belief, and to act on my belief, to open myself. Through my freedom, God is then free to act.

In Luke’s story Jesus sees the widow, has compassion for her and tells her, “Do not weep.” The woman is asked to die to her grief and to be open to rebirth, to a rebirth in the presence of his deep and everlasting comfort and compassion. He touches the dead man’s bier, comes in contact with the dead, a strikingly discordant chord for Jews of his time; and commands the dead man, ‘Rise!’ The widow gives birth to joy in new life; not the life that would have been had her son never died, but a new life with a new son, a life metaphorically created in the story with the return to life of her son.

We are the flesh and blood body of the resurrected Christ present here and now. Each day we come in contact with grief, in our own life, in the lives of those around us. We are mournful and fearful. Is it possible that we can resurrect, give life to, something within us, within them, touching us both that will assuage that grief and give birth to a new life, new joy, that through us God may orchestrate a vibrant loving melody rich in harmony?