Four days. Four life-changing days. They were days in which the marvelous mystery of God’s redemptive plan was revealed—and the course of humanity was forever altered. Spanning Thursday to Sunday, the Easter miracle provides every man, woman, and child the occasion to stop and reflect upon the flesh-and-blood meaning of the Father’s great love and the Son’s great sacrifice. And who better can help us stop and reflect than those whose gifts help communicate the depth of that twofold mystery in the ordinariness of everyday life?
In this special section, four gifted writers—Walter Wangerin, Jr., Virginia Stem Owens, Eugene Peterson, and Philip Yancey—each reflect on a single day of the Easter drama. Their personal experiences reveal anew the power and meaning of love and sacrifice, death and resurrection—eternal life.
WALTER WANGERIN JR.
How young I was at the period of my crisis, I do not remember. Young enough to crawl beneath the pews. Short enough to stand up on the seats of pews, when the congregation arose to sing hymns, and still be hidden. Old enough to hold womanhood in awe, but much too young to tease women. Old enough to want to see Jesus. Young enough to believe that the mortal eye could see Jesus.
I wanted to see Jesus. There was the core of my crisis. I mean, see him as eyewitnesses are able to see: his robe and the rope at his waist, his square, strong hands, the sandals on his feet, his tumble of wonderful hair, and the love in his eyes, deep love in his eyes—for me!
For it seemed to me in those days that everyone else in my church must be seeing him on a regular basis, and that I alone was denied the sight of my Lord. They were a contented people, confident and unconcerned. I, on the other hand, I felt like a little Cain among the Christians, from whom the dear Lord Jesus chose to hide particularly. No one seemed to tremble in the Holy House of the Lord. But I …
Well, the knowledge of my peculiar exile came all in a rush one Sunday, when the preacher was preaching a mumblin’ monotone of a sermon. One sentence leaped from his mouth and seized me: “We were eyewitnesses,” he said. Eyewitnesses. We! I sat straight up and tuned my ear. This seemed, suddenly, the special ability of a special people to which the preacher belonged: to be eyewitnesses. Who’s this we? What did they see? I glanced at my mother beside me, whose expression was not astonished. Evidently, eyewitnessing was familiar stuff to her. She was one of the we. I took a fast survey of the faces behind me. Sleepy-eyed, dulleyed, thoughtful-eyed; but no one’s eyes were dazzled. None widened in wonder at what the preacher said. So then, they all belonged to the we: eyewitnesses, every one of them! “We,” the preacher was saying, “have seen the majesty of Jesus …”
No!
I didn’t say that out loud. But I thought it very loud.
No, but I haven’t! This was a stinging realization. I haven’t seen Jesus! My eyes were never witnesses!
All at once the stained-glass picture of a praying Jesus wasn’t enough for me. The Jesuses in my Sunday-school books were merely pictures and a kind of mockery. I did not doubt that the Lord Jesus was actually there in his house somewhere—but where?
Even before the preacher was finished preaching, I dropped to the floor and peered through a forest of ankles, front and back and side to side—seeking Jesus perhaps on his hands and knees, a Jesus crawling away from me in a robe and a rope. But I saw nothing unusual, and earned nothing for my effort except the disapproval of my mother, who hauled me up by my shoulder, but who probably wouldn’t understand my panic since she was one of the we.
For the rest of that service I sought in the faces around me some anxiety to match my anxious heart. But everyone sang the hymns with a mindless ease. I searched my memory for some dim moment when I might have caught a glimpse of Jesus. There was none. No, he’d never appeared to me. But he must be here, for hadn’t he appeared to these others? Then why would he hide from me? Did he hate me? And where, in this temple of the Lord, would he be hiding?
Thus, my crisis.
Sunday after Sunday I looked for Jesus. I ransacked the rooms of a very large church. I acquainted myself with kitchens and closets and boiler rooms—checking for half-eaten sandwiches, a vagrant sandal, signs of the skulking Lord.
One Sunday, exactly when the preacher stood chanting liturgy at the altar, I experienced a minor revelation. It seemed to me that the bold bass voice of the chant was not the preacher’s at all, whose speaking voice was rather nasal and whining. It seemed that someone else was singing instead. For the preacher faced away from us, and the altar was as long as a man is tall, and the wooden altar (ah-ha!) was built in the shape of a monstrous coffin. Therefore, the real singer was lying inside the altar. And who else would that secret singer be—but Jesus?
I kept a shrewd eye on the altar for the rest of the service, to be sure that he didn’t escape. And after the service I took my heart in my hands and crept into the chancel, crept right up to the altar, certain that the Christ was still reclining therein, waiting in his tomb, as it were, till all the people departed.
Suddenly—Ah-ha!—I popped round to the back of the altar and peered inside its hollow cavity and saw … not Jesus. I saw a broken chair, a very old hymnal, and dust, dust, dust as thick as the centuries of human toil and misery.
For my restless soul there was no peace. I was not suffering a crisis of faith; never once did I doubt the truth or the presence of Jesus. Mine was a crisis of love—or perhaps of knowledge. Either the Lord had decided to avoid me particularly, or else I was stupid, the only one who did not know in which room the dear Lord Jesus abided. There must be one holier than all other rooms, one room so sacred and terrible that no one mentioned it, except in whispers and elders’ meetings. Not the preacher’s office. Dreadful as that room was, I’d already scouted it. Not the sacristy, nor the loft for the organ pipes, nor the choir room (which smelled of human sweat). A holiest of holies, a …
All at once I knew which room! My heart leaped into my throat with joy and fear at once. It was a room whose door I passed ever with a tingling hush, whose mysterious interior I had never seen. Horrified by my own bravery, but desperate to see my Jesus, I determined to venture the door of that room, and to enter.
And so it came to pass that, during a particular worship service, during a very long sermon, I claimed the privilege of children and left my mother in the pew and crept downstairs all by myself to The Forbidden Room, the only room left where Jesus could be hiding: The Women’s Rest Room.
Oh, how hot my poor face burned at my own audacity, at the danger I was daring. If the holiest place of the temple in old Jerusalem might kill an unworthy priest, how would this room of taboos receive a little boy? I swallowed and panted and sweat. But I wanted to see Jesus. I lifted my hand and I knocked.
“Jesus? Are you in there?”
No answer. None.
So I screwed my little courage together, and I sucked a breath, and I pushed on the door, and it actually opened.
“Hello? Hello? Jesus—?”
I do not remember whether that was on a Maundy Thursday. It might well have been. It should have been.
With a deep, funereal gloom I returned to my mother. With a deathly sense of finalities I took the pew beside her. I was as woeful as any disciple who heard the Lord say, “I am leaving you, and where I go you cannot come.” Abandoned!
Jesus does not abide in women’s rest rooms. Mirrors are there, surrounded by lights and suffused by incense. But not Jesus.
Jesus was nowhere in this church for me.
I was a most sorrowful disciple. Lord? Is it I? Did I somehow betray you that you would leave me alone in the night?
With grim, remorseful eyes, I watched the service proceed. Perhaps my senses were intensified by sorrow, for I saw things as I had not seen them before. Things moved slowly, burdened by unusual weight and meaning. The preacher—far, far in the front of the church, robed in black and white—was lifting bread and mumbling. Then he was lifting an enormous cup and mumbling some more, mysterious words I was likely never to understand: “… this cup is the New Testament in my blood.…”
Blood. That seemed a grave word altogether.
“Do this,” he was murmuring, “in remembrance of me.”
Then people began to arise and to file forward. There was the deep timbre of song all around me. People were devout. Incomprehensible things were happening.
Then my mother got up. In marvelous docility, she walked forward down the aisle, away from me. My mother is a strong woman. She could haul me from the ground in one hand. This humility, then, was strange, and I stood up on the pew to watch her.
Far in the front of the church my mother diminished, almost to the size of a child. And then, to my astonishment, she did childish things: She kneeled down. She bowed her head. She let the preacher feed her! This was my mother, who knew how to make me eat! Like a little baby, she let the preacher lower the cup to her lips and give her a drink. And then she stood, and they bowed to each other; and almost, as it were, upon a cushion of air my mother floated back to me.
Oh, this was a different woman. My mighty mother seemed infinitely soft.
And when she sat beside me and lowered her head to pray, I actually smelled the difference too. She had returned in a cloud of sweetness. I tasted this exquisite scent deep in my throat, and like a puppy found myself sniffing closer and closer to my mother’s face—for the odor was arising from her nostrils, from her breathing, from within her.
Suddenly she looked up to see my face just inches from hers.
“What’s the matter?” she whispered, and a whole bouquet of the odor overwhelmed me.
“Mama!” I breathed in wonder. “What’s that?”
She wrinkled her forehead. “What’s what?” she said with frankincense.
“That,” I said. I wanted to tug at her mouth. “That smell. What do I smell?”
“What I drank.”
“But what is it? What’s inside you?”
She began to flip for a hymn in the hymnal. “Oh, Wally,” she said casually, “that’s Jesus. It’s Jesus inside of me.”
Jesus!
My mother then joined the congregation in singing a hymn with a hundred verses. But I kept standing on the pew beside her and grinning and grinning at her profile. Jesus! I put out my hand and rested it on my mother’s shoulder. She glanced up, saw that my face was exploding with grins, gave me a pat and a smile, then went back to singing.
But Jesus! She told me where Jesus was at! Not far away from me at all. Closer to me than I ever thought possible. In my mama! He never had been hiding. I’d been looking wrong. My mighty mother was his holy temple all along.
So I shocked her by throwing my arms around her neck and hugging her with the gladness of any disciple who has seen the Lord alive again.
So she hauled my little self down to the pew beside her and commanded silliness to cease; but I didn’t mind. A boy can grin as silently as the sky.
And so it was that two commands of our Lord, delivered on Maundy Thursday, the night before he died, were twined into one for me. “Do this,” he said of his Holy Supper, “in remembrance of me”—and in so doing his death and his presence would be proclaimed to all the world. My mother did it; she ate and drank; and as her faith received her Savior truly, she bore the Lord in my direction, and I met him in her.
And the second command was this: “Love one another.” My mama did that too. And so there were two disciples side by side on the same pew. And one of them was grinning.
Walter Wangerin, Jr., is a former pastor and the author of the critically acclaimed Book of the Dun Cow (Simon and Schuster) and most recently Miz Lil and the Chronicles of Grace (Harper & Row).
VIRGINIA STEM OWENS
Although it has not happened since 1913, and won’t happen again till 2008, Easter can come as early as March 23, just barely inside the official limits of spring. But whether Holy Week falls in March or April makes little difference in Texas. It’s always springtime here by then.
People like the dogwood to be in full bloom for Good Friday. They like to point out to one another how the dogwood’s white blossom, shaped like an ivory Maltese cross, each point dented and tinged with red, is an emblem of Christ’s crucifixion wounds. They even send one another greeting cards bearing the so-called Legend of the Dogwood, which links the tree with the wood used for the cross.
The dogwood trees are usually blooming at about the same time I teach college sophomores the Housman poem that begins,
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Most of my students have never seen cherry trees in bloom. The Texas weather is too mild and genial for the cherry’s hearty nature, so I rely on the dogwood tree to furnish them with a reasonable facsimile of Housman’s vision. The decorative dogwood chooses to display its white blossoms along the highways precisely when they will be the most conspicuous—before their own leaves unfurl and before the other, taller trees have put on their new leaves. Thus, the shadowy recesses of the winter-bare forests provide the perfect background for the white blossoms.
The only rival to the dogwood’s ostentation during Holy Week is the redbud, also known as “the Judas tree.” Most flowering trees bloom only from the tips of their twigs, but the redbud’s small, purplish pink blossoms pop out all over its smooth, silvery skin, even directly from the branches and the trunk. A popular horticulturist calls the redbud “the colorful doll of our hardwood forests” and compares its flowers to “little dancing shoes.”
People in this part of Texas consider a perfect Holy Week one in which the dogwood’s dramatic appearance exactly overlaps the redbud’s rouging of the Texas roadsides with its smudges of pink. And as if the native flowering trees weren’t enough, bluebonnets smear across acres of pastureland like mosaics of lapis lazuli, punctuated by saffron Indian paintbrush.
They are very beautiful, these blossom-laden trees and fields of blowing flowers, heartbreakingly beautiful. And I have plenty of opportunity to have my heart broken as I drive twice a week to the university, 60 miles away. The little two-lane highway dips and twists over creeks and around farms that used to grow cotton but now are grazed by crossbred cattle.
Some of the descendants of the people who used to pick the cotton still live along this road or in the tiny towns of Shiro and Roan’s Prairie. Their decrepit houses lean and gape at the surrounding woods and fields. They stay, the people who live in these hungry houses, because they are tied to the dogwood and redbud, just as surely as they were once tied to the cotton. Every spring they wait for the dogwood’s appearing, and its glory, sudden and stunning, gets them through another year. So they stay on in their obliquely slanting houses, sustained by social security or ADC checks, rather than move to the city.
I suppose I’m one of the few people who actually like Lent. I like it in the same way I like throwing away last year’s student essays and clearing out my file cabinets. During Lent some deep crack opens in my soul, down which I like to shovel the dirt and debris that has accumulated over the year. The sly self-deceptions, the dogged willfulness, the witless pain I’ve left in my wake that I’ve been too busy to notice or repair. From back in February, before the blooming starts, 40 days always looks like little enough time for this task. The penitential season is for clearing away accumulated garbage, and I usually set to work with a will.
But three years ago, late in March, I was driving to work in College Station on Good Friday through a miasma of dogwood and redbud and not feeling good about it at all. It was a sparkling, resplendent day. Thickets of wild plum threw up their dark arms in dreamy clouds of white. Primroses, tenderly pink and gold, filled up the ditches along the road.
I was not pleased. This was not a penitential landscape. Good Friday is not the time for beauty.
Yet here I was on my way to teach a bunch of 19-year-olds—most of whose minds were undefended by dogma, half of whom probably had no idea what Good Friday was all about—a poem that told them they should have their socks knocked off by the ersatz cherry trees blooming all about them. They were probably a good deal more concerned at present with their own hormones than the beauties of the woodland ride. But was converting them from hedonists to aesthetes any improvement?
I drove along, vaguely offended by the fields of flowers in full cry and the hillsides spangled with Easter white. This is the week, I thought, the Savior of the world dies. This is the day when all that is good and true goes down to suffer death at the hands of the arrogant, those swollen with the pride of power. And what is the world doing? What is the earth, its own life threatened by those same enemies, doing? Did it care? Was it grieving? No. It was shouldering aside the clods and the husks of its dead self in order to break into life. This unseemly riot had been going on for at least five days, in fact, ever since Palm Sunday—a term that sounded almost pagan itself. Another tree, another symbol of life had been flaunted in the face of suffering and death on that day, too.
As I watched the land roll by, it was as though this week, this so-called holy week, and this day, this tragically good Friday, were being mocked by the triumph of a fickle and unregarding life—life heedlessly, ruthlessly springing forth with relish, ignoring the torn placenta, the shriveling umbilical cord. Life ignoring the violated flesh and choked-off breath to which it owed its very existence, winking at the blood and muck from which it rose. Disregarding the cost.
I started up the range of hills that form the watershed of the Navasota River, glad to leave the flagrant fields behind me for a while. Dark pines rise up beside the highway there, shading out the understory trees and making vertical walls through which the road cuts toward Carlos, a community of itinerant coal miners who work in shifts for the regional power plant.
This was what Good Friday should be like, I thought. Somber and stripped. And here among the austere pines I could concentrate on what this day was about, could consider my own part in this necessary Good Friday.
All week I had been reading the penitential psalms and examining my sins. The exercise had been a satisfying one since my sins were clear and undeniable, and what was required of me to be rid of them was just as clear.
But now it was Good Friday. What did you do after you’d confessed all your sins and cleaned out all your closets? I took one last look around the bare cell of my heart for some forgotten fault, at the same time being careful to avoid the danger of manufacturing contrition for its own sake. Scruples, the small, sharp stones that score an overactive conscience, can also lead to the sin of self-indulgence, I knew.
But what else was there to do on Good Friday? Already, on this spring morning, as I was descending the hills toward the river, Jesus was beginning his climb to Golgotha. What else was there to do? For the women who followed him, “looking on afar off,” for those standing beneath the cross, what was there left to do?
Nothing. Quite obviously just nothing. The soldier who confessed, “Truly this man was the Son of God,” and the one who pierced his Savior’s side with the spear, both were equally helpless there, I suddenly saw. Because Good Friday is the day when you can do nothing. Bewailing and lamenting your manifold sins does not in itself make up for them. Scouring your soul in a frenzy of spring cleaning only sterilizes it; it does not give it life. On Good Friday, finally, we are all, mourners and mockers alike, reduced to the same impotence. Someone else is doing the terrible work that gives life to the world. Good Friday is the day we can do nothing at all.
No matter that I repudiated my old transgressions. On Good Friday, all one’s fine feelings count for nothing. If there was to be anything new about life after today, it had to come from some source beyond myself. That is why there was nothing more to do on Good Friday. Our hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness. His blood and his righteousness.
I passed the intersection at Carlos with its one blinking, yellow light and crossed the bridge over the pipeline that carries the coal slurry to the plant a few miles further on. From there the road bent northward to cross the river.
As I broke out of the pines and into the fertile bottomland, the spring again assaulted me. The land below, emerging from the tendrils of morning fog, was a tangle of luxuriant fertility. Clouds of pink and white, effulgent enough to inebriate the soberest soul, lured one’s line of vision into the darker trees. Acres of bluebonnets streaked up the red clay banks of the river. The earth, on this Good Friday, cast forth its life, heedless of the sacrifice that sustained it. Its callous, regardless life, sucked from the source it can never repay, never replenish. Continually drawing on the death of its Savior to live. Just like me.
Virginia Stem Owens teaches English at Texas A and M University in College Station, Texas. She has written several books, including Feast of Families (Macmillan) and Wind River Winter (Zondervan).
EUGENE H. PETERSON
Prettyfeather placed two buffalo-head nickels on the countertop for her Holy Saturday purchase: smoked ham hocks; two for a nickel. In the descending hierarchy of Holy Saturday foods, ham hocks were at the bottom.
Large hickory-smoked hams held center position in the displays in my father’s butcher shop. Colorful cardboard cutouts provided by salesmen from the meat-packing companies of Armour, Hormel, and Silverbow all showed variations on a theme: a father at an Easter Sunday dinner table carving a ham, surrounded by an approving wife and scrubbed, expectant children.
Off to the side of these displays were stacks of the smaller and cheaper picnic hams (though a picnic ham is not, properly speaking, a ham at all, but the shoulder of the pig). There were no company-supplied pictures, nor even brand names on them. On Holy Saturday customers crowded into our store, responding to the sale signs painted on the plate-glass windows fronting Main Street and sorting themselves into upper and lower socio-economic strata: the affluent buying honey-cured, hickory-smoked hams, and the less-than-affluent buying unadjectived picnics.
Prettyfeather was the only person I ever remember buying ham hocks—gristly on the inside and leathery on the outside, but smoked and therefore emanating the aroma of a feast—on Holy Saturday. She was the only Indian I knew by name in the years of my childhood and youth, although I grew up in Indian country. Every Saturday she came into our store to make a small purchase: pickled pig’s feet, chitlins, blood sausage, head cheese, pork liver.
She was always by herself. She wore moccasins and was wrapped in a blanket, even in the warmest weather. The coins she used for her purchases were in a leather pouch that hung like a goiter at her neck. Her face was the color and texture of the moccasins on her feet.
Indian was a near-mythological word for me, full of nobility and beauty, filled out with stories of the hunt and sacred ceremony. Somehow it never occurred to me that this Indian squaw who came into our store every Saturday and bought barely edible meats belonged to that nobility.
While she made her purchases from us, and did whatever other shopping she did on these Saturdays in town, her husband and seven or eight other Indian braves sat on apple boxes in the alley behind the Pastime Bar and passed a jug of Thunderbird wine. Several jugs, actually. As I made back-door deliveries of steaks and hamburger to the restaurants along Main Street, I passed up and down the alley several times each Saturday and watched the empty jugs accumulate. Late in the evening, Bennie Odegaard, son of one of the bar owners and a little older than me, would pull the braves into his dad’s pickup truck and drive them out south of town to their encampment along the Stillwater River and dump them out.
I don’t know how Prettyfeather got back to that small cluster of tarpaper shacks and teepees. She walked, I guess. Carrying her small purchases. On Holy Saturday she carried four ham hocks.
I had never heard of any Saturday designated as holy. It was simply Saturday. If, once a year, precision was required, it was “the Saturday before Easter.” It was one of the heaviest workdays of the year. Beginning early in the morning, I carried the great, fragrant hams shipped from Armour in Spokane, Hormel in Missoula, and Silverbow in Butte, and arranged them symmetrically in pyramids. We had advertised all week long. Saturday was the commercial climax to the week. Holiness was put on hold till Sunday. Saturday was for working hard and making money.
It was a day when the evidence of hard work and its consequence—money—became publicly apparent. The evidence was especially clear on that particular Saturday, when we sold hundreds of hams to deserving Christians, and four ham hocks to an Indian squaw and her pickup load of drunks.
The Saturday pinned between Good Friday and Easter was one of the high-energy workdays of the year, with no thought of holiness. I grew up in a religious home that believed devoutly in the saving benefits of the death of Jesus and the glorious life of resurrection. But between these two polar events of the faith, we worked a long and lucrative day.
I would have been very surprised, and somewhat unbelieving, to have known that in the very town in which I worked furiously all those unholy Saturdays, there were people besides the Indians who were not working at all, nor spending, but were remembering the despair of a world disappointed in its grandest hopes, entering into the emptiness of death by deliberately emptying the self of illusion and indulgence and self-importance. Keeping vigil for Easter. Watching for the dawn.
And some of them listening to this ancient Holy Saturday sermon from a preacher now unknown: Something strange is happening on earth today, a great silence, and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and hell trembles with fear.
He has gone to search for our first parent, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow the captive Adam and Eve, he who is both God and the son of Eve. The Lord approached them bearing the cross, the weapon that had won him the victory. At the sight of him Adam, the first man he had created, struck his breast in terror and cried out to everyone: “My Lord be with you all.” Christ answered him: “And with your spirit.” He took him by the hand and raised him up, saying: “Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.”
—The reading for Holy Saturday in the Liturgy of the Hours
As it turned out, I interpreted the meaning of the world and the people around me far more in terms of the hard working on Saturday than anything said or sung on Friday and Sunday. Whatever was told me in those years (and I have no reason to doubt that I heard truth), what I absorbed in my bones was a liturgical rhythm in which the week reached its climax in a human workday, the results of which were enjoyed on Easter.
Those assumptions provided the grid for a social interpretation of the world around me: Saturday was the day for hard work, or for displaying its results, namely, money. If someone appeared neither working nor spending on Saturday, there was something wrong, catastrophically wrong. The Indians attempting a hung-over Easter feast on ham hocks were the most prominent exhibit.
It was a view of life shaped by “The Gospel According to America.” The rewards were obvious, and I enjoyed them. I still do. Hard work pays off. I learned much in those years that I will never relinquish.
Yet, there was one large omission that set all other truth dangerously at risk: the omission of holy rest. The refusal to be silent. The obsessive avoidance of emptiness. The denial of any experience and any people in the least bit suggestive of godforsakenness.
It was far more than an annual ignorance on Holy Saturday; it was religiously fueled, weekly arrogance. Not only was the Good Friday crucifixion bridged to the Easter resurrection by this day furious with energy and lucrative with reward, but all the gospel truths were likewise set as either introductions or conclusions to the human action that displayed our prowess and our virtue every week of the year. God was background to our business. Every gospel truth was maintained intact and all the human energy was wholly admirable, but the rhythms were all wrong, the proportions wildly skewed. Desolation—and with it companionship with the desolate, from first-century Semites to twentieth-century Indians—was all but wiped from consciousness.
But there came a point at which I was convinced that it was critically important to pay more attention to what God does than what I do; to find daily, weekly, yearly rhythms that would get that awareness into my bones. Holy Saturday for a start. And then, times to visit people in despair, and learn their names, and wait for resurrection.
Embedded in my memory now is this most poignant irony: those seven or eight Indians, with the Thunderbird empties lying around, drunk in the alley behind the Pastime Bar on Saturday afternoon, while we Scandinavian Christians worked diligently late into the night, oblivious to the holiness of the day. The Indians were in despair, religious despair, something very much like the Holy Saturday despair narrated in the Gospels. Their way of life had come to nothing, the only buffalo left to them engraved on nickels, a couple of which one of their squaws had paid out that morning for four bony ham hocks. The early sacredness of their lives was a wasteland; and they, godforsaken as they supposed, drugged their despair with Thunderbird and buried their dead visions and dreams in the alley behind the Pastime, ignorant of the God at work beneath their emptiness.
Eugene H. Peterson is pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Maryland. His latest book is Reversed Thunder: The Revelation of John and the Praying Imagination (Harper & Row).
PHILIP YANCEY
My earliest memories from childhood have in common a single, overwhelming quality: fear.
I was not yet four when I awoke in the middle of the night to a wild pummeling at the door. Mother, in her bathrobe, unfastened the chain to let in a hysterical woman, then slammed and locked the door just in time. The woman’s drunken husband was chasing her with a jagged, broken bottle.
For the next half-hour I lay in bed and listened to the sounds: inside, the woman’s blubbery sobs; outside, the man’s loud threats punctuated by the blows of his fist on our door and the shatter of glass from a bottle hurled against our brick wall. Then policemen came, and the light from their squad car swept across our apartment, eerily lighting in red the faces of neighbors who had gathered just outside.
Another memory: my mother’s stern, mysterious warnings against a “nasty, nasty man” who had been seen in the neighborhood offering candy to little boys and girls. “Don’t you ever go near him,” she said, gripping my arm as if I already had. “Don’t ever go beyond the swing set in the backyard.”
The polio epidemic of 1950 had widowed my mother at the age of 26, and only now, as an adult looking back, can I sense the hardship she bore trying to rear two sons in a grim “white trash” housing project near Atlanta.
When I was five, we left that project for the country town of Ellenwood, a move that crossed a psychic distance from Charles Dickens to Mark Twain. We now lived on a divided dirt road, with a colonnade of trees running down its center, in a house that was connected to no one else’s. My memories of that year come back in happy waves. The freight train that derailed, spilling mountains of bright green watermelons for us kids to climb, slide bumpily down, then lob at each other. The mule next door who gratefully ate all the too-large and too-bitter cucumbers from our garden. My mongrel dog, Buster Brown, who disgraced himself by wandering too close to an open septic tank. (No amount of raw meat would lure him up a slanted board, and we despaired of Buster’s fate until a neighbor man, genuinely heroic, waded in to rescue him.)
In that house I first learned to ride a bike, and to read, and catch a baseball, and climb a tree, and swing out over a creek on a rope. And it was there one Easter Sunday that I learned the meaning of one of the most terrible words in the English language.
As far back as I can remember, we had a dog. They were all mixed breeds from the dog pound, and since we couldn’t afford distemper shots they rarely lived long. But as soon as one died, another puppy would come along to chase away our grief. They marked my progression through childhood: “Oh, that’s the year we had Rebel, just after Blackie died.”
We never had cats, though, not until we moved to Ellenwood. An aunt in Philadelphia had let cats, scores of them, run wild in her row house, and there my mother had acquired a deep aversion. But finally, our first year in Ellenwood, Mother relented. We got a six-week-old kitten, solid black except for white “boots” on each of her legs—as if she had daintily stepped in a shallow dish of paint. Could she have any name but Boots?
Never was so much loving attention devoted to a kitten. My brother and I resolved to raise a pet so unblemished that our mother would desire a houseful of such sublime creatures. Boots lived in a cardboard box on the screened porch and slept on a pillow stuffed with cedar shavings. Forbidden to bring her inside the house, we spent most waking hours on that porch. Mother insisted that Boots must learn to defend herself before venturing into the huge outdoors, fixing a firm date of Easter Sunday for the kitten’s first foray.
The final days before Easter tried our patience and fanned our longing. At long last the time arrived, the day of Boots’s emergence.
The Georgia sun had already coaxed spring into full bloom. Easter morning began with the obligatory church service, after which we were required to line up like prisoners beside the tulips and daffodils for family pictures. I endured the picture-taking with much squinting and complaining, then yanked off my tie and ran to liberate Boots.
She sniffed her first blade of grass that day, and batted at her first daffodil, and stalked her first butterfly, leaping high in the air and missing. She kept us exuberantly entertained until neighbor kids descended upon us for a prearranged Easter egg hunt.
But when our next-door playmates arrived, the unthinkable happened. Their pet Boston terrier, Pugs, following them into our yard, spied Boots, let out one growl, and charged. I screamed, and we all ran toward Boots. But already Pugs had the tiny kitten in her mouth and was shaking it like a sock. We kids stood in a circle around the scene of violence, shrieking and making threatening motions to scare Pugs off. Helpless, we watched a whirl of flashing teeth and flying tufts of fur. Finally, Pugs dropped the kitten on the grass and trotted off, nonchalantly.
Boots had not yet died. She was mewing softly, and her eyes held a look of terror. Blood oozed from many puncture wounds, and her shiny black coat was flecked with Pugs’s saliva. I prayed desperately that she would survive, and we all begged our parents to rush her to a veterinarian. But a neighbor pointed to the odd way Boots’s head was jerked sideways. “Broken neck,” he pronounced. “She’ll never make it.”
The adults shooed us away, and for many years we did not learn what happened next: they placed Boots in a burlap bag and held her under water in the creek, putting her out of her misery.
I could not have articulated it at the time, but what I learned that Easter under the noonday sun was the ugly word irreversible. All afternoon I prayed for a miracle. No! It can’t be! Tell me it’s not true! Maybe Boots wouldn’t really die. Or maybe she would die but come back—hadn’t the Sunday-school teacher told such a story about Jesus?
Or maybe the whole morning could somehow be erased, rewound, and played over again minus that horrid scene. We could keep Boots on the screened porch forever, never allowing her outside. Or we could talk our neighbors into building a fence for Pugs. A thousand schemes ran through my mind over the next days, until the reality finally won over, and I accepted at last that Boots was dead. Irreversibly dead.
From then on, Easter Sundays in my childhood were stained by the memory of violence and death in the grass. And as the years increased I learned much more about the word irreversible. Once in the woods a friend and I lined up 17 box turtles beside the creek and proceeded to drop heavy boulders on them, laughing as their shells cracked and their insides spurted out. That act of cruelty, my own cruelty, shocked me beyond measure. It defied my deep love of animals, and I long lived under its shadow of shame and guilt. I yearned for some way to erase it, to reverse it.
There followed a whole succession of scenes I likewise wished to reverse: fights with bullies, broken arms, foolish comments in class, unexpected pop quizzes, the inevitable first automobile accident, and all the other minor jolts of growing up, each one underscoring the dreadful word irreversible.
I had not escaped tragedy by moving from the housing project to an idyllic setting on a country lane; I had merely changed the setting where my life, both tragic and joyful, would play itself out. Life is like that for adults as well, I was to learn. We never quite grow used to it, but we concede that life consists of moments of joy and sadness all tossed together in a crazy salad. Over time, the tragedies may wear us down so that we no longer fight them. We grow conditioned to the irreversible.
After years of urban living had ground down my childhood love of nature, I found it suddenly rekindled through my friendship with a young photographer named Bob McQuilkin. I was working as a magazine editor at the time, and Bob seemed determined to drag me out of my stale routine and reintroduce me to the joyous world outside.
Once Bob drove his jeep to my office and insisted that I come see two baby owls he’d just rescued. For months he fussed over those scraggly orphaned owls, chasing barn mice and lizards to feed them, then trying to teach them to hunt on their own, and to fly. (Bob teaching a bird to fly!) They’d flutter in soaking wet from a rainstorm—not wise enough yet to find shelter—and Bob would patiently pull out his electric hair dryer and blow them dry.
Two baby raccoons visited Bob’s house every few days. (And why not? He would fix them an exotic crabmeat omelette.) On warm summer evenings, he opened the skylight above his bed and an obliging bat named Radar would swoop in with free mosquito-extermination services. You simply could not escape reminders of the natural world in Bob’s home—he had built an aquarium into the side of the bathroom wall.
Bob was as fully “alive” as anyone I have ever known. And so when I heard this past October that Bob had died on a scuba-diving assignment in Lake Michigan, I could hardly absorb the news. Bob, dead? It was inconceivable. I could picture Bob doing anything at all—anything but lying still. But that is my last image of him: a 36-year-old body in a blue-plaid flannel shirt lying in a casket. The old, ugly word irreversible came flooding back. I would never ski with Bob again, never sit with him for hours viewing slides, never again eat rattlesnake meat or buffalo burgers at his house.
Susan, his widow, asked me to speak at Bob’s memorial service. Without a doubt, it was the hardest thing I have ever done. When I stood before them, the magazine editors and art directors and family and neighbors and friends, they reminded me of little birds—Bob’s owls—with their mouths open begging for food. Begging for words of solace, for hope. What could I offer them?
I began by telling them what I had been doing the very afternoon Bob was making his last dive. That Wednesday I was sitting, oblivious, in a cafe at the University of Chicago, reading The Quest for Beauty, by Rollo May. In that book the famous therapist recalls scenes from his lifelong search for beauty, among them a visit to Mount Athos, a peninsula of monasteries attached to Greece.
One morning, Rollo May happened to stumble upon the celebration of Greek Orthodox Easter, the tail end of a church service that had been proceeding all night long. Incense hung in the air. The only light came from candles. And at the height of that service, the priest gave everyone present three Easter eggs, wonderfully decorated and wrapped in a veil. “Christos Anesti!” he said—“Christ is risen!” Each person there, including Rollo May, responded according to custom, “He is risen indeed!”
Rollo May writes, “I was seized then by a moment of spiritual reality: what would it mean for our world if He had truly risen?”
I read Rollo May’s question the afternoon that Bob died, and it kept floating around in my mind, hauntingly, after I heard the news. What did it mean for our world that Christ had risen? Why were monks staying up all night to celebrate it? The early Christians had staked everything on the Resurrection, so much so that the apostle Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians, “And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith” (15:14, NIV).
In the cloud of grief over Bob’s death, I began to see the meaning of Easter in a new light. As a five-year-old on Easter Sunday I had learned the harsh lesson of irreversibility. Ironically, now as an adult I saw that Easter actually offered an awesome promise of reversibility. Nothing—no act of childhood cruelty, no experience of shame or remorse, and, no, not even death—was final. Even that could be reversed.
On Friday Jesus’ closest friends had let the relentless crush of history snuff out all their dreams. Two days later, when the crazy rumors about Jesus’ missing body shot through Jerusalem, they couldn’t dare to believe. They were too conditioned to the irreversible. Only personal appearances by Jesus convinced them that something new, absolutely new, had broken out on earth. When that sank in, those same men who had slunk away in fear at Calvary were soon preaching to large crowds in the streets of Jerusalem.
At Bob McQuilkin’s funeral, I rephrased Rollo May’s question in the terms of our own grief. What would it mean for us if Bob rose again? We were sitting in a chapel, numbed by three days of grief and sadness, the weight of death bearing down upon us. What would it be like to walk outside to the parking lot and there, to our utter astonishment, find Bob. Bob! With his bounding walk, his crooked grin, and clear grey eyes.
That image gave me a hint of what Jesus’ disciples felt on the first Easter. They, too, had grieved for three days. But on Sunday they caught a glimpse of something else, a startling clue to the riddle of the universe. Easter hits a new note, a note of hope and faith that what God did once in a graveyard in Jerusalem, he can and will repeat on a grand scale, for the world. For Bob. For us. Against all odds, the irreversible can be reversed.
The German theologian Jürgen Moltmann expresses in a single sentence the great span from Good Friday to Easter. It is, in fact, a summary of human history, past, present, and future: “God weeps with us so that we may someday laugh with him.”
Philip Yancey is editor at large of CHRISTIANITY TODAY and author of Disappointment with God (Zondervan).
