Forget about the afterlife.
Resurrection is not for dead people.
It’s for those of us most alive.
It’s the way we live when we’ve gotten over
being afraid of dying, maybe because
we took to heart the raising of Jesus and maybe
because our life got ripped out of our hands.
Either way God stayed with us and gave us life,
raised us up out of the coffin of our individualism
and its brittle, consuming survival,
and made us part of the Risen Body of Christ,
alive with a life that’s irrevocable, and such a gift
that we’ve gotten over death as a thing and now
we live not in the afterlife but this very life,
the afterlife of what we’re no longer afraid of,
totally free to love no matter what.
Resurrection is the unkillableness of love
that nothing can stop, not even death and despair.
Resurrection is when we love to the bitter end
even when it’s really bitter, and really the end,
and God carries it on anyway in a grace we can’t see
because the love we have is actually God
and God is eternal. Resurrection is what gives us
the audacity to get all up in the devil’s face
with joy and kindness and hope,
and laugh at all his threats, and love people
as if there were no tomorrow precisely because
there always is one, and it’s always God.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
April 27, 2020