As we celebrate Eastertide (you've heard this from
me before), I'm not particularly interested in focusing on Jesus' resurrection as an individual anomaly that we have to struggle
to believe in (or not believe in). I'm interested in focusing on the Easter Event as being about how we live in this world
because of our experience of the inexplicable and ongoing miracle of our relationship to Jesus of Nazareth. The great German
poet Rainer Maria Rilke captures the task for me:
We must accept our reality as vastly as we
possibly can; everything, even
the unprecedented, must be possible within
it. This is in the end the only
kind of courage that is required of us: the
courage to face the strangest,
most unusual, most inexplicable experiences
that can meet us. The fact
that people have in this sense been cowardly
has done infinite harm to
life; the experiences that are called "apparitions,"
the whole so-called
"spirit world," death, all these Things that
are so closely related to us, have
through our daily defensiveness been so entirely
pushed out of life that
the senses with which we might have been able
to grasp them have
atrophied. To say nothing of God. But the
fear of the inexplicable has not
only impoverished the reality of the individual;
it has also narrowed the
relationship between one human being and another,
which has as it were
been lifted out of the riverbed of infinite
possibilities and set down in a
fallow place on the bank, where nothing happens,
For it is not only
indolence that causes human relationships
to be repeated from case to
case with such unspeakable monotony and boredom;
it is timidity before
any new, inconceivable experience, which we
don't think we can deal
with. But only someone who is ready for everything,
who doesn't exclude
any experience, even the most incomprehensible,
will live the relationship
with another person as something alive and
will himself sound the depths
of his own being.
