Practice Resurrection

We used to have a motto in one of our old churches, Practice Resurrection. Making dead things alive again, taking things intended for evil and using them for good instead is something God is doing all the time.

A few years ago, my husband and I read the book American Gods by Neil Gaiman. There is a goddess Ostara, in some dialects Oester, a mother god, who makes the world come back to life again every spring. My friend Meghan wrote recently in her magazine Christ’s Coven, about how historians can’t really find evidence that worship of such a goddess was ever wide spread, and if you don’t subscribe you should. Either way, I am enchanted by the way that all of our different cultures have these stories that tell us the same things. So much religion is built upon distinguishing between my beliefs and yours, but the Christian Bible tells us that God has been making what is most eternally and importantly true about them clear to us through nature from the beginning, so it’s not surprising that most of us attribute the same characteristics to our Creator.

My household income is usually not enough to cover all of our expenses properly. I am constantly scraping and borrowing from this for that and having to pay it back. Most of the time we end up with a credit card balance that we pay off with our tax credits and then have a little left over. For the first few months we may exceed our pay check in expenses, but we slowly dip it out of this surplus. This week I got a bill for our escrow analysis. It seems our home owner’s insurance increased more than our mortgage company anticipated last year, and we owe the balance. It’s everything left in our savings - the surplus we would have been using to get by for the next several months. It’s gone before most people have even filed their taxes. I was sewing for a client when I got this email, and I immediately quit. I felt nauseated. I went and got in bed with my husband, who likes to sit there during the day time, and I cried. I felt, in my body, like I was physically in a hole being buried alive, squinting and spitting the dirt that keeps hitting me in the face as I try ineffectually to climb out. I basically quit for the day. I stayed in bed and felt too heavy to get up. Inside I was still scrambling so frantically that my actual body didn’t have anything left.

I woke up the next morning with this thought on my mind, “Creator takes everything intended for evil, and works it for good instead.” Now, if you are starting to get skeptical that I am going to try to feed you some holy feel good schpeel, I don’t see or feel this any more than you do. This felt deeply true in my soul as Creator’s eternal project, but not something that I see being completed right now. Still, yesterday, I did nothing. I did not move money around, pay any bills, or find some miraculous or clever way to make everything okay. I just got up and did the work in front of me. I finished my client’s outfit, fighting with my machine every step of the way. I wrapped it up as beautifully as I could and wrote a message of gratitude to go with it, and I dropped it in the mail. I bought my kids cereal milk, and forgot to buy more cough syrup. I just kept steady. Last night as I closed my eyes, I felt a peaceful voice, Even though we are working hard, that savings is not money we worked for. When it is gone we will continue to do the work in front of us, and continue to depend on God for each new day. Essentially, nothing will change.

My pastor friend, Penny, is always saying that what humans do is try to set up systems that will just keep on running. We think if we can just pick the right system. The right religion. The right political ideology. If we get it right then it will just take care of itself, just keep on ticking. I always think of the saying, “set it and forget it.” So many stories in the Bible, and in the world around us, show us that it hasn’t worked yet, and never will. We will never be self reliant. We will never find the system that just stays right forever. The good news is, we were never intended to. Creator is always there, waiting for us to recognize our dependence. They are all love waiting for us to come receive.

I had this mantra last year, trying to fight my scarcity mentality and compulsion to shop for fixes, “I am already connected to the source of every good thing.” My word was flow, and I imagined that as abundance, a gush. I imagined Creator finally breaking through our struggle to keep the wheel turning and just flooding us with blessings and provision. What I really learned about flow is that it’s a lot of recognizing my own emptiness, clearing my own junk out of the way, and staying connected to that source.

All this is to say that I am really feeling that meme lately that says, when you feel you are being buried, you are actually being planted. You are a seed. I am so dependent on resurrection. Nothing in all of creation is meant to set up and last forever. Everything dies and is renewed, over and over. I’m not sure that resurrection is something I practice, so much as a gift I receive. What takes practice is trusting it. I have to practice to remember that when I feel like I am dying, life will come again. When I feel like I am bring cracked open that is growth breaking toward the surface. My life depends on the soil and the rain and the sun and the other organisms I share an ecosystem with.

I just finished Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver this week. It was a slog, even though I love Kingsolver, but it was worth it in the end. In the last few chapters the narrator is processing the idea of cities being a cash economy and rural areas being a land economy. He is also learning that city people don’t make eye contact as much because there are so many people it can feel draining to give connection every time you come in contact with someone else. His mentor calls it “saving your juice.” Eventually Demon decides that rural areas don’t have a land economy as much as they have a relationship economy, everyone helps one another out because no one has access to everything they need. In a way they have a juice economy. They all get by on their human connections.

Meghan’s Christ Coven magazine ends with a statement of values, and even though her words are not exactly the same as mine, they are close enough that the values I claim to live by came immediately to mind when I read hers today. This is what I have written in my journal every few months, because I am so prone to forgetting: I connect to my Creator through creation, creativity, and relationships with other image bearers of the Creator. I am dependent on all of those connections for my perpetual resurrection.

The end of the story is this, “Behold I am making all things new.” It’s in the present tense, because it’s happening every day.