THEME    The Rapturous Awakening – The Irrepressible God — The Ever-present Mystery

THOUGHTS FOR REFLECTION

1. Easter is the festival of the irrepressible God whom not even death can contain.
2. Most of us would prefer a cozy God to a God who shatters our complacency. Yet Easter is about a God who bursts tombs of the familiar, the ordinary and the mediocre.
3. Easter is the amazing wow of cosmic love.
4. Just when I thought I had God under control the wild wind of the spirit blew me away.
5. Easter is the season of stone rolling – rolling away guilt, fear, hatred, monotony, lifelessness and blandness.
6. O God, how many times have we sought to bury you again, for fear of what you might do to our predictable grayness?
7. To believe in the historicity of the resurrection is one thing. To experience the liveliness of the resurrection is something quite different.
8. It is not our beliefs about what happened in history that transform us but the extent to which we allow these glimpses into the heart of God to energize our lives.
9. All crosses can be transformed into trees of life. All tears are part of the river of life.
10. The vibrancy of the vision is only exceeded by the discovery that one’s spirit has a home everywhere.
11. Home becomes a tomb when flexibility vanishes, awareness contracts and adventure disappears.
12. The delight of new awareness can be a prelude to a life lived in the mellow light of love.
13. When we invite the earth-shattering spirit of Easter into our lives, our images of God recede into the background and we are left walking hand in hand with the unknowable.
14. Easter is the eternal moment that supersedes all time; the vision that puts into perspective all visionless living.
15. Easter is the sky that encloses the broken egg.
16. Out of the familiar emerges the extraordinary that transforms the ordinary.
17. All risings of the human spirit are preceded by brokenness, loss or rejection.
18. If you look into the dust for long enough and contemplate its mystery, you shall find a resurrection.
19. At Easter all the themes of the Christian Gospel are held together in one great burst of life.
20. The Cross and Easter are two faces of the one mystery.
21. Love life and deadness will flee.
22. The Resurrection is witness to the golden incandescence at the heart of life which neither suffering nor death can destroy.
23. To live the mystery is to flesh the idea and to share Resurrection.
24. Resurrection is beauty appreciated, love shared, justice implemented.
25. We turn Easter back into Good Friday when we worship ugliness, sterility and unthinking conformity.
26. The sequence of death and resurrection is the pattern of all creating and of all loving.
27. Resurrection is about seeing behind and beyond death, ugliness, injustice, pain and despair.

PRAYERS

1. O Easter God, who shatters all the familiar tombs which we create, enable us to move beyond slavish conformity either to old understandings or to new fashions and with joy embrace your ever-changing, ever challenging future.
2. O God, who gifts us moments of amazement, help us to accept the rhythm of the ordinary and the extraordinary that we may retain a steady awareness of your presence both in grey days and in bright.
3. O God, help us to let go of those mental pictures of you which prevent us from accepting that we will never know you fully and save us from pointless theological argument which reflects our insecurity rather than your mystery.

HYMNS

In between the Cross and rising. (BL)

From Good Friday’s gruesome darkness. (BL)

 

I saw the gardener dancing.

www.methodist.org.nz/whakapono/online-resources/hymns/with-heart-and-voice

There shall be life and love.

www.methodist.org.nz/whakapono/online-resources/hymns/with-heart-and-voice

In the sprouting of the seed.

www.methodist.org.nz/whakapono/online-resources/hymns/with-heart-and-voice

Taste and see.

www.methodist.org.nz/whakapono/online-resources/hymns/with-heart-and-voice

We are an Easter people.

http://www.methodist.org.nz/whakapono/online-resources/hymns/the-mystery-telling

Rise O my heart.

http://www.methodist.org.nz/whakapono/online-resources/hymns/the-mystery-telling

 

Wake up, wake up it’s morning. (STS1)

Empty lay the tomb. (STS1)

This planet is pregnant. (STS1)

Singing the Sacred, Vol 1 2011 World Library Publications

 

Jesus Christ is alive and lives in me. (SYSJ)

 

RESPONSES

In the sprouting of the seed.

www.methodist.org.nz/whakapono/online-resources/hymns/with-heart-and-voice

Easter Chant.

http://www.methodist.org.nz/whakapono/online-resources/hymns/the-mystery-telling

 

SONGS                                 

Life is for living now. (SYSJ)

 

Give me laughter.

http://www.methodist.org.nz/whakapono/online-resources/hymns/the-mystery-telling

 

POEMS / REFLECTIONS

BURIED TREASURE

In the disaster lies the hope,

In the laughter lies the truth,

In the emptiness, the fullness,

In the nothingness, the essence,

In aloneness, the belonging,

In the “we are”, the “I AM”.

For “I AM”  is everywhere

But out of non awareness

There comes

Death.

 

THE EGG THAT REFUSED TO BE ETERNAL

On first inspection Divinity appeared to the seekers to be like a luminous egg, well rounded, self contained, completely clothed in light and amenable to definition. But suddenly, those who had waited in silence saw the egg crack and a phoenix bird emerge and immediately fly away into the mysterious nothingness leaving the seekers sitting in the broken shells of their religious presuppo­sitions and carefully crafted ceremonies.

Some of the people remained in the fragmented remnants and developed compensating mantras. Others stretched the wings of their spiritua­lity and flew off into the magic darkness joyfully singing:

“All will be well and all manner of things shall be well!” (Julian of Norwich)

 

PERCEPTION

To see the divine in yourself

Is to see the divine everywhere.

To reverence the divine in yourself

Is to reverence the divine everywhere.

To nurture the divine in yourself

Is to nurture the divine everywhere.

For there is no division within the divine.

 

DEATH AND RESURRECTION

The way of the cross and the way of the dance

are but two parts of the one Way;

without the dance there is no life –

without the cross there is no healing.

 

THE EASTER EXPERIENCE

The Easter experience

is becoming

a cross that grows into a tree,

a tomb that liberates,

a rock that dances,

bread and wine that feed the spirit,

an earthquake that destroys complacency and

a darkness that births radiant light.

 

GOLDEN INCANDESCENCE

Having glimpsed

the golden incandescence

at the heart of the mystery

I need not ask

‘Who am I?’

but rather rejoice that

I AM,

need no longer to understand

but simply

to be ‑

for the interaction

of fire and water,

earth and sky brings answers

that are not mine yet reside within.

All this

I seek to reverence,

celebrate,

live ‑

for the interior beauty

finally uncovered

inhabits the whole created world,

the love I share

flows throughout the Cosmos,

my inner song echoes

the mystic hymn of universe

until my griefs merge with

Creation’s calvaries

and God’s unending liveliness

embraces

my

resurrections.

 

 THE RISEN CHRIST

The Risen Christ is the liberated Inner Child which is allowed to dance, to skip, to sing – for as Jesus said, ‘unless you become as a little child you are unable to enter the “Kingdom of God” (the commonwealth of God, the dancing space of God), “Kingdom of heaven” (your heaven.)

(Matthew 18:3, Luke 18:17, Mark 10:15)

 

AFFIRMATION

In forgiving past grudges,

In unlocking unwept tears,

WE EXPERIENCE EASTER.

 

In transforming buried anger,

In abandoning guilt and fear,

WE EXPERIENCE EASTER.

 

In the melting of the ice in our heart,

In the giving of our being to God,

WE EXPERIENCE EASTER,

SEASON OF NEW LIFE.

 

THE PATTERN OF DEATH AND RESURRECTION

The pattern of death and resurrection is the pattern of all our creating and all our loving

for out of darkness comes light

out of chaos comes new creation

out of silence comes the singing

out of stillness comes the dancing

out of desolation comes new hope

and out of the death of the old comes the birth of the new.

 

FOCUS FOR ACTION

1. What mechanisms do I use to attempt to tame the untamable wind of God’s Spirit?
2. What tombs of conformity does society create in order to control the spirit of fully alive divergence?
3. What tombs are there in the Church that exercise the same function?
4. Does attending worship make my heart dance?  If it doesn’t is it my heart or is it the worship that is dead?  Or perhaps it is that both are dead?

 

Text and image © William Livingstone Wallace but available for free use.