There are moments when life seems to fold in on itself — when grief sits heavy, when injustice runs long, when war does not end, when the poor remain crushed beneath systems that should protect them. Any honest soul, gazing at history or at the raw texture of daily life, must sit with the question that will not be silenced: if Love is the deepest truth of reality, why does so much go so terribly wrong? It is not a question to be answered quickly, or dismissed with easy comfort. It deserves to be held, carried, breathed through. And yet — and this is the quiet insistence of the resurrection mystery — even within that darkness, something keeps happening. Something refuses to stay buried. Love is stronger than death. Not theoretically, not eventually, not as a consolation prize. Now. Here. In the slow cracking open of wounded things returning to life. The final word has already been spoken, and it sounds like mercy. Not an ending, but a becoming. There are no permanent dead ends. What looks like mud and material, what seems so ordinary and dying — all of this, too, is tending toward rebirth. The light, it seems, does not descend from above to rescue us. It rises. From the ground. From within.
May you go forth as one who has heard the last word — and found it was love.
Even in the mudded ground
of what was lost,
the light rises —
not from above,
but from within:
from the world
we live in,
from the places
we had given up.
(inspired by Richard Rohr, “Easter Sunday,” homily, April 8, 2012)