FAITH AT HOME
By Laura Kelly Fanucci
We don’t talk enough about resurrection.
How a marriage can be resurrected: How what felt dead and gone, ready to be buried in the dark earth forever, is not always dead and gone. How a friendship can be resurrected: How speaking hard words can breathe new life into brittle bones. How relationships can come back to life through grace, mercy and forgiveness.
How miracles happen every day in hospitals, clinics and churches. How every priest and doctor, if you press them for a story and if they trust you with the truth, will tell you they have seen things with their own eyes that cannot be explained by anything they learned in school.
How children hold the secrets to God’s upside-down kingdom. How freely the young speak of life, death and heaven — and how arresting their simple truths can be to older ears.
We need to tell many stories: loss and grief, suffering and love, doubt and faith. Stories that challenge and complicate. But we also need the startling stories that defy category.
Like the first disciples who found the empty tomb, we too have run and stumbled, disbelieving and grappling with what makes no sense by earthly terms.
But if we could make ourselves vulnerable, like Christ stretching out wounded hands so others would believe, we might summon the courage to speak a few words — to a spouse, a friend or a child — about the holiest glimpses we have been given.
A story of sobriety after years of addiction.
A story of a lost child returning home.
A story of grudges chipped away with the right chisels.
Resurrection was meant to be shared, spread and shouted. If we do not speak of resurrection, we lock up God’s best stories within cold tombs.
What’s more, when you tune your eyes and ears to the infinite ways God works to bring life from death, you will start to glimpse God everywhere.
The hair on your arms will rise when a child asks a question about life or faith that you have never thought to ask.
The memory in your bones will leap like joy when you offer forgiveness to a loved one and remember how it feels to start over.
The tidy categories you assigned to heaven and earth will start to unravel when you listen to a friend admit that in deepest grief, they felt surprising joy — and they never had a place to share such a story so she buried it for years.
Ordinary hints of resurrection will start to push into your life, certain as spring, stubborn as seedlings.
You could start to see dawn as affirmation: that God has deemed it good and worthy that we keep going, offering us another chance to try again.
You could open the confessional door, taking one step beyond the fear that kept you on the side of long-held sin, stepping out again with the freedom of forgiveness.
We don’t talk enough about resurrection. But we could start to try, and it would change us — you and me, our children and grandchildren, our friends and neighbors, this lost and lonely world.
If we follow Mary Magdalene to the tomb and stay when others leave, if we turn around when God calls our name, if we let go of what we carried and take up new truth into open hands, then we can keep spreading the good news, telling what we have seen and heard and known.
We don’t talk enough about resurrection. But each year we have the whole season of Easter to keep trying.
What stories will we tell this year? What truths will we find?
Fanucci is a writer, speaker, and author of several books including “Everyday Sacrament: The Messy Grace of Parenting.” Her work can be found at laurakellyfanucci.com.
