Resurrection: Every time I come to the Easter celebration, it seems as if this great gift is too great to be appreciated.
All of us experience life as a wearying thing. We work; we expend energy; we feel tired at the end of each day. Our bodies show signs of age, and we are reminded that we are subject to death.
So how are we to appreciate resurrection? Is resurrection the simple extension of life? No, this cannot be. In a great work of literature, a man named Gulliver met a colony of immortals, called Struldbrugs. He discovered that their "immortality" was life without vigor. They kept accumulating the effects of age, and were doomed to keep doing so forever.
So resurrection must involve an advance into a qualitatively different kind of life.
Every Sunday we profess our faith in "the resurrection of the body." At the same time we are heirs to a popular idea of heaven as a place where people dressed in white stroll amid the clouds and strum harps. This is a foreign place for my body to take up residence.
Heaven is better understood as "gazing on God forever." And forever is utterly different from the "very long time" which is all that we can imagine. Eternity is being caught up in the "now" of beholding God's majesty, without any awareness of time; for, in fact, we will be beyond the limits of time.
Our first response to this idea, however, is that gazing on God will be boring!
We must, therefore, be attentive to the ways in which we encounter God here and now. These moments are far from "boring" and they give us a taste of wonder.
The word "conversion," which we may tend to associate with a makeover of a van or some other vehicle, is what we must employ.
Our life of faith is a life in which God keeps changing us. One great saint wrote of "consolation without a cause." We keep telling ourselves: "If only God would make the things in my life different, then I would be happy." God actually gives us a stranger experience than that. We know we are in the midst of conversion when we realize that we are happy even without "outside" changes. If I feel different but the world is the same, the difference must be in me. God is changing me!
We are closest to resurrection when we feel ourselves "lifted up" by God's gift of conversion. Even amid the daily experience of the expending of energy and consequent tiredness, we know that God's Word is active. Each new day holds the promise that we will be molded further into the image of one resurrected.
Jesus, the risen one, the first-born from the dead, lived an earthly life which emphasized the value of human beings. He proclaimed that we who, weighed down by this world, tend to devalue ourselves, have only to accept a new vision: that each moment intersects with eternity; that we can be caught up in the eternal "now"; that we see life, and the people in our life, as a gift; that we trust more deeply in the God whose love suffuses all of the human drama.
Resurrection is, indeed, an acquired taste. We welcome this Easter celebration as a further invitation into a mystery which does not take us away from this world but in fact calls us to love our situation here and now.