Easter Good Friday
By Colin Fagan
Something of myself was lost the day I was given away. I do not write that to cast blame or shame upon my first mom. She was navigating her world and situation as best she could at the time, and who knows, maybe she would have similar or adjacent language to describe her experience. Regardless, in that moment I lost a fundamental feature of myself, as well as a way of discovering myself.
I would like to say that I was able to overcome that moment, but that would be untrue. Unbeknownst to me or anyone around me, I carried within my body a sense of incompleteness and profound shame. I internalized so many dynamics that I was, without knowing it, perpetually shut down and shut off. I was here. But I wasn’t present. That subtle difference is far more vast than I, or most of us, can imagine. And as I began the journey to understand the reality of being an adoptee—and do so in a key that didn’t have me throwing away my faith—I had to face several pertinent questions, such as how does one embrace the giftedness of life when that life has been fundamentally marked by a significant experience of estrangement? Can I be healed?
Something close to an answer emerges out of Good Friday and Easter. I shared in a previous post that Advent looks toward Easter as Easter looks back toward Advent. The Church bears witness to the whole life of Jesus and the manner in which God, in His Son, shares in our lives. We discover that, in the Son, the very nature of human life, every feature and facet of it, has come into communion with the Triune God—even death. Suffering and tragedy were close companions to Jesus and that reaches a crescendo on Good Friday. As Jesuit Gerard Hughes so wonderfully wrote:
“When we contemplate Christ in his passion, we do so not simply to recall a historical event now over and done with, but to encounter the living God, the God who enters our darkness, weakness and sinfulness, who enters our hatred and our despair, and can transform it. We contemplate the ravaged body of the dead Christ to understand the nature of God now holding me in being, a God who pursues us into our darkness and destructiveness, and entering and sharing it, brings life out of our death.” —Gerard Hughes, God of Surprises, 170
I would add that God enters our incompleteness, and in so doing, renders possible becoming whole. This has been the hinge for my journey to discover adequate language that could hold together what has been lost and begin to release, at least inwardly, the tight hold I’ve had on the wounds surrounding estrangement. When we behold the Cross, we are beholding God’s pursuit of us into our darkness and despair—into our estrangement from all things—so that life might emerge. To arrive at the Resurrection after such a brutal death is to discover that even a brutal death couldn’t hold him, but it, too, gets filled with life—his life.
The invitation that is always before us is to walk into the mystery of Jesus’s life with us. I don’t use the language of mystery flippantly. The Church uses such a term to suggest to us that there are features within the Christian pilgrimage where our rational faculties cannot fully capture or articulate what is happening. It is a reality we must live into and become awake to, much like a baby’s slow awakening to life as he or she grows. We become awake to the new life that we are invited to live into. This offers a sense of what Scripture proposes as sanctification. It is not just the growing out of varied “sinful” proclivities that plague all of us. Sanctification is the filling of our lives with the very Life that so graciously died and rose again. Within the journey of sanctification is the discovery that what was lost in me has been filled, too. That the death I carried, and carry, is no longer empty, but filled with life.
But there remains a caveat. We will always carry within our lives the twinges and pangs of the loss we’ve experienced. The abyss may be a little less dark and stark, and we will carry a sense that healing has happened and continues to happen, but there remain periods of struggle—and sometimes quite significant periods of struggle. I am reminded of an interesting scene in John’s Gospel, after Jesus’s resurrection, in chapter 20. It is the second time Jesus arrives to see his friends and eat with them, but this time Thomas is present. He was absent the first time Jesus visited and didn’t believe what his fellows were telling him. Thomas exclaimed, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” (20:25) Well, Jesus shows up and Thomas is present, and walks over to him saying, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt ,but believe.” (20:27)
There are many comments on this portion of Holy Scripture by far more qualified people than me. Yet, I want to offer a reflection that I carry with me. I find Thomas’s comment to the disciples not necessarily to be one of a skeptic or cynic, but of one who is hurting and grieving the loss of an intimate friend—one who Thomas and so many others had come to see as the longed-for Messiah. His hope, which I can imagine was quite deep, was wounded, and something for and of him was lost when Jesus was tortured and killed. To have his friends saying to him, “Jesus was here,” may well have been like poking a wound, and he reacted.
But I think Jesus came and showed Thomas his wounds not to condescend or mock him, but because, though resurrected, he still remains in complete solidarity and friendship with his people, his friends. And so long as we are struggling, facing despair of all sorts—so long as those of us remain struggling with the wounds of our estrangement—Jesus carries our wounds too. Jesus reminds us that so long as we struggle, he struggles. He can carry and see us through our darkness and incompleteness, infusing it with life and hope.
Easter is about Death being conquered, but Easter is not merely a moment. In Easter we discover that Jesus continues pressing into our lives so that we can press into his. Our wounds become his wounds, as his life becomes our life. The project that is inaugurated at his birth continues on after his resurrection. He never stops inviting us into deep friendship with him and, for me, as one who so often feels lost and prone to despair, that is the invitation that I have so desperately needed and desired.
