Resurrecting The Dead: An Easter Reflection

Growing up in the Catholic Church, as a child I learned about the Resurrection story in the New Testament: Jesus dies and three days later he rises from the tomb.

I read the stories of Jesus calling Lazarus out of the grave after four days there, and of him reviving a dead child carried to him by her panic-stricken father.

Back then I believed these stories as actual events.
I accepted that physical life could be pulled back from the hands of death, through prayer or faith or divine movement.
I embraced these stories, not just for Jesus and those he healed in those stories but for me; for those I loved and for people here living alongside me.
I believed that dead people could live again.
I welcomed these as gospel truths with the faith of a child.

As I grew older, I began to question why people didn't rise from the dead anymore; why I never saw such miraculous things in front of me, why physical resurrection seemed relegated to the distant past and to those pages and to those stories.

Gradually I began to realize the grownup truth: all people die.

Children get sick, and all the desperate prayers of parents and siblings and children sometimes don't make them well.
Teenagers spiral into addiction or depression and they gradually succumb to their demons despite all those fighting for them.
People are taken both in startling suddenness and in protracted agony; sometimes in the radiant brightness of youth, other times after a long and slow decline.

They died and they stayed dead, and none of it had anything to do with people not believing enough or praying enough or being religious enough. There was no supernatural cause-and-effect at work in death—and contrary to the funeral platitudes, God didn't take people because he needed an angel, either.

People died and there was no way to really wrap it up neatly.

Somewhere along the way I slowly stopped believing in resurrection as a physical, tangible reality and a bit of my faith died with it. 

Yes, I could look to a life after this one; I could imagine a soul moving on from this place, a spiritual resurrection happening somewhere beyond the reach of my senses and outside of this space and time—but not physical life restored after here it has been extinguished. That belief died.

As I've walked further into adulthood, I've leaned into the hope of resurrecting other things: of rebuilding marriages and repairing relationships and mending broken systems and renewing faith and overcoming fear and rescuing people from hazards.

I've looked at what could be saved here and tried to save it.

And it's been in those places of renewal and restoration and healing that I've found whatever God is: the transformation within people, the rebirth of dead dreams, the perpetuating of a loved one who's passed, the new life in places it seemed gone.

And yet, I know that even some things that can be resurrected, don't always live again. Sometimes marriages implode for good, sometimes fractured friendships can't be mended, sometimes the doubts and demons do overcome, sometimes people are taken from us. That's just how this works. You can't read into it or overspiritualize it or kill yourself looking to interpret it.

As a Christian, throughout my life my answer in the face of death has always been faith: a persevering, defiant hope in what I cannot see.

I suppose faith is still the answer for me; not that God will reanimate bodies and let people walk out of the grave, or that I can pray breath back into someone when that breath has long left them.

But I do still have faith that good people propelled by love do their best to bring dead things back to life here—and that sometimes it happens. We care and listen and embrace and give and work, and sometimes we win.

I have faith that yes, in us and through us there can be unexpected Easter Sundays after Good Fridays of grieving; there can be mourning that does turn into dancing; that after a night of weeping, joy can come in the morning.

I don't think I'll ever have the simple religion of my childhood resurrected but that doesn't mean I don't still believe in miraculous things or want to be part of such things.

May we who are people of faith, morality, and conscience push back against death in whatever ways we can.

May we be a people of life here as we live.

May we be about saving who and what we can save.

In, around, and through us—may resurrections come.

Share anything you feel moved to in the comments on faith, losing faith, Easter, resurrection in whatever way you have seen or experienced it!