Post-Easter Musings on a complex theme
So this is it! For seven weeks I’ve been procrastinating over what was to be the final piece in my Lenten series: a resurrection reflection. I almost gave up because last Sunday was the seventh and final Sunday in the Easter season, and because I couldn’t organise my thoughts or find the words to give clarity to my musings. Then I read Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files #365 in which he speaks of the agony of writing, the fear of getting it wrong, and the ‘unique joy, the deepest satisfaction and a kind of spiritual appeasement in knowing that something we have made, or worked on, means something to somebody else.’ So here it is: a messy, unsystematic, fragmentary reflection on the theme of resurrection. It has been informed by my reading of the lectionary-based gospel stories over these past seven weeks, by some writers you’ll meet below, by my life experience, and by my still-unsatisfied curiosity around the question ‘resurrection: yes or no?’ I can only pray that it might just mean something to somebody else!
In 1960, at the age of 30, my mother underwent a radical mastectomy, having been diagnosed with ‘carcinoma simplex of the breast with lymph node metastases.’ Her prognosis was poor, and her subsequent radiation therapy (which, incidentally, was in its very early days: the first linear accelerator treatment machine was installed at Peter MacCallum Hospital in 1956) did little to improve that ‘less than two year’ expectation. Miraculously and thankfully, she lived for a further fifteen years, meaning that my brother and I grew old enough to hear the story of her wondrous ‘resurrection’. She termed it that because that was what it felt like to her. In the course of the initial surgery she ‘saw’ the ‘bright white light’ that she and others have experienced as the intimate nearness of God, but with an additional layer of complexity: she ‘heard’ the voice of her recently deceased 18-month-old son calling to her and assuring her that all would be well. She also felt that she was given a choice: to follow the ‘voice’ into the bright white light, or to ‘return’ to her earthly body. She ‘chose’ to return on the basis that I and my brother (at the time aged 6 and 4 years), as well as her husband and parents and others, needed her more than the 18-month-old Paul. My mother spoke of this moment as a resurrection moment and she lived the next fifteen years with a deep faith, a radiant sense of gratitude, a genuine generosity, and an un-wavering commitment to her family and to life in general. I suspect it was her story that fired my first curiosity about the nature of resurrection.
The gospel reading prescribed for Easter Day this year was the Fourth Gospel account of the resurrection of Jesus. In her reflection on this passage, Diana Butler Bass drew parallels between the resurrection story, as recounted in the Fourth Gospel, and the creation story as portrayed in Genesis. In particular, she noted the interplay of light and dark in both stories: how Mary went to the tomb when it was dark (in grief, confusion and chaos), but, choosing to sit with the darkness, she heard her name called by the ‘gardener’ and her world was suddenly bathed in light. ‘Rabbouni!’ she proclaimed. Light in the darkness, order out of chaos, just like the movement in the Genesis story of creation: the first morning of the new creation, the sun has risen, a resurrection experience for Mary (Butler Bass, Easter Sunday Musings, The Cottage, 4th April 2026).
I am enjoying rediscovering the teachings and writings of James Finley and appreciated his reflection on ‘the dark night of the soul’ as reported by David Dury in Spiritual Wanderlust. My messy resurrection mind map was stirred by his suggestion that the dark night is ‘the process of being dislodged by love from the perception that the point you’ve come to is deep enough for you. The dark night is not something to fix. It is something to welcome. We are not being invited to solve the darkness, we are being invited to remain within it. Love is making room for something deeper’ (David Dury, Not the End, Spiritual Wanderlust 30th April 2026). With the Butler Bass column still bubbling around in my mind, and the Easter season gospel passages adding their fomentation (the disciples huddled together in a locked – perhaps darkened – room; Thomas with his personal dark night doubts; the travellers to Emmaus mired in confusion, and the successive sayings of Jesus: Do not let your heart be troubled (John 14:1), I will not leave you orphaned (John 14:18), and now the hour has come (John 17:1) ), the interplay of dark and light kept bubbling to the surface. Each of these narratives was a resurrection story in which light was born out of darkness!
One of the Substack columns I follow and enjoy is Coming Down to Earth by Barbara Brown Taylor. She writes of very ordinary thigs that inevitably reveal extraordinary meaning. Like her missive about picking up rubbish along the rural road on which she lives: how standing up too fast after bending down to pry bits of broken beer bottle out of the mud in front of a culvert resulted in a big wet kiss from a five-inch cluster of pink mountain laurel blossoms; and finding a whole beer bottle with a natural terrarium inside, complete with a tiny mountain range of verdant moss; how more often than not, nature was already breaking down the bits and burying them as part of the cycle of new life; and her growing realisation that there was so much more beauty around than litter: short yellow buttercups, blue-eyed grass, wild geranium, oxeye daisies (Trash Detail, Substack 5th May 2026). The evidence of resurrection is embedded in all of creation, and the awareness of that became a resurrection experience for Barbara Brown Taylor! In her most recent column she tells of her first experience of birdwatching, concluding with this observation: On the last stretch back to our cars, when I knew my neck would be sore for days, I thought about Moses turning aside from herding sheep to take a closer look at a burning bush. I thought about Jesus telling his disciples how important it was to consider the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. He didn’t say anything about whether they should do this alone or together, but last Saturday, I found a way to do it with other people whose attention was so tuned to the life around them that they made mine eight times keener. I wasn’t living in the present with them; I was living in the Presence (Turning Aside to Look, Substack 21st May 2026). And it occurred to me that this is a good descriptor of the resurrection experience: living in the Presence.
In recent months I have found this to be true for me. A sudden change in my cancer journey confronted me with my own mortality and dropped me into a sort of ‘dark night’ experience. But only briefly: the skill of medical practitioners, the wonder of treatment options, the deep love and support of family and friends, and an overwhelming sense of ‘living in the Presence’ shone a bright light in my momentary darkness and I experienced (not for the first time) a profound resurrection!
OK, so what am I to make of this rambling resurrection reflection? I know it’s messy, maybe disjointed, perhaps even nonsense, but as it tumbled out of my mind a few themes emerged that just might hold it all together:
- Resurrection is not a vicarious experience; it is deeply personal. The story of someone else’s resurrection – not even that of Jesus – cannot be claimed as our own (by faith or any other means). The resurrection of Jesus is not ‘on our behalf’, but is an invitation, an urging even, to be open to a resurrection experience of our own.
- Resurrection is not a once-off, high moment in our journey, it is a repeated and continual (eternal) state of awareness in all the ordinary and extraordinary moments of our complex and confusing lives. It may present as the light breaking into the dark night of the soul, as a moment of awe in the midst of nature, as an eruption of joy in the company of loved ones, as a dawning wonder at the enormity of the universe, as an involuntary gasp of delight at the beauty of a flower. All these and more might be claimed as moments of resurrection, of living in the Presence, in the context of our everyday lives.
- Resurrection is not a miracle, it is a common human experience for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear and souls to be stirred.
- Finally, by way of justifying my messy, disjointed nonsense, resurrection is not rational or logical, it is not definable or reasonable – it is unfathomable mystery!
How then shall we live? Being alert to the light – to the wonder of resurrection – and living in the Presence, we become light-bearers and life-givers in every moment. This doesn’t mean of course that we are to be artificially happy or superficially optimistic when we or others are dealing with hardship, trudging through the dark night. It’s unnatural to be so. Rather it means we are honest about how we feel, genuine about how we perceive life to be dealing with us, empathetic with those who are struggling to cope, irked by the injustice of bad things happening to good people (and to bad people too for that matter), while all the time holding within us that flickering flame that is the spark of the Spirit in the confidence that nothing, no turmoil, no assault, no darkness, can ever extinguish it.
And once the flame has been lit – well it’s already and always lit, so once it has been recognised – it will never be extinguished and will sustain us through even the deepest darkness, until the next inevitable moment of resurrection, be that a mountaintop experience or a seemingly ordinary encounter with nature, person, music, whatever … … if we are but open to that presence, that nearness, that reality of awe and wonder, those moments of resurrection that envelop us.Madeleine L’Engle says it well:
We do not draw people to Christ by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it. [Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water, Waterbrook Press, 2001]
David Brooker (22nd May 2026)
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