Despite Everything, I’m Still Here

Sorry for the long silence. Of course, there are plenty of reasons.  Prepare and present a three session RCIA Lenten Retreat at our parish. Prepare and present on the topics of Resurrection, vocation, and discernment. Throw in a major family crisis and increasing health problems over the past five weeks or so. These are facts, not excuses. I’ve missed writing these reflections and have looked for spaces where time and energy came together, but could not find one. It’s not that I’ve run out of “inspirations.”

 I was out for an exercise walk on a multi-use trail a couple blocks south of our home, around the latter weeks of Lent, with the whole Pascal Mystery (Life/Suffering/ Death/Resurrection) looming on the horizon. I followed the trail around a corner and just ahead, maybe thirty yards, I came across this graffiti scrawled in large, bold black letters on the wall of an overpass that the trail passed under: Despite everything I’m still here. I have no idea who this person was, or what they had lived through, that they felt compelled to shout this defiant cry out to the cold hard world he or she is living in. I immediately could relate. But as I walked on, this statement, this cry painted on cement, seemed to fit very well with what Jesus went through. 

Easter — the huge stone rolled away, the empty tomb, the discarded burial cloths, friends and colleagues of Jesus experiencing their dear friend – whom they had seen arrested, tortured, cruelly executed – against all expectation, alive, suddenly present with them – but in a different way. And their lives were transformed. The disciples who had just been cowering behind locked doors, terrorized that the authorities would come for them next, went out to the whole Roman world of their day, facing torture and death unafraid, and planted seeds that took root and flourished, in some way even to today.

I can just picture Jesus standing on the hill of public execution, Calvary, that first day of the week, shouting triumphantly, “Despite everything, I’m still here!” Life, lived in self-giving love, in God, is stronger than death. It’s no contest.