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| MESSAGE FROM FATHER LAURENCE, 24 MARCH 2008 |
- EASTER SUNDAY
Dearest Friends,
Easter Sunday is eight days long, the Octave of the greater feast which distends liturgical time
to keep us more focused in the present. That helps to justify sending a message from our
retreat a day late in secular time. The other reason being twofold – a Vigil that ended late and
started up again very early.
- The retreatants and the islanders gathered in the church for the first Easter Vigil to be held on
Bere Island in many years. Ignoring warnings we had received we started the Easter fire in an
old wheelbarrow on the church steps. It was roaring as people arrived but then burned its way
through the bottom of the wheelbarrow and began to consume the rubber wheel. The
theological interpretation came later from Giovanni – the love of God that consumes everything
it loves, the fuel and the fire becoming one. At the time we positioned ourselves according to
the shifting winds to avoid the black smoke. No mention of smoke in the description of the
burning bush, I think. But the burning wheelbarrow in the light of the just rising full moon over
the hill ignited the Easter candle and then the hundred or so little tea lights that we were each
carrying as we processed into the church, to listen to the ancient story again, to sing the long-
awaited alleluias and an adapted Leonard Cohen, plunge the candle into the waters of the font,
to celebrate the Eucharist and to meditate.
At 5.30 the next morning we came together in the cold and blustery dark in the middle of an
elevated filed looking across the sea. Like Neolithic worshippers we huddled around the
menhir, the standing stone said to be positioned in the exact centre of the island. Not the
mathematical centre it seems but maybe a centre of another kind. We formed a witty, laughing
shivering body of Christ as we sang chants and hymns, beginning with the cosmic gayatri and
evolving into the Christian music that both expresses and feeds our faith. As the horizon
turned to light we read from John’s gospel of the disciples discovering the empty tomb, of
Mary staying behind weeping and of her hearing herself spoken in the recognition of Jesus. In
the slow enlightening of the day one body pressed up against me identified itself as an
islander and another as a new and late addition to our retreat from Prague. The Resurrection
has a moment in history, or we would not have been able to be touched by it, but it never
ceases to expand.
To die always leads to rebirth, that is the law of karma and of physics. Energy cannot be
destroyed only re-formed. But if we enter death with faith active in love we are assured (and in
the resurrection we are convinced) that it is not rebirth but resurrection that ensues. A
breaking out of the compulsive cycle of birth and death into eternal day the moment of Christ,
God’s I Am.
As we left the island on the ferry yesterday afternoon I spoke a few moments with the
ferryman, Colm whose son had been drowned three weeks ago. It was the first time I had
seen him since his tragedy, tragically familiar to him, too, as years ago his brother had also
been drowned. His rugged face, lined from decades of ferrying in all weathers, and his clear
eyes did not flinch from talking about his grief, describing it with astonishing completeness
and openness in brief space but really saying only that there are no words, no explanations.
No words to describe such loss, as there are no words to describe such hope as Easter
insists on giving. Perhaps the ancient faith renewed each year as we have now done, and are
still doing, embraces and finds space for all the doubt that our worldessness, and at times our
worldliness, make inevitable.
Laurence