hallelujah

'It is through loss that we become hardened to childlikeness and through loss that we return again to childhood stories, to the imagination that lets one word lead to another.  This is grace, to allow the same cry that tears us down to bring life.'  -Elisa Stanford, Ordinary Losses

This is good Friday, a day of remembering the paradoxical truth that it is only through death that we are brought to life.  One of my new favorite writers puts it this way:

"His desire was that all people might live. And the fulfillment of his desire was only realized through death. Who am I to think that the road to realizing my own true desire would be paved with anything different? And so leading up to Easter, we often say things like, Jesus died so I didn’t have to, it’s actually much worse. The truth is, Jesus died and so did I."


I forget this.  I seek after what I think will make me happy and I am confused when I am left unfulfilled.  I find myself continually thwarted in pursuit of the life I think I deserve.  I press in harder I pursue more relentlessly.

I forget that I have died.  I don't have to be a slave to appetite.  I am only able to see the completely full life I am living when the life of my own invention and ambition is allowed to wither and die.  There, in the ashes of what I thought I wanted, I find what I needed all along.  Again and again, always the same, it's always the dying that brings us to life.

Today, I celebrate the death of all that was never to be, and the life that springs up from that very same place.  Hallelujah.