An Easter Reflection by Dr. John DeCostanza, Director of Campus Ministry at Dominican University Ministry and current Board President of CSPL
How do you trust that resurrection is on the other side of this? How do I? How does anyone ever and especially, right now? There have been a few times in my life when trusting that resurrection was on the other side of painful experience was challenging.
Off and on throughout my life, I have struggled with depression. In the not too distant past, some major transitions – the end of my life as a student, changes in my ministry, a trauma that I witnessed, and the narrowing of my horizons in a fog of stress – triggered the return of my formidable opponent.
There is something uncanny and familiar in stories of those of us that have experienced what Parker Palmer called, “a living death.” Too many of us know depression’s pain, both physical and emotional. We have had the good, the positive, and the optimistic slip through our fingers like sand. I have been fortunate to travel back from those places where I questioned even the surest of my own judgments. Palmer’s perspective and my own align. “I do not understand,” he writes, “why [some] are able to find new life in the midst of a living death, though I am one of them.” Depression for too many of us is too great a challenge to the certainty of resurrection.
If you’ve been there like me or if you find yourself struggling for joy in this Easter Octave, you’re not alone. We do not have to go very far to imagine the disciples’ mood in that Upper Room. It hovers somewhere between grief, deep sadness, and existential fear. Despite the fact that Jesus speaks the line, “Peace be with you,” with such certitude, it never feels any less shocking to me when I read it. Jesus could have said, “Hey, what are you all doing here? I told you I’d be back” or with a full throated, finger guns blazin’ “Who’s risen? This guy.” But he doesn’t. Instead, Jesus invokes peace and breathes on them. The English word “inspire” finds its Latin root in this action.
History and conventional wisdom paint the disciple Thomas as the uninspired one – the doubter, the naysayer. My experience of brokenness suggests something different. Like Thomas, I know of few people (maybe none) that have experienced trauma and loss or abiding sadness and depression and miraculously and instantaneously emerge joyous and victorious on the other side. Instead, our experience is a little more like the tentative tulips in my Chicago garden. We are not quite sure if now is the moment to show off our beauty because life has taught us the Upper Midwest cares not for our desire for spring.
Thomas probes the wounds.
He leans fully into Jesus’ broken and blessed Body.
He approaches Him in an exquisite and intimate way made all the more poignant in this moment by our social distancing.
Thomas knows these wounds as surely as we have felt the wounding of this pandemic.
The crucial takeaway of this Divine Mercy Sunday is that Resurrection does not erase the suffering of the cross. God’s loving mercy creates a future that we cannot yet see. The image of Divine Mercy, a vision given to St. Faustina Kowalska, is one of a heart overflowing. St. John Paul II, the first Polish pope, once said that “through the mystery of this wounded heart, the restorative tide of God’s merciful love continues to spread over the men and women of our time.”
On this side of paradise, we, like Thomas, do not always experience the resurrection as a decisive moment of glorious certainty. Instead, as if coming out of a long sadness or a challenging period of suffering, we realize that God’s unfolding mercy has been in our walk all along as an embrace of love that has washed over us. Jesus has gone ahead of us, bearing the wounds that we must probe.
Thomas’ response is quite simple: “My Lord and My God.” Not the powers and principalities, but the truth of living through death. Resurrection does not erase the suffering of the cross, it reveals its power over it. Jesus’ response comes as one final beatitude spoken to us, “Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.”
How do we trust that resurrection is on the other side of this?
Jesus knows that we may need to probe the weary wounds of our own experience. We know that God, whose very name is Mercy, has already opened a way.
“Peace be with you.”
“Peace be with you.”