Nativity Catholic Church
|
|
The Story Inside: Rolling
Back the Stone! Let me spread out the snapshots on the table…take a look and see what thread seems to be connecting them. Here’s the little boy running through the doorway, his breathing just short of needing a paper bag for hyperventilation. His eyes are bursting with a gleaming light that rivals Superman’s laser vision. His gaping mouth betrays a tug-of-war between shouting and screaming. All the signs are there…something BIG has happened…and he simply can’t hold it any longer. This one finds the teenage girl sitting in the counselor’s office, twisted and contorted like a pile of spaghetti, and just as hot, clutching her aching stomach, and rocking…rocking back and forth…which seems to now shake loose the tears. All the signs are there…something BIG has happened…and she simply can’t get it out. Finally, the dark, grainy one makes the shriveled skin and dark circles even more ominous. He’s obviously been through life and back more times than he’d care to remember. In this one, he clutches the portrait of himself in his uniform—no, not the shiny one with all the medals, but rather the one with the stripes and the large number across his chest—his “yearbook” picture from Auschwitz. All the signs are there…something BIG has happened since those days…but will anyone care to hear an old, broken, and barely audible man’s story yet another time? Maya Angelou once wrote: “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” This “agony” can taste like the flavor of great joy, ready to burst our heart and skin for the sheer power of it in our lives. Something beautiful and wonderful happens to us; we achieve something that’s been the result of incredible commitment, or perhaps the surprising fortune of being at the right place at the right time. Either way, this untold story pounds on the roof of our mouth and begs to be shared. This “agony” can also taste like a damp, dark jail cell, where the story has been imprisoned out of fear of retribution, or embarrassment, or shame, or guilt, or unspeakable pain. Like any prisoner, this story longs for freedom and fresh air, but the sentence has been passed, and the inner laws one has created must be obeyed. Yet, it is a story that yearns to be unshackled. This “agony” can bear the stripes of the public or private evils that cut to the core of humanity, that tear at the very fabric of civilization; the horror of this agony can become so unspeakable that persons and nations and cultures feverishly try to bury or deny the horror. Yet, as Angelou so rightly asserts, the untold, unredeemed story must break forth against all odds—if in fact, redemption is to have a chance to shine. Every moment of every day, we all bear stories within us that yearn for a telling. But they are so deep, so personal, so full of vulnerability that we become accustomed to hiding and protecting them from anyone—lest we suffer the greater indignities we believe will flow from their telling. And so we suffer, and we weep, and “unknown” rumblings trouble us in our souls, and we turn to palliatives to mask the pain…but the stories refuse to go away. But when the opening comes, when the relationship with another is strong and trustworthy enough, when the taste of freedom is sweeter than the dread of concealment, when the stone is finally rolled away in spite of the “stench” that may temporarily linger—resurrection is possible and life can begin anew! On the “road to Emmaus,” so poignantly rendered for us by the Evangelist Luke, the unnamed disciples, who sound suspiciously like us in our sometimes-despondent wanderings, experience the resurrected Lord Jesus only after their painful story breaks forth from their souls. In the course of their wayward journey, a stranger joins them who provided a safe place, an oasis of freshness wherein they felt courageous enough to unleash the agony inside them: “we had desperately, perhaps foolishly hoped he was the one!” This story of profound hurt and pain and guilt had been pleading for release since the apparent “defeat” of the crucifixion, and the cowardly desertion by Jesus’ disciples. But like so many stories that find refuge in the deepest places of ourselves, there was no one to trust with this hauntingly personal story, no one who could hold it and caress it (the way Jesus must have gently caressed the feet of these same disciples at the Last Supper) with the tenderness and understanding it deserved. That is…until the risen Lord appeared in their midst…and he allowed them to tell their story first! And as it had been throughout Jesus’ entire life, once again, the journey to Emmaus was first about them, and only secondly about him. Once their story was set free, Jesus began to breathe new life into them by gathering up the tattered shreds of their story into the GREAT STORY of God and God’s ultimate victory over death. Stories of seeming death were revisited…and the seeds of new life were found just beneath the surface. Watered by the tears that so often accompany an untold story, the seeds of life begin to sprout. In this grand season of new life, this Easter of God, are there story-stones that need rolling back in our lives, stories whose “agony” we can no longer confine—whether the “agony” be that of a joy we’ve failed to share because we thought no one would care to listen, or whether the “agony” be that of a deep sorrow we’ve failed to share for the same reason. The risen Lord Jesus is alive and amongst us, and God continues to roll back stones of death so that stories of life might come forth!
|
