For those of us who are part of the Christian tradition, you already know that we are barreling through Eastertide. All the promises and possibilities of resurrection glisten like the sweat of children on an ever-warming planet.
It’s been over a year since I left church ministry. Last year’s Lenten season was a time of withdrawal for my family, which was a divergence for me in a High Holy Season. We said goodbye to our family pup on Good Friday. We spent Easter at Disney on Ice. It was a weird time.
This time last year, I was part-time at my new job, working nights and weekends at a children’s hospital as I grew a baby inside me and tried to keep myself from spinning out after a vocational shift.
Today, I am a full-time chaplain at the children’s hospital. I “provide emotional and spiritual support, whatever that looks like for you” to hematology and oncology patients and their families. My congregation’s demographics have changed, to say the least.
This year on Ash Wednesday, I spread ashes on the foreheads of hospital employees, families unable to get away to church, and tender patients who did not need reminding of their mortality for chemo bags and oxygen cannulas adorned their bodies.
“Remember you are dust,” I whispered to them as their frail bodies whispered it back to me.
I carried my own grief for patients who had died throughout the Lenten season and cared for my own sick baby (who is fine and just had a garden variety of daycare illnesses).
Jesus asked his disciples in the garden to stay awake and keep watch.
I promise I am sleep-deprived, Jesus.
My family finally made it to a local-ish church (Church 1) on Palm Sunday, where we knew exactly one person. The children’s minister handed my daughter a palm and asked if she would like to walk down the aisle with the others when the music began, and let me tell you: we never miss an opportunity to process down a church aisle.
We waved our palms and gulped down communion and sang, “Hosanna.” It’s like a parade, I told my daughter. We celebrate Jesus being here, and we don’t understand it. It was true then, and it’s certainly true now.
I went with a friend to a Good Friday service at another church (Church 2) that does justice for queer and neurodivergent people and hosts the walking wounded of evangelicalism. We read the last words of Jesus and snuffed out candles. We cried. We sang songs about God abandoning us and then pleaded that God abide with us. We left in silence.
And then my family got all dolled up for Easter service at Church 1 and adorned the cross with flowers and crammed into pews with strangers.
It should come as no surprise to you that I have always been more of a Lenten gal than an Easter gal. Easter is hard to preach.
But in the midst of genocide, I was doubly relieved to not have to prepare an impossible word this year.
It’s hard to be a student sometimes when you’ve been a teacher. And it’s hard to be a layperson when you’ve been a preacher.
I oscillate between being critical and being generous.
On one hand, it is difficult to prepare a fresh word every week with the onslaught of news and community happenings alongside your own personal life experiences and angst about job security should you say the thing too clearly.
And on the other hand, you do have the privilege of the pulpit. You have the attention and expectation of everyone in the room. You have the responsibility to say the thing. So say it.
I am not going to comment on the pastor’s sermon either way here, but I mention the fraught feeling because I realize I have been quiet here.*
It has been in part that I don’t think people are clamoring to hear from a white girl in Texas, and I’m fine with that. The world is burning, Palestinian people are being slaughtered, reproductive rights are being stripped. What is there for me to say?
I have also chalked it up to the demands of my new job at the hospital and having a new baby, and that is definitely a part of it.
And of course, there is the sticky point within the work I’m doing that many of the stories I hold are not mine to tell.
I have been granted “sacred access” as hospital chaplain J.S. Park has so deftly put it.
I am a companion, but in a way, I am also an onlooker. On my more spiritual days, I would say I am a witness.
And there is also this: I ran into a former professor at the Good Friday service and he asked what I was doing with the inclination to preach now that I work as a chaplain. I hemmed and hawed for a moment about pulpit supply and writing here, but then I said, “Honestly, I don’t have the bandwidth for it with the work I’m doing at the hospital.”
He responded cheekily, “So you’re saying that the existential wrestling we do in sermons can be dealt with in other ways?”
And I guess that is true, too.
When people have asked me how my job is going, I say some version of “I do something that matters every day.”
And that is a form of resurrection, for me.
The story of Easter is one of miraculous possibility, of life unfathomable.
It is a story of going to finish a funeral and finding that the story is not over.
It is the story of faithful grief turned into unbelievable awe.
It is the story of surprise for the bleary-eyed, the cried-out, and the heavy-hearted.
One of my favorite quips about the ridiculousness of resurrection is from theologian John Caputo, who said that every century or so, humanity proclaims that God is dead. And then something funny happens on the way to the funeral. And what was declared dead lives to bury its pallbearers.1
Something funny happens on the way to the funeral.
I suppose that is what is happening to me.
*I have suspended paid subscriptions for the time being since posting is sporadic. Thank you so, so much for the support.
From The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional by John Caputo
Thank you for sharing this, such beautiful words. And I'd like to say, it's so wonderful to hear from you again. I've recently been baptised and part of that was due to your online ministry showing me that Jesus can hold my struggles and what Christianity can be.
What beautiful words.