The far side of death

"When I came to you," writes St. Paul to the Corinthians, "I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God in lofty words or wisdom.  For I decided to know nothing among you but Christ and him crucified."  Stay a while.  Do not hurry by the cross on your way to Easter joy, for we know the risen Lord only through Christ and him crucified.  The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said that the only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.  The only joy to be trusted is the joy on the far side of a broken heart; the only life to be trusted is the life on the far side of death.  Stay a while, with Christ, and him crucified. - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon


I had no intention of including the whole paragraph, but it builds on itself so well that I felt I couldn't omit any of it.

35 years ago, my wife and I were high school sweethearts.  We reunited a couple years after graduation, still very young, intensely in love.  I'm pretty sure that she'd agree with me that the only love to be trusted is the love on the other side of trial - the trials that life has brought us and God has brought us through.  Love that has been tested in fire becomes pure, without alloy. Along the way, we've too much broken each other's heart by our own choices and actions, and it is true that we couldn't trust the joy we knew until we were healed of our brokenness.  We've each had to let part of our self die: our vision of what love should be and of how we relate to each other, our ideas of just what sort of thing could and couldn't ever be forgiven, our desire for a relationship different from - in our minds, better than - the one we thought we could have together.  So the life we have together, that we can now trust, is already on the other side of a sort of death to ourselves.  As we experienced the laying down of our lives for one another, as the immature relationship we once shared was put to death, we have found a resurrected love far deeper and more wonderful than that we thought so marvelous at the outset.

It's important not to linger at Good Friday in the wrong way.  It isn't merely a reason to tolerate or even embrace all the crap that life brings us, though it is good for us to unite ourselves with Christ in all our sufferings as well as our joys.  Nor is it just a helpful way to console ourselves over the bad things that happen to good people.  It isn't a reason to beat ourselves up some more over the wrong choices we've made, and is especially not a license for those wrong choices we might be considering.  In fact, there are many shallow ways to think about this day of glory and suffering, and the purpose of lingering at the foot of the cross is to put them aside to plumb a bit further the depths of unfathomable love.