The Festal Life

Because you know I love her. Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement while supporting the United Farm Workers in California, July 1973. Day was 75 at the time and was imprisoned for crossing a banned picket line.

"Our entire life is built on the patterns of the Easter chants: on one side- the tomb, death, descent into hell; on the other side- resurrection, life, joy. 'For Thou has descended into the tomb, O Thou who art immortal, yet Thou hast destroyed the power of hell.' Our lives task is to let the elements of heaven and resurrection triumph over the forces of hell and death." -The Diary of a Russian Priest, Aleksandr V. El'chaninov

Julia Esquivel

--From Threatened with Resurrection
Esquivel is a Guatemalan Catholic who has been living in exile since 1980 because of her protests against the government.

I am no longer afraid of death

I know well

Its dark and cold corridors

Leading to life. 

I am afraid rather of that life

Which does not come out of death,

Which cramps our hands

And slows our march. 

I am afraid of my fear

And even more of the fear of others,

Who do not know where they are going,

Who continue clinging

To what they think is life

Which we know to be death! 

I live each day to kill death;

I die each day to give birth to life,

And in this death of death,

I die a thousand times

And am reborn another thousand

Through that love

From my People

Which nourishes hope!

Poetry Wednesday

For Jared because he will always love Jurgen Moltmann. While this is somewhat lengthy, if you have a spare moment, this is pretty amazing stuff and if lived could, dare I say it?, change the world. 

"The Feast of Freedom"

from The Power of the Powerless

The Easter faith recognizes that the raising of the crucified Christ from the dead provides the great alternative to this world of death. This faith sees the raising of Christ as God's protest against death, and against the people who work for death; for the Easter faith recognizes God's passion for the life of the person who is threatened by death and with death. And faith participates in this process of love by getting up out of the apathy of misery and out of the cynicism of prosperity, and fighting against death's accomplices, here and now, in this life.

Weary Christians have often enough deleted this critical and liberating power from Easter. Their faith has then degenerated into the confidant belief in certain facts, and a poverty-stricken hope for the next world, as if death were nothing but a fate we meet with at the end of life. But death is an evil power now, in life's very midst. It is the economic death of the person we allow to starve; the political death of the people who are oppressed; the social death of the handicapped; the noisy death that strikes through napalm bombs and torture; and the soundless death of the apathetic soul.

The resurrection faith is not proved true by means of historical evidence, or only in the next world. It is proved here and now, through the courage for revolt, the protest against deadly powers, and the self-giving of men and women for the victory of life. It is impossible to talk convincingly about Christ's resurrection without participating in the movement of the Spirit "who descends on all flesh" to quicken it. This movement of the Spirit is the divine "liberation movement," for it is the process whereby the world is recreated.

So resurrection means rebirth out of impotence and indolence to the "living hope." And today "living hope" means a passion for life, and a lived protest against death.

Christ's resurrection is the beginning of God's rebellion. That rebellion is still going on in the Spirit of hope, and will be complete when, together with death, "every rule and every authority and power" is at last abolished (I Cor. 15:24).

The resurrection hope finds living expression in men and women when they protest against death and the slaves of death. But it lives from something different- from the superabundance of God's future. Its freedom lives in resistance against all outward and inward denials of life. But it does not live from this protest. It lives from joy in the coming victory of life. Protest and resistance are founded on this hope. Otherwise they degenerate into mere accusation and campaigns of revenge. But the greater hope has to take living from in this protest and resistance; otherwise it turns into religious seduction.

Easter is a feast, and it is as the feast of freedom that it is celebrated. For with Easter begins the laughter of the redeemed, the dance of the liberated and the creative play of fantasy. From time immemorial Easter hymns have celebrated the victory of life by laughing at death, mocking hell, and ridiculing the mighty ones who spread fear and terror around them.

Easter is the feast of freedom. It makes the life which it touches a festal life. "The risen Christ makes life a perpetual feast," said Athanasius. But can the whole of life really be a feast? Even life's dark side- death, guilt, senseless suffering? I think it can. Once we realize that the giver of this feast is the outcast, suffering, crucified Son of Man from Nazareth, then every "no" is absorbed into this profound "yes," and is swallowed up in its victory.

Easter is at one and the same time God's protest against death, and the feast of freedom from death. Anyone who fails to hold these two things together has failed to understand the resurrection of the Christ who was crucified. Resistance is the protest of those who hope, and hope is the feast of the people who resist.