Choice

“Grandmother, how do you know there is a God?”

“Oh Honey!  You hear the birds sing and see the flowers grow and you know there’s God!”

“But Grandmother…I hear the birds and see the flowers…and I don’t.”

Grandmother Page was a—perhaps the—pivotal person in my life.  She lived out the example of unconditional love.

When I was a child I suffered from severe attacks of asthma.  My lungs would close off to the degree that I was sure, even when I was quite small, that panic would kill me and I had to remain still, both physically and emotionally.  Nights were worse; lying down brought me a level of distress similar to a sailor in a sinking submarine.

Grandmother would sit with me and hold me upright all night long.  She’d sing to me, and tell me stories from her childhood and from the Bible, and most of all she’d keep her light blue eyes focused on mine so that I was drawn into her spirit and her heart.  To this day I don’t see blue eyes without thinking of her.

Her faith burned like a star; through losing my grandfather, the love of her life, in her early 40’s, through ensuing decades of poverty and constant physical pain, she loved.  Her love, and her faith, seemed effortless.

The exchange of words I share with you now occurred in the kitchen of my parent’s home when I was sixteen.  When I told her honestly of my emptiness I ran out of the room and sat in a car and cried.  She didn’t follow me; she didn’t have to.  I’m certain she prayed for me, and we never spoke like that again.  Somewhere along the line, faith came to me.

I suppose we might call that a kind of resurrection.  And though it’s not as monumental, nor as preposterous, as Jesus leaving his tomb in Jerusalem 2000 years ago, I’d argue that it’s a related miracle.

A miracle is something we can’t explain, can’t get our minds around, an experience that brings us to awe and wonder.  It may be that we’re never supposed to grow fully comfortable with a miracle, that we always need to stand—or kneel, or fall on our faces—in front of it, and later process the whole experience with questioning and even with tears.

The Resurrection is not dogma, it’s not religion—it’s revelation.  It’s there.  It happened; we can and should wrestle with how, what and why it all happened, but that it happened strikes me as undeniable.  Mary Magdalen said it happened.  Peter and John experienced it too.  Did they see the same thing?  They each saw through their own eyes, but they saw something that transformed them from terrified, lost sheep to lions willing to die rather than deny what they’d seen.

I haven’t seen—yet—the physical form of Jesus risen from the dead.  But I have had a revelation, and it involved my Grandmother, long after she’d taken her last breath on earth.

I was praying.  I was about to ask God for help as I faced a situation involving career and ego and emotional turmoil and a large amount of money.  I knelt by my bedside and suddenly none of that seemed pressing.  A different prayer—not a prayer of petition but simply the desire to be open and honest—came to me.

Then came a revelation, and sharply along with it surged something both spiritual and physical—so physical my lungs expanded like the breath of God blown into them.  The revelation was an insight, and more—it was a purpose.

What struck me was that I’d had it easy; I’d been blessed, surrounded, bathed in love.  Believing in God was a gift I’d been given.  I’d always seen myself as struggling for faith.  But I had experienced God’s love from my earliest moments; both spiritually and physically I’d felt and seen it.

And I saw at that moment that other people have a different road, and some a viciously different one.  Some children are abused by parents or grandparents; some people, when they are smothering as I was as a child, have their teeth knocked out.

My duty—my opportunity, my calling, as God let me know on my knees that night—is not to convince anyone of the supreme miracle of God’s endless, eternal love.  I am simply to love them, to contribute in any way I can to the possibility that they can experience enough love to believe that Resurrection—Jesus’s, and their own—might just be possible.

And that they, and you, and I all might say together, “He is Risen!  He is Risen indeed!”

-Randall