by Joanie Butman
Years ago I wrote that I wanted the Big C in my life to be Christ, not cancer. I made that choice again a few years later in regard to chardonnay. It’s a question we’re all facing right now. We are in a defining moment. Easter prompts the question, “Who or what will be the big C in your life – Christ or coronavirus?” Will BC take on a new meaning?
The terms BC and AD are about more than just measuring the passing of time. They delineate a turning point in world history and in my history as well. They separate the old from the new. There’s no doubt my life changed once I became a Christian – not necessarily in a physical way that would be blatantly obvious to others. It was a game-changing shift in my world view which, I hope, eventually became evidenced in the way I chose to live going forward.
Though becoming a Christian remains the most life-defining choice I’ve ever made, it was just the beginning. No one sheds their old skin in one dramatic AHA moment. It takes a lifetime of breaking down walls we didn’t even realize we’d erected – usually as a means of protection (or so we thought). Each time God was asking me to let go of something or someone to embrace a new God-directed future that always came with uncertainty. It was painful for sure, but as I’ve often been reminded, “If you miss the crucifixion, you’ll miss the resurrection.” Resurrection always requires the death of something. There’s another saying that is particularly relevant when standing at the edge of an abyss, “Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.”
Regardless of our myriad beliefs, this year our quarantine has been a forced Lenten practice – a time of self-reflection, self-sacrifice, self-denial. We may be disconnected physically as Jesus was in the desert, but we are more connected than ever – not necessarily by our devices but by our shared suffering. I can’t think of anything that connects people faster than pain.
Humanity is facing its own BC question. There’s no doubt that we are in a global, historical, life-defining moment with a new normal yet to be defined. As anyone who has ever suffered a trauma knows, there’s no going back. You are changed forever. All that remains to be seen is what that change will look like. In his Good Friday sermon Pope Francis exhorted, “We should not waste this opportunity. Let us not allow so much pain, so many deaths, and so much heroic engagement on the part of health workers to have been in vain. Returning to the way things were is the ‘recession’ we should fear the most.”
As Jesus was dying, He calls to His Father, “Into your hands I commend my spirit.” God is asking us to do the same – to surrender our old ways in order to embrace a new reality. James Martin explains, “Giving ourselves entirely to God means surrendering to the future God has in store for us. We may not know what it is. We may not understand it. We may even fear it. But we are called to surrender ourselves to that future.” My hope and prayer is that it will be a future where we have learned the answer to the question, “Who’s my neighbor?” and can respond not by building walls but by destroying them, that our love and compassion for each other will display the same disregard for geographical and socio-economic borders as the coronavirus.
Jesus’s resurrection ushered in a new hope. That hope is just as real today as it was on the first Easter Sunday. His resurrection changed everything. So much so that the shift from old to new is marked indelibly in history and, hopefully, in our hearts. We will get through this crisis (one way or another), but who will we be on the other side? Jesus wants us to thrive not merely survive. My hope is in Him – the Big C – today and always.
On a lighter note, Romans 12:12 calls us to be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. Below is my joy-filled entry into our family’s quarantine Easter bonnet challenge – appropriately made out of empty toilet paper rolls. Given the national preoccupation with toilet paper recently, it appears that Charmin may be the Big C for many people. The spiritual lesson in those empty rolls may be a stretch, but I immediately saw the correlation. Christ willingly takes the trash of our lives and recycles it into something beautiful. He uses the manure of our troubles as rich fertilizer for His redemptive power. Who else can “take a mess and make it into a message, a test into a testimony, a trial into a triumph, and a victim into a victory?” My Easter bonnet is my victory hat.
