As I was dismantling the victory hat I posted last week, I realized there was something intrinsically wrong with it. The Big C was perfect. However, my artwork on those empty toilet paper rolls at the foot of the cross mirrors the way we dress up for Easter, arriving at church looking our best. What Jesus really yearns for is for us to come as we are – warts and all. I saw a church marquis once with the following invitation posted, “Come as you are, you can change inside.” Exactly! Everyone keeps saying this was an unprecedented Easter. So true. We all finally arrived just as we are without pretense, without all our outward finery. Maybe that’s not such bad way to celebrate Resurrection Sunday.
Too many times in our spiritual lives we attempt to gloss over our imperfections, adorning or disguising them before going out in public. We might fool others (but usually less than we think) or ourselves, but there’s no disguising our faults before God. He sees them all and loves us anyway. The spiritual journey involves a partnership with Him so that He can reveal them to us through His Word. Only when we are forced to see ourselves in our raw state can we truly understand the depth of God’s love. As Tim Keller explains, “The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.” That is good news indeed!
It would have taken every empty roll on Marco Island to illustrate all the issues God has transformed in my life, and that doesn’t include the ones I don’t even know about yet. This quarantine is revealing more than I care to admit. The longer it goes on, the longer my ‘raw’ state emerges. Bereft of adornment, I am left staring in the mirror at someone I hardly recognize. It made me think of an article I read before this crisis that suggested undercutting vanity as an alternative to giving up chocolate for Lent. The author based her suggestion on the Christian practice called ‘mortifying the flesh.’ HA! Quarantine has forced everyone to undercut vanity in some form or another whether it’s the pajamas we wear all day, elastic waistbands that disguise the consequence of frequent trips to the frig, the lack of hair dye, pedicures, Botox, access to a gym, shaving, etc. I keep moving further and further away from the computer during Zoom calls and have even considered using the age-old trick of Vaseline on the camera lens to blur my image.
That said, even more than my mortifying physical state is the way this quarantine has exposed some even less attractive spiritual conditions desperately needing a shot of Divine Botox. During a recent group What’s App conversation, someone was questioning whether we were experiencing the rapture, but autocorrect kept changing it to ‘rupture.’ I’m not a biblical scholar so won’t speculate on the rapture, but we’ve definitely been ruptured. We don’t know what our resurrection is going to look like yet, but it will come. Easter is our guarantee. We will rise because He already has. For now though, we’re still confined in our homes, fearful for our lives and an uncertain future. What’s important to remember is that after the resurrected Christ appeared to His disciples in their hiding, they went from cowering to courageous – and so will we.
Aren’t we all tempted to design our own resurrection? But that’s not our job. What God asks and what He’s revealing in quarantine are the things we have to surrender to Him so that He can create our own distinct victory hats. That’s our only participation – to accept the things He’s revealing that need to be changed and to offer them back to Him, to give Him something to work with, to get rid of the old to make room for the new. The spiritual exercise with that silly hat taught me a valuable lesson. I need to deconstruct everything I thought made me look good, everything that glossed over my imperfections, everything that prevented me from looking at who I really am – not the polished one I present to others.
Those issues are what the empty toilet paper rolls should illustrate: the drab-colored, cardboard ones with remnants of paper still stuck to them, a little bent and dented. I spent an entire day painting and glorifying trash. But isn’t that what I do when I attempt to disguise my spiritual trash? The only way to get rid of it is to release it to God for recycling. Lastly, Christ isn’t ‘in the clouds’ as I depicted with cotton balls on my original design. He’s right there in the middle of our muck doing what He does best - recycling souls.
I have no idea what God’s going to do with the things I surrender to Him, but I DO know it’s going to look a lot better than the hat I created last week. We all have our own resurrection expectations, but we’re limited by our humanity. Every time I’ve gone through a resurrection story where something had to die, what followed was nothing I could have imagined or dreamed. It was always better.
Renee D. Roden wrote the Lenten article I mentioned in 2017, but it seems particularly relevant and worthy of consideration as we wait for our own COVID resurrection story to unfold. She concludes, “Letting go of our exterior image of ourselves creates space for us to focus on our interior image. In the words of Blessed Basil Moreau, may we come to possess ‘as vivid awareness of the maladies of our soul as we have of the maladies of our body,’ and through deeper awareness of our maladies, come to deeper healing.” Amen sista!!
P.S. Not one to waste a good craft, I repurposed my fancy toilet paper rolls into pins for COVID bowling last night.
*https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/5-lenten-practices-that-arent-giving-up-chocolate/