Easter in the time of Corona

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I'm writing this on Saturday, the day between “Good Friday” and Easter Sunday. It seems like that’s where we are living right now. We are in some ways rolled into our own tombs with the big stone up against the door – waiting for the time when we might be resurrected again. Waiting for some miracle of transformation to come from this entombment. Looking around the walls of our isolation, drawing hieroglyphs of how it used to be. We are living between what was and what shall be. This pinprick of time when we could do so much more than watch reruns – when we could find new seeds of what we will become. Us, with our unwashed hair in our bedroom slippers fast running out of toilet paper are learning things. To whom do we really belong? What deeply calls to us in this time of isolation? We learn how much we relied on our routine, on our things, on our ability to stay comfortable. How we spent time like pocket change. How we had SO much. In this time before resurrection arrives, I want to study this pared down self, this messy me who wants so badly to shape some kind of deep meaning out of this re-arrangement. Miracles occur out of sight … beyond our will. Can I allow myself to be transfigured by the burial of the life I once knew? Can I wrap myself in a shroud and be patient? Can I see this time as holy? Eat the communion wafer and swallow the bloodwine of possibility? Can I please, oh please, not spend this gift in distraction. Can I open to the transubstantiation that could come from this? My friend and poet, Kim Rosen has written often about the power of darkness and how everything gets transformed by it. I have her permission to post this new poem here.

Between

By Kim Rosen

But it's the cave I want to know. Not how He left, rose, became a something again. But what happens in the cave?

Not blood, not flesh, not wine stamped with the memory of blood, but the space between breath and breath where we are nowhere

to be found. Someone weeps outside. Someone tugs at the boulder. Someone clings to a torn lock of His hair.

And inside, in the still, lightless air the turning back into everything.

--Kim Rosen