In June of 1995 a young woman named Meredith was driving along a two-lane road late at night somewhere out in the desert. As she rounded a curve in the road all she could see were the headlights of a huge tractor-trailer barreling down on her. She swerved to the right to get out of the way, but when her wheels hit the soft sand on the side of the road her car skidded, then flipped end over end, until she was finally thrown 100 feet from the car into sagebrush and sand.
When paramedics arrived they tried to revive her, but couldn’t. She was airlifted, with no vital signs, to the hospital, then lay in a coma for a week. She wrote about her experience in a piece for the Resiliency Center in 2002. “I remember nothing,” she said. “I can only describe what happened because I read the police report.”
When Meredith emerged from the coma she had no short-term memory, couldn’t move her left arm and leg, could hear herself speak but didn’t know where the words were coming from, and was in excruciating pain when she tried to move. She envisions her family watching her emerge from the coma and writes: “I imagine it was like witnessing a caterpillar coming out of its cocoon, changing from one life form to another. I was transforming into a new form of myself.”
Five years after the accident, having received speech, physical, occupational, vocational and psychological therapies, she writes: “I currently live independently, in charge of my own life. I now look for the good, or the lesson, in every situation and try to turn a negative into a positive. I have taken a traumatic life occurrence and turned it into a rewarding metamorphosis. I have made peace with the new me. As a matter of fact, I like the new [me] and my new life better.”
Meredith’s story is a story of resurrection, as is the story of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, shot in the head in Tucson, AZ in 2011 and making her way back to life again amid challenges most of us cannot even imagine. Some in this room have their own resurrection stories to tell. I know because I’ve heard them. Resurrection stories are the stuff of human pain, challenge and tragedy turned on its head so that new life can rise from the ashes. These stories emerge from the heart of death and are linked to words like salvation and redemption. The lived-experience of these stories is an experience of such deep transformation that a radically new life, new self, new outlook, new way of seeing and living life, are the result.
Resurrection, salvation and redemption are this-world realities. The words are name-tags for the experience of metamorphosis Meredith describes so well. I have an acquaintance who almost lost his home during the mortgage fiasco two years ago. He happened to learn of a program that provided assistance for people like him, and he was able to qualify. As a result he and his family still have their home. The program, he says, “saved” them from the street. This is an example of salvation.
Because these words represent life in this physical world, Scripture continually admonishes us to put flesh on the concepts, to transform the systems that keep the poor “POOR”, to protect and care for the vulnerable, to provide health care for the sick, to free those in prison. We call Jesus “savior” because he was a healer, a liberator, one who freed people from the effects of social sin and personal guilt. He stepped in when the woman caught in adultery was about to be stoned and, without words, forced the crowd to look at its own wrong-doing. He called Zacchaeus down from the tree and announced his intention to spend the night in this despised man’s home so Zacchaeus, the rich and greedy tax collector, could undergo a profound change of heart and become a generous and compassionate man.
We are called to such acts of courage and leniency. We are called to become the hands and hearts of mercy, to support and assist the vulnerable, to see the human need for salvation and redemption in everyday life, to find new ways of dealing with crime, mental illness and desperation instead of caging people in environments of scorn. We are called to work toward making our communities and neighborhoods places where all are respected, all are response-able and all are free. Redeeming the darkness of human failure is what salvation FEELS like. Justice-making is the road that takes us there. It is the path of changing hearts and attitudes so that it becomes impossible to ignore and neglect those who suffer.
The theological concept of Resurrection is a template for earth-focused transformation. “Resurrection of the Body” is another way of saying that the Divine Design is for this earth experience itself to be resurrected, to be lifted to another dimension of being, a dimension of wholeness and harmony. Perhaps the butterfly image is the perfect image for us today. Resurrection is about changing from one life form to something so NEW it is utterly unrecognizable as the former self. It rises out of the unique sludge of that-which-was.
This is what the Maccabee sons proclaimed, in a fashion, somewhere around 200 B.C.E. when the idea of resurrection was just beginning to emerge within Judaism. It’s what the Sadducees refused to accept as they argued against this “new” belief and staunchly advocated for the old, the seat of their power. The changes Jesus represented threatened to undermine their weakening Temple position and authority, so they were determined to out-argue, intimidate, and prove the superiority of their views and rank before this untrained upstart. Jesus used their own theological framework, the first 5 books of Scripture, to turn the debate upside down. “If God is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, God of the living, not of the dead,” he quoted from Exodus, “then it follows these ancestors are alive even now in the presence of God.”
Resurrection just IS.
At this point in history, over 2,000 years later, we still debate the Scriptural references to “resurrection.” That the physical body would somehow be re-constituted and return to life sounds ludicrous to a good number of people, as it did to the Sadducees in Jesus’ time. And well it should! This isn’t what resurrection is about. We may come closer to understanding by using the analogy of metamorphosis. Resurrection is not resuscitation. The old form dies and disappears as does the caterpillar. The new form, radically unlike the old, is born. “What was” is no more, but LIFE, transformed, goes on.
Our mission as followers of Jesus is to recognize the hidden truth under these counter-materialistic concepts. We’re called to heed the cry for redemption, salvation and resurrected life in our world by responding to the plea for healing, for mercy, for liberation and wholeness in our communities today. There is an ancient maxim: “as above, so below.” Metamorphosis at the level of the caterpillar is mystery enough for most minds to consider. At the level of transition from physical death to NEW LIFE, “Mystery” is even more difficult for many to accept or even to contemplate.
That’s why we have Scripture. It’s why we have religion. The point is to hold on to the reality of worlds within worlds and lives beyond lives, as well as to encourage the walk of self-giving and the practice of mercy and compassion. The “words” are there to focus our attention on what matters—the wholeness of the human family, the healing of the human heart, and the ongoing mystery of metamorphosis — the radical, invisible Divine force of transformation, alive and active, always and everywhere.
Rev. Toni Tortorilla, Sophia Christi Catholic Community
October 13, 2013, 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time
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