Guest Artist

I’m writing this on the day I’m turning 60 years old. And feeling it, a little. I have a head cold and a bum knee that’s kept me from jogging for going on two months. A fine welcome to senior status.

I’d love to offer some apt reflections on turning over this new chapter, but…I haven’t had enough time to reflect on it yet, and my head is partly under water! Instead of afflicting you with any more of this, I’d like to yield the rest of this space to a fine writer, Frederick Buechner, author of many books of religious fiction, autobiography, theological reflection, etc.

What strikes me is that, although these words are a few decades old, they speak to a sense many of us may have—that Easter has come and gone this year leaving a very anxious world, and our anxious lives, little touched. Not so, Buechner would say:

Anxiety and fear are what we know best in this fantastic century of ours. Wars and rumors of wars. From civilization itself to what seemed the most unalterable values of the past, everything is threatened or already in ruins. We have heard so much tragic news that when the news is good we cannot hear it.

But the proclamation of Easter Day is that all is well. And as a Christian, I say this not with the easy optimism of one who has never known a time when all was not well but as one who has faced the cross in all its obscenity as well as in all its glory, who has known one way or another what it is like to live separated from God. In the end, his will, not ours, is done. Love is the victor. Death is not the end. The end is life. His life and our lives through him, in him. Existence has greater depths of beauty, mystery, and benediction than the wildest visionary has ever dared to dream. Christ our Lord has risen.

Amen, and peace,

Rod