Prayer

As spring comes to America’s Midwest, I am reminded of this reflection I wrote a couple of years ago for a group of spiritual directors. The conversations in it bounce back and forth between what I imagine the risen Christ might say to me and the common struggles of faith that spiritual directors often hear from those who share their stories with us (and also feel ourselves from time to time, of course). The title, “Let Me Easter in You,” was inspired by a poem by Gerard Hanley Hopkins. 

“Let me Easter in you,” he says to me, handing me a piece of fish and a small helping of bread warm from the morning fire. We sit on the shore together and then he rises and looks out over the lake at his fishermen-disciples, earnestly but haplessly making their way and their living in the early morning light. He shakes his head and grins. “The fish are right there on the other side of the boat, and they can’t see them,” he says.   

“I don’t know why I’m here,” she says to me, her head in her hands and her tears spilling out through her fingers like spring water through reeds. “I am hungry for something I cannot even name. I am searching for something in all the wrong places that for all my life I have been taught and assured should be easy to find. But it’s not. It never is.” 

“Let’s Easter together,” I manage to say, handing her a tissue and giving her my attention. 

“Let me Easter in you,” he says to me, breaking open the bread with the two men he met on the Emmaus road and inviting me to join in the sharing. The bread is warm in my hand, and he is as close to me as that heat. He turns away from the two men and toward me. He smiles and shakes his head as he speaks: “I walked with them for miles, and they didn’t know it was me.” 

“I don’t know what it all is supposed to mean for me,” he says, “all the words and stories and rituals and prayers. I’m told it’s supposed to set my heart on fire but all I sense is a cold void. Isn’t there more? Shouldn’t there be more?” 

“Let’s Easter together,” I whisper, inviting him to speak his own story.

“Let me Easter in you,” he says to me, folding the garments and placing them at the place where he had been lain. We walk together into the sun-lit morning and out into the field, and I notice his hand reaching out to touch a slender stem of wheat, cradling its spike in a kind of blessing of the food it will become. “She thought I was the gardener,” he says. “She just couldn’t see me.”

“I don’t know that I believe anymore,” she says. “What sense is there to an empty tomb, a folded cloth, broken bread and a risen man? Why should it matter? When has it ever — even once — changed my life?” 

“Let’s Easter together,” I say. “Let’s see what we hear in the silence and dark of deepest and richest soil. Let’s allow ourselves to remain buried long enough for the light of the sun to warm us into life again. Let’s take our time but reach ever-upward. Let’s gently burst from the deadness of our seeds, sprouting and digging our way back to the surface, a little curl of green barely visible but ever hopeful.

“Then a stem…a few leaves…a flourish of grain, something to be plucked and ground by stone, mixed and patted and baked and served as nourishment for another. Let’s Easter together, grasping a new chance at life when it is offered.”