The reality of Easter

...Only fantastic stories could tell the truth about them...

...As an alternative to fundamentalism, however, it is not only not adequate...

...Toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend...

...They aren't enough to base a life on, especially not one which might take you to death, where experiences end for good...

...The mysterious is a real dimension of human experience...

...JOHN GARVEY...

...it isn't even the right way to tell a story...

...What is clear from Scripture, from the testimony of the early church, and what has been believed by orthodox Christians throughout history is that a man who was killed lived again, not as a ghost or as an appearance of his former self, but as someone alive with a new kind of life...

...It is almost an embarrassment to bring up the question of the empty tomb to someone who urges this point of view...

...We want to explain Christian faith in terms which won't offend people to whom the idea of a miracle is scandalous (as if it weren't scandalous to first-century pagans, who considered Christians a credulous lot...

...There is something watery and insipid about this approach to the "faith experience" of the early church...

...it is easy to see what it is meant to remedy...

...They include not only Jesus, but Saint Francis of Assisi and the founder of Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov...

...it reminds me of the sort of thing liberal ministers who wanted to uplift everyone and offend no one used to trot out: "Those great men of history, Roosevelt, Gandhi, Lincoln, Jesus, and Plato...

...However, there is a way of talking about the resurrection which avoids fundamentalism by speaking of the way Jesus was, after his death, alive "in the lives of his disciples...

...The importance of the resurrection is to be found in the "faith experience" of the church...

...One thing it tells us is that the world is not the safe, predictable place we thought it was...

...If Jesus lived only as any impressive dead person lives, there is no more reason to be a Christian than there is to be a Platonist...

...Sounds pretty dead to me...

...It is that mysterious one we should look to, realizing that whatever it was that happened at the resurrection it transcended all ordinary categories of experience, including the merely factual or historical...

...What I think we are faced with is a fear of the marvelous...

...People understandably do not feel that they have found the pearl of great price when told they should move away from the question of whether a man really rose from the dead to a consideration of the state of mind of the early church...

...This passage from The Habit of Being, Sally Fitzgerald's wonderful collection of Flannery O'Connor's letters, came to mind recently when I was trying to figure out what bothered me about some appreaches to scriptural interpretation and Christian doctrine...

...now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one...

...I understand why we are offered this diet...

...Insisting on too literal an approach can make us less sensitive to the need for faith...

...There have been some people about whom fantastic stories have been told...

...What we wind up with is pretty thin soup...

...The resurrection mattered to the faith of the apostles, according to this line of thought, and it is this faith which counts, not whether or not the event happened in time...

...Broadwater said that when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the 'most portable' person of the Trinity...

...It is interesting that our first question about them is, "Why would people tell a story like that, unbelievable as it is," rather than "What if things like that could happen...

...A miracle can be seen for what it is only where there is a prior faith, able to receive it...

...it is hardly interesting...

...it would never convince someone simply as an historical or physical fact...

...you feel like Lenny in Of Mice and Men: "Tell me about the rabbits, George...

...To this extent what counts is the faith of the church, and not what a camera placed at the entrance of the tomb might reveal...

...I WAS ONCE, five or six years ago, taken by some friends to have dinner with Mary McCarthy and her husband, Mr...

...I then said, in a very shaky voice, 'Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it.' That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me...

...This is not only hopelessly academic...

...plainly the main significance of the resurrection is not the fact of a resuscitated corpse...

...But the belief that Jesus really rose has been central to Christianity...

...What would that tell us about the sort of world we live in...

...Here some words of Simone Weil are brutally to the point: Hitler could rise from the dead a thousand times, she said, and she would never believe that he was the son of God...

...Some interpretations of Scripture are resented not because they aren't fundamentalist enough, but because they offer a vision which doesn't look as rich or as comprehensive as the traditional sort...

...Intense experiences are a dime a dozen...

...Maybe the Western worldview which has prevailed since the Enlightenment is too limited and needs shaking up with stories of multiplied loaves and fishes, transfiguration, and resurrection...

...Broadwater...

...Maybe this can't be done...

...If the danger of conservative Christianity is its tendency towards legalism and fundamentalism, the danger of liberal Christianity is a kind of embarrassment before the claims of traditional Christianity...

...all the rest of life is expendable...

...There are interpretations of the resurrection, for example, which bypass the question of whether Jesus actually rose from the dead in order to consider the state of mind of the early church...

...He appears sometimes as a stranger, recognized "in the breaking of the bread" or in serving breakfast to his friends, who had gone back to their trade as fishermen and were hungry after a night of fruitless work...

...We are too time-bound, too prejudiced in favor of the categories acceptable to educated, middle-class modern Western white folks to consider the possibility that there really is such a thing as the miraculous, the marvelous, the uncanny, the supernatural...

...anyone tired of thinner stuff should turn to Haughton's refreshing theology...

...A strictly fundamentalist view of this doctrine may lead us to overlook some of the lessons the doctrine is meant to teach us...

...In her excellent book The Passionate God (Paulist) Rosemary Haughton brings a wider vision to bear on the mystery of the Incarnation...

...It is made no less real by the fact that our culture isn't very good at dealing with it...