Experience of Resurrection Now.

How To Experience Resurrection Now?

In order to come to new life, one must first grow through a grieving process, a process of acceptance and processing of the loss, of the illusion, the actual death experience. Certain affective ties that one had with whom or what one has lost (a person, an ideal concerning one or more persons, a life dream, a self-image) must be let go, so that one can see that person, that ideal, oneself, in another ‘light’. ‘, and can enter into a different kind of relationship with it, a relationship built from the situation I/we are in now.

The first persons to whom Jesus appears as the risen one, the further living, the differently living, are precisely those people with whom He had very close affectionate ties (his mother, some women) and who were therefore also deeply personally affected by that loss, and each had to deal with it in his/her own way. But He also asks them to let go of those ties (“Don’t hold me…”) and to experience them in a different way (“But go to my brothers and tell them…”).

Wanting to live out of some dream, wanting to live out of love, is indeed a personal choice, personally filled in, and the disappointments or death experiences we experience in doing so are also extremely personal. Likewise, the experience of ‘he/she/it/I’, followed by the belief in the resurrection, will be very personal. That belief remains purely theoretical as long as it is not preceded by a personally lived experience of death and a personally lived experience of the resurrection.

The resurrection stories from the Gospel clearly point in that direction. The Emmaus travelers awaken from their disenchantment when their hearts start to burn again. It is precisely in this that they recognize Him. Mary Magdalene, utterly devastated by the death of her beloved Lord (“Woman, why weep ye…?” Jo. 20:15), feels revived upon hearing her name, and recognizes in the one who pronounces it, the Risen One.

The disciples, disappointed, take up their previous work again. They go fishing again. Doubly disappointed because here too their efforts are fruitless, they are told: “Try it differently, throw your nets the other side!” (Joh. 21:6). That sudden feeling of ‘now it’s working great!’ revives them, and it is precisely in this that they recognize Him as ‘the Living One’.

An anonymous Jesuit

Source: In alle dingen – Nikolaas Sintobin SJ