Today we come to the eighth and final chapter in Parker Palmer’s The Active Life: A Spirituality of Creativity, Work, and Caring, titled “’Threatened With Resurrection’: Acts of Death or New Life.”
The Horizons of Action
In this final chapter, Palmer offers some insight about the meaning of resurrection. He opens by reminding us that we live our lives in view of a coming horizon. How we view that horizon shapes our action. If all we see is death on the horizon, we can become fearful and despondent.
But when we envision a horizon that holds the hope of life, we are free to act without fear, free to act in truth and love and justice today because those very qualities seem to shape our own destiny. (139)
The hope of resurrection can set us free. Yet Palmer offers an interesting insight about resurrection.
I have sometimes feared life itself, and the movement toward new life, more than I have feared death in its various forms. (140)
We are prone to become accustomed to our pain and dysfunctions, and losing them … dying to them … threatens our very identity and ability to make sense of the world.
Death in various forms is sometimes comforting, while resurrection and new life can be demanding and threatening. If I lived as if resurrection were real, and allowed myself to die for the sake of new life, what might I be called upon to do? (142)
Who Threatens Us?
In the second section of this chapter Palmer turns to a poem by Julia Esquivel, titled They Have Threatened Us With Resurrection. (You can follow the link if you want to read the poem.) The context for the poem is murder and repression peasants in Guatemala in the 1950s to 1980s. Her poem suggests that it is both the oppressors and the martyred oppressed who threaten us with resurrection.
“… On the one hand, we fear the killers, but not simply because they want to kill us. We fear them because they test our convictions about resurrection, they test our willingness to be brought into a larger life than the one we know. On the other hand, we fear the innocent victims of the killers, those who have died for love and justice and peace. Though they are our friends, we fear them because they call us to follow them in “this marathon of Hope.” If we were to take their calling seriously, we ourselves would have to undergo some form of dying.”
So we huddle together in our conspiracy of silence, trying to ignore both the death and their murderers, trying to ignore the ambiguous call of the new life that lies beyond death. (148)
As Palmer notes the “Us” in the title of the poem isn’t just about the killers and the killed. We, the ones observing this, are part of the “Us” as well.
The Meaning of Resurrection
Toward the end of this section. Palmer writes:
For Esquivel, there is no resurrection of isolated individuals. She is simply not concerned about private resurrections, yours or mine or her own. Each of us is resurrected only as we enter into the network of relationships called community, a network that embraces not only living persons but people who have died, and nonhuman creatures as well. Resurrection has personal significance – if we understand the person as a communal being – but it is above all a corporate, social and political event, an event in which justice and truth and love come to fruition. (152)
I think Palmer writes some important stuff here. Resurrection isn’t simply being raised into a new life and a great personal relationship with Jesus. Resurrection is the consummation of the Kingdom of God. It is realization of the world that God intended from the beginning. Resurrection is threatening to our complacent existence but it is also the hope that animates us.
Resurrection Into Community
Death is our constant companion. We can live in denial of it or we can embrace it as our companion.
… if we try to gain life by denying death, the paradoxical result is that we become lifeless. This is why “disillusionment” is so important, for by losing our illusions we can tap the energy of the reality that lies beyond them. Once we are thoroughly disillusioned we can say, with Thoreau, “Reality is fabulous!” No matter how difficult reality may be, it contains more life than any illusion.
The reality is that sooner or later all we have will be taken from us by death. But if we can live with the threat of resurrection in our bones, then we will live truly and well. Then we will join in a corporate witness that is immortal, a witness that is only strengthened by the forces of death, a witness that is in itself the resurrection life. (155)
Palmer goes on to say:
For many of us, the life we need to lose is the life lived in the image of the autonomous self, and the life we shall then find is that of the self embedded in community – a community that connects us not only to other people but the natural world as well. No wonder resurrection is threatening … (156)
He wraps up the chapter with this:
In the active life of work, creativity, and caring we are given endless opportunities to lose ourselves so that we may find ourselves, to join with others in the great community so that free from the fear of isolation, we may become who we are. It is the testimony of Julia Esquivel that by joyfully embracing the threat of resurrection we can work, create, and care in ways that take us not toward the futility of death but toward the fullness of new life for ourselves and for the whole of creation. (157)
As I reflected on this chapter, actually the whole book, it drove home a very important point to me that it is too frequently overlooked. Living the resurrection life is frequently cast in terms of getting on board with some “big deal” … going to an unreached community with the message of Jesus or losing ourselves in some great struggle for justice or compassion. I have no doubt that the resurrection life leads some us for a period of time into such “big deals.” But as I’ve read Scot McKnight write about other topics, “This is true but not true enough.” I read Palmer to say that resurrection life penetrates all our work, creativity, and caring and that means all of our work, creativity, and caring is mission. The “big deal” is not an escape from secular and trivial life into sacred and meaningful life. The “big deal,” when it emerges, springs from having ALL of life deeply embedded in resurrection life. Our most menial daily acts are opportunities for service in the Kingdom of God. The big deal turns out to be the daily small deal.
How have you been threatened by resurrection?
How do react to the idea of “resurrection into community,” rather than simply an event tied to your personal narrative?
Do you experience you daily life as deeply connected to resurrection? Why or why not?