Resurrection means giving up the old to find new

By Marie Luttrell

In my long-ago files is a column that I clipped and have read many times. It was written by an Anglican minister in London who told the story of his wife’s death and his coming to understand resurrection in a whole new light because of it.

The op-ed piece reprinted in a secular newspaper brought me a moment of real soul illumination. The piece went something like this:

Pastor Stephen Virney wrote about the few days immediately after his wife’s death: helping to organize the funeral service, taking his children to purchase new clothes, greeting the hundreds who came to help mourn.

He related how the ache of loss carried on for several years, until just before Easter one year. Needing a break and some time with just his own children, he went to the countryside for a weekend.

As they were walking, one of the children spotted a white horse all by itself in the middle of a field. Pastor Virney stopped and watched it closely, recalling that his wife had often spoken about her inner longings being similar to a beautiful white horse that was free to run through the countryside.

Just then the horse trotted over to the fence and whinnied almost gleefully as he and the children petted it and fed it grass. As he felt its warm breath on his hands, he felt as if his wife were right there saying to him with great love, “Look at me, how happy and free I am. It’s time to let go of me, and trust that I will always love you.”

Later, as he prepared his Easter sermon, this event so fresh in his mind, Pastor Virney could not help but see the events of the Resurrection with new eyes. In particular, the story of Mary Magdalene in the garden came alive.

Once Mary had understood that it was Jesus and not the gardener speaking to her, she was filled with joy and went to embrace Him. Jesus responded, “Don’t cling to Me.”

Pastor Virney felt he had heard the same message from his wife, and that it had taken three years after she had died before he heard it so clearly. “Don’t cling to me. You will never live the life you are supposed to live and become the person God wants you to be unless you can let me go.”

It was through that experience, Pastor Virney wrote, that he finally understood the joy of Resurrection. In a sense, he too, rose from his time of mourning, a kind of death for him, and began in small ways to live his life and his faith more fully and deeply.

When I read that piece as a young woman with a young family, it pushed me through a doorway. I thought at the time that it was about letting go of my father, who had died when I was 18. Certainly I was able to look at his photograph and find new gladness.

In hindsight, though, I realize that at that point I really had to let go of my dreams for my life. We had just moved from the log home we had built with our own hands and with it, all our “back-to-the-land” life. We had been called to something new and we were in a transition year, living in a tiny house on a small piece of garden paradise, and circumstances at the time forced us even to let that go, too. “Don’t cling to Me.”

There was more. I was starting to come back in earnest to a faith that I had held through my childhood and teen years, and had found a parish that seemed to be nurturing me well, and the extra move meant I had to let go of it, a place I was just beginning to love, and go to a new parish.

It took some time, too, before I could understand it was Jesus saying, “Don’t cling to your adolescent faith and keep your way of thinking hemmed in. I have so many more ways to inspire you and train you and show you that I love you.”

My road to faith has come partially through these moves we made. For some of my friends, the “Don’t cling to me” has come through losses far more painful, hearts broken through another’s infidelity with a person or a job or a bottle.

It has come through wanting an old life back after a tragic accident which left their bodies physically impaired. It has come through the loss of a family member to Alzheimer’s or schizophrenia or MS or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

I have watched in awe as these people I love let go of their dreams and their hurts and let Jesus heal and guide them to new joy.

This is neither an easy nor an instant thing. If we let go and stop clinging, there will be a time when the only certain things in our lives are God’s love and uncertainty. Where do I go now? What do I do? Who am I anyway? Am I losing my mind?

It was so for Mary Magdalene. It was so for the apostles and disciples as they felt their way through those 40 days after the Resurrection.

Resurrection is new life. To have that new life, we cannot cling to our old life. People like Pastor Stephen Virney remind us that this is true for all of us. Our Easter joy depends on it.