"Waiting for the light."
Thoughts on forgiveness.
Some Easter reflections.
APRIL 4—The sun has not yet risen and I am standing in a cemetery a few miles south of Norfolk, Conn. It is Easter morning. A small handful of parishioners from Church of Christ Congregational are gathered to celebrate the Resurrection. I am a Buddhist among the faithful—a non-believer, an atheist. We face east, waiting for the first light.
A lively chorus of birdsong, including the distinct trill of the red-winged blackbird, heralds daybreak. Beneath my feet I feel the thawing earth. Night has passed and in the gray twilight of dawn, shape and form emerge into the world. Around me the cemetery comes into focus.
Many of the old stones are crumbling, their epitaphs no longer legible. Of those I can read, some date back into the early 1800s. They gather in familial clusters, lean in toward each other as if sharing intimate secrets. Generations lie together on this hillside.
To my left is a polished pink granite monument—the first color my eye registers on this morning. It is a fairly recent addition and seems to stand apart from the other markers, isolated and alone. My companion has pointed it out to me. He recognizes the name engraved upon it. I have heard the sad story before and listen to it again.
This gravestone memorializes the death of Sarah Craig, a young woman hit by a drunk driver while walking home along the same road that borders the cemetery. Sarah was eighteen when she died and had just finished her first year at Harvard. The chiseled inscription records the dates of her first and final days upon the earth and includes a single embittered sentence: “A rising star—killed.”
I am arrested, temporarily frozen, like the cold ground upon which I stand. These are the final words of a grieving mother who buried her daughter and—unable to continue living in the community where Sarah was killed—moved away, leaving her child behind. It is a monument to anger, so it seems to me, and stands as an indictment of the man responsible for Sarah’s death. “Bitterness chiseled in stone,” my companion would say some days later, still haunted as I have been.
I ponder the message of forgiveness that is part of the Easter story. It has been on my mind since Good Friday.
Two days earlier.
“Is this the day Jesus was betrayed?” I ask. It is Good Friday and I cannot recall the sequence of events as Christians remember and celebrate them. “It’s the day he was crucified,” my companion replies. I watch him leave our cottage for the village chapel where he will spend three hours, noon until three o’clock, in prayer and contemplation.
Strangely enough, as the morning and afternoon unfold I spend my own tormented time on a cross, however metaphorical this may be. It feels as if I am upside down, like the image on the twelfth major arcana card of a tarot deck: The hanged man.
It is a day fragmented by ceaseless interruptions and disruptions, a day of frustration and increasing despair. I cannot connect with my work, with my painting or writing—with myself. My life is passing, I see it disappear like water into sand and it fills me with panic. It is a lost day and I am lost and ever more frantic. As the hours come and go I struggle repeatedly to rally, only to sink more deeply.
As late afternoon arrives, I am sitting in the car sobbing. I have been crying off and on for hours and I no longer recognize myself. It is a fitting place to break down because I am like a broken down vehicle—stuck and unable to move. I bang my hands on the steering wheel until I notice I have damaged a thumb. It is turning purple and black from a hematoma, and the pain, when I become aware of it, sobers me.
How does one come back from such a fall? Through shear exhaustion. By ceasing to struggle… and finally by letting go. Perhaps most importantly, by extending kindness and compassion to oneself.
“What is forgiveness?” I ask my companion still later that day. It is on my mind because this is Good Friday and because I am struggling to let go, to forgive myself so that I can get out of the hell I’ve been in and start over. “It’s acceptance,” he says simply. “Acceptance of our frailty.”
Light.
As the first warm blush of sunrise colors the sky, Pastor Erick lowers his mask and begins service. He does not talk about the crucifixion or forgiveness. That has passed. This morning’s sermon is about resurrection and life after death. The message is one of hope and new beginnings. Erick is soon interrupted by a pair of geese, honking loudly as they fly low overhead, on course for a nearby pond. He pauses to watch them pass—smiling at this, his interruption.
I think of Sarah’s mother and hope she has found peace. Do I have it in me to forgive a harm of such magnitude? I wonder. Could I let go of my anger and give rise instead to acceptance and ultimately to compassion? I cannot possibly know, and yet I suspect it is the only way forward, the only way out of winter and into a new spring.