When All That’s Left Is an Empty Tomb                   

By Cara Callbeck  - in Reflections 

Last week my spiritual director left me with a loaded question: “What are you going to do when all that’s left is an empty tomb?”.  As I gave his question some thought, I chuckled, realizing how well he knows me. Now he can even see my stumbles coming before I do.

What he was surely thinking of is how much I love church, and how just being inside the walls of the church brings me a feeling of such security and peace. I absolutely love Holy Week, mostly because I get to be at church a lot more than usual. I am in love with the music, the fellowship of our community, the beautiful liturgies, and that precious scent of incense. I get so that I never want to leave. And so my director, knowing that I will come crashing into the reality that is daily life all too soon, asked me his question.

We have so much to reflect on when we read the Gospel, so many descriptions of people’s experiences in the presence of God, but how often do we reflect on what happened AFTER those big moments? The angel Gabriel left Mary after the Annunciation; Zebedee’s sons left him on the beach with a bunch of fishing nets; and the three apostles had to come down the mountain after the Transfiguration. After those big moments, ordinariness followed. Life is not built up entirely of big moments and profound encounters with God. Most of the time, it’s just “the usual.”

Perhaps I can apply St. Ignatius’s wisdom: he tells retreatants to store up those moments of consolation and use them to get through the moments of desolation. While the empty tomb doesn’t have to be desolation per se, maybe the experiences I have stored up over Holy Week can give me the courage to walk away from the empty tomb and go out once again. I can’t help but think this was Mary’s strategy. We read in the Gospel that, “Mary pondered them in her heart.” Maybe she was mentally cataloging all she could of what had just happened, to carry with her as she continued along her own journey. Like one who plans food for a long trip, she knew to save the moments and memories and make them last as long as she could.

The empty tomb doesn’t have to be my crash and burn. If I take my experiences of Holy Week—my big moments—and ponder them and cherish them as the holy treasures they are, perhaps they will become the food for my missioning out from the tomb. Go now, the Mass has ended”.....and now it’s business as usual.

Approaching the Cross

By Cara Callbeck in Reflections

Pope Francis gave us all some homework during his weekly catechesis on April 16, just as we headed into the Triduum. Pope Francis challenged us all, “This week it will do us good to take the crucifix in hand and kiss it many, many times and say: thank you Jesus, thank you Lord.”

His words were on my mind at our Good Friday service as everyone began to queue up to venerate the cross. I somehow expected there would be more people kissing the cross than I had seen in years past. But as I watched, what I observed was not an ardent desire to kiss the cross; rather, I witnessed an awkwardness and uneasiness around many who approached it. And as I thought about it, I realized that this was actually very fitting in its own way.

What is the cross to us who believe? Among many other things, it is a sign of our lowest point, our sufferings joined with Christ’s; it is great pain, sadness, and brokenness. The cross reminds us of just how unworthy we are and what that unworthiness physically cost our dear Lord. As Pope Francis expressed in his catechesis that day, it is Jesus taking upon himself all human suffering as he reminds us, “He clothed himself in this suffering.”
If that is the cross, then the uneasiness I saw as my fellow Catholics venerated the cross was really a profound recognition of that very suffering. We tend to be uneasy around suffering and brokenness. We don’t know what to say or what to do to make it all go away. Our first inclination is not so much to kiss it as to fix it somehow.

But we can’t fix it. Just as in the contemplation sitting in the garden with our Lord before his hour had come, we are left only to stay with him, witness the moment quietly, and accept it along with our powerlessness to change it. The cross indeed should make us uneasy and awkward. I think that’s respecting the great sacrifice our Lord made for us. In the end, whether we kiss the cross, awkwardly approach it and then shy from it, gaze upon it from near or far, or touch it with love, we took that time to just be with Jesus in his suffering. It’s moments such as those—awkward or otherwise—that bring us closer to Christ.

Living Frugally on Surprise

by Michelle Francl-Donnay in Reflections

It’s been a tough few weeks, with just a few too many surprises disrupting the usually gentle rhythm of the semester. A grant deadline was pushed up by two weeks; my youngest son, a continent away, got quite ill. All the while my e-mail chirped like a nest of starving baby birds, messages popping up and demanding answers faster than I could stuff answers in them.
Last Monday, in what appeared to be a lull between winter storms both literal and metaphorical, I slid one last calculation onto the supercomputer queue and ducked out the door. I had booked a room for the night in a retreat house and was looking forward to some slow time with God.

An hour and a half later, I parked the car, sent a text to my husband letting him know I’d arrived safely, and opened the trunk to grab my overnight bag. It wasn’t there. I checked the back seat. Was it behind the passenger seat? Was it hiding under my gym bag? No, no, and definitely not. I had packed that bag with indulgences, balm for my soul after the slog of the last weeks. Peppery vanilla-scented chai, a book of poetry. These, I told myself firmly, you can live without. It’s Lent. You’re a grown up. But my pajamas? My toothbrush!

That’s when it occurred to me that the gym bag I kept shifting around, hoping to see my small bag hidden behind it, had a toothbrush and a few other necessities stashed in it.
There were pants and a sweatshirt that could double as pajamas, and while I decided I was not desperate enough to reuse the socks stuffed in the outside pocket, my feet could be happy in my sneakers without them.
I had enough to manage for the night.
I found myself remembering the opening words to Alice Walker’s poem “Before you knew you owned it”: “Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.” How much, I wondered, of what I think I need, could wait on surprise? How frugally could I live?
For one night at least, I could apparently manage with no socks and a single line of poetry.
St. Ignatius’s Principle and Foundation reminds us: “All the things in this world are gifts from God, presented to us so that we can know God more easily and make a return of love more readily.” I wonder how often I forget that many of the best gifts are surprises. I was surprised to think I could walk off and leave my bag by the door, but yet more surprised to realize there was nothing in it I truly needed.

What I needed was time empty of things demanding my attention, even a bag to unpack and repack. What I needed was not hot chai and chocolate, but God’s tender care, more easily seen when stripped of my own pretensions of preparedness and organization.
I didn’t even have time to open my e-mail the next day before the flock of tasks began demanding their due, chirping at the door. “Take only enough” of compassion, reminds Walker in her poem. The night had been just enough and simultaneously everything that I desired.