Invitation To The Garden | The Chaplaincy of Poitou Charentes

<h2>Something moves!</h2>

I was taking the dog for a walk one day during Holy Week and found myself gazing at the may blossom which the wind was blowing into a stream. A few of the tiny white flowers were bobbing happily along, on either side of a bank of weed. But some were trapped by this obstacle and had backed up, a block of imprisoned white blossom. As I looked though, some of these prisoners became escapees. There was a surge of current and a flake of white would duck under a strand of weed, and be swept out and away down the stream. It could not go; it went. 

The resurrection narratives in the gospels contain some interesting differences, as though they are trying to describe something which cannot be properly captured in words. But, if they were all the same it would be a bit suspicious, as though these variations had been edited out in order to standardise the text. One of the things the accounts agree upon, however, is that the stone sealing the tomb was rolled away. In John’s gospel, Chapter 20 begins ‘Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance’. Something immovable had been moved. I invite you to stay with this for a moment. Something does not happen; something happens. Something does not move; something moves. 

This movement from not-going to going is the dynamic of Easter. On the cross Jesus literally could not move, nailed down to one place and time. On the third day he was raised, moving, flowing, expanding - the Lord of Life, space and time - through God’s transforming touch. 
I find this dynamic incredibly hopeful for our lives, our church and for our world, in which so much seems to be nailed down, imprisoned, not-going. There was a time when Handel’s Messiah did not exist. But he put pen to manuscript paper and twenty-four days later it was there! 

On Good Friday I read a remarkable narrative entitled ‘The Invitation to the Garden’*
by Joanna Tulloch. Joanna describes herself as a poet, artist, preacher and long-term mental health patient. She sees the experience of living with anorexia and depression as The Jungle, a swamp which would suck her down into a place of self-hatred and darkness. But there is another space she has discovered - the Garden: 

‘While living in the middle of the jungle,
is there not a garden, we all seek,
vaguely remembered, or maybe only dreamed of:
do we not long to have it in our sight? 

Can we not hear its music in our silence,
a great sad song of longing, yet of joy,
the song sung by a gentle, lonely Gardener –
do we dare to listen, touch the tree of life?’ (p.1) 

This is the Easter dynamic. 

*Tulloch J., The Invitation to the Garden: a Mystical Journey in Five Paradoxes’, Matador, 2018