Risen, Sights Raised

Bill and Billie choose a new word each new year.  Last year, the year that they sold their perfectly wonderful, wonderfully comfortable house to move to a much more challenged part of Detroit in order to participate in urban gardening, their word was “resilient”.  While their move was within the city limits, the contrast between their old and new neighborhoods was enormous.  Their old neighborhood near the University of Detroit Mercy was among the most desirable in the city.  Neighbors took care of their homes on tree-lines streets and most yards were beautifully cared for.  Their new neighborhood has streets that are worn, with less than half of the original houses occupied, many no longer standing.  It is also the locus of a hopeful community, that plants food in the broken places, farming the empty lots.

It was almost February by the time I realized I did not know Bill and Billie’s word for this year, after they had worn last year’s “resilience” so nobly.  The new word, it turns out, is “tranquility”.  Because I was in Germany when I’d asked him, he included the German translation of the word, Ruh, used in the German original of Silent Night, designating the “peace” in which we sleep, heavenly. As soon as I read the word Ruh, I recalled it as a word in the powerfully moving closing song of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony.  Auferstehen, the song begins: “Rise again” the song tells us; our ashes, after a short “rest”, Ruh.  I first heard Mahler’s 2^nd Symphony, “Resurrection”, when I was crafting a sarcophagus, a box for the cremated remains of a friend.  

For hours while I worked on the box, I listened over and over to the music.  While the wood of the box was changed forever by my tools, I was forever changed by Mahler’s music.  Bill knew of that experience, and some years later he gave Kathy and me a pair of tickers to experience its performance at Detroit’s Orchestra Hall.  We sat in center seats, just twenty feet
from the conductor.  By then I knew the music by memory, and by the time that last song, Auferstehen was sung, I was weeping into my hands.  I was thinking of the friend for whom I had made the box.  I was thinking about my dad who had recently died.  I was thinking of countless others.  I was weeping out of hope for them, not because of the opening words, promising that they would “rise again” but the closing line that I awaited.  “That which you have suffered will lead you to God.”  It was their suffering that struck me so deeply.  For Roger, whose box I had made, it was a slow, disfiguring death from facial cancer.  For my dad, it was years of debilitation after a life marked by his physical ability. It was the closing line that grounded the promise of new life in the very suffering that seemed to have vanquished them.

Here in Cologne, I was on one of my ritual morning walks when I came upon St. George’s Church and found there a remarkable crucifix, formed not with cross-members, but three branches, two curving to accept Christ’s outstretched hands.  I thought of the Trinity, and how he was nailed to his relationships of it, with the Father, and the Spirit, nailed to their gift of him, the sacrifice of themselves in him.  Then I noticed that the baptismal font in front of that crucifix was covered with a bronze casting with a flying dove whose wings were raised in the same manner as the arms of the cross. 

I followed my eyes to the words cast around the bronze cover of the font, and saw the word Auferstanden, “Risen”.  It was the words of Colossians chapter 3: “You have been raised with Christ, so set your minds on the higher things.”  I think of those who struggle, who from that struggle are drawn up, drawn back to life.

I think of this as a call to risenness.  Through your suffering you have been brought back to life.  Now that that is so, look at the higher things.  I don’t think it means to achieve greater things.  I think it means to be inspired by higher values.