A Jon Post
It’s an important day in my faith tradition. All the pageantry and performance of the day coalesce into sunrise services, liturgical dances, ecstatic praises, and reprises of Keith Green singing “Hear the Bells Ringing”.
But here I sit on one of the many plastic chairs that line the school gymnasium that passes for a church building on Sunday mornings in Maputo, and I’m thinking about my church clothes.
Pristine, they hang in my closet most days smelling of detergent or dust, depending on how long it has been since I’ve felt the need to dress up. Today, my pink button-up shirt and dress-up jeans won the day, and I joined in the Easter custom of wearing bright colors and new-life-spring-has-sprung-themed clothing on a day welcomed by Christians around the globe as our most momentous and worthy of celebration. But my church clothes have a particular smell to them that keeps distracting me from the joyous occasion.
I spent the morning carrying a 19-year-old boy from bed to shower, from shower to chair, and from chair to wheel-chair. He has lost all strength or control of his legs as lymphoma has claimed nerve ending upon nerve ending throughout his body as its own. Lymphoma has spread twisted versions of white-blood cells into blood stream and body, pushing aside the bits and pieces that used to respond to the will of the person who used to call them his own. His legs and one arm no longer respond to his bidding and so I carry him from place to place in their stead.
He is dying.
I smell it on my church clothes.
I smell it on my shoulder where he laid his head as I picked him up from his bed and carried him to the shower chair, where he washed away the work he did in the night of staying alive and breathing. I smell it on my right forearm where his knees draped as I carried him back to a plastic chair to dry his frail body. I smell it on my hands where I picked up one limp foot then another, shucking jeans that used to be the right size but are now far too big, up his legs and to his waist. I smell it on my chest where he leaned as I put him in my car. I smell it on my beard where his head lay as I pulled him back out and put him in our wheelchair.
The angels of death and age walk hand in hand, smiling as they go. Though often thought of as malicious, they mean no more ill than did Jacob’s angel, and they too can be wrestled with for the sake of a blessing. When a 19-year-old wrestles with his angel of death, that angel’s close friendship with the angel of age means both tend to smell the same. If you have ever accompanied one of your own very old ones, you likely know the smell. So too, our dying bear that smell. It has taken me several years of wrestling to get used to the smell but I no longer resent it as I once did. It smells like our old ones. It smells like our ancestors. It even smells like a tomb. And I smell it on my pink-spring-has-sprung, button-up shirt.
This day, most Christians focus on the story told in the Gospel narratives of an empty tomb, and a resurrection and the hope of salvation.
But not all.
For some, the hope, the joy, the celebration, the liturgy of “He is risen! He is risen, indeed!” is as painful as the tumors and malignancies in body and soul that accompanied them to that pew, cushion, or plastic chair. For some, the tears fall today as easily as the smiles comes to the rest of the church. For some, all promise of “for those who believe” is only another pronouncement of the brokenness of the body and the pouring of the blood to go along with the brokenness of the promises and hopes for healing. No testimony, nor truth-telling, nor tithing could bring the miracle once so desperately hoped for and believed in and now that brokenness sits in the pew, the cushion, the plastic chair, or, as in our case, the wheel-chair.
Some of us are as perplexed as were John and Peter when they found grave clothes where they expected their friend. Some of us still smell like them.
That’s what today means to some of us. Hear me in this, beloved: It is the right day for that.
If you go today to your pew, your cushion, or your plastic chair and you listen closely and sniff the air around those who may have wrestled in the night, do me this favor: Echo the words of that one who is risen and say “Come unto me, all who are labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Then follow it up with a simple, “Eat and drink with us, you are no freak and we are not freaked out by your suffering”