Lazarus Saturday...

In a few hours I'll be on the road again, there are services tomorrow and its easier if we make it to LaCrosse tonight. The greatest week of the Christian faith is at hand and all is ready. Lazarus Saturday, full of promise and life, is less then a day away.

I don't know how many will be present for Liturgy tomorrow (truthfully its possible that, God forbid, I may not be at Liturgy tomorrow) but over the years Lazarus Saturday has become a special time, a ray of hope that flavors all the week to come. In Lazarus Saturday, no matter how many may be physically present we sense the presence of those gone from our sight but with us mystically in the reality of glory and the assurance of resurrection. In it the Church says that no dark time is beyond the reach of the love or power of Christ and even the darkest time, death, is powerless before a word from our Lord.

In some ways this has been the greatest gift to me from Orthodoxy, the understanding of the depths of our mortality always flavored with the light of Pascha and resurrection. Even in the depths of my own struggle I cannot escape this hope. Every evening when I fall alseep and by the mercy of God awaken with the sun I'm reminded of it all. When my heart is laid bare and broken in confession and made new in absolution I am given a taste of that which has been promised. When I, the unworthy presbyter John, receive the most precious body and blood of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, I literally ingest it.

From it also flows an understanding of those I love who are an eternity away and as close as a prayer. They, although their bodies sleep in death, know the light of Pascha in a direct and certain way and though we sometimes think them distant from us they are but a heart beat away from us, part of us, cognizant of us with a kind of life that we can only imagine but whose affects we often feel even if they are subtle to the point of being unrecognizable.

As a child I was told that those who had died were away from me, inaccessible to me, with the Lord for sure but on one side of an impassible chasm. There was no malice in this, just a desire to avoid a kind of worship or obsession with those who had gone before. But Orthodoxy called me to remember that even death is filled with the life of Christ and those who live in him are never ultimately extinguished and share in a mystical way some of the unseen closeness that Christ has for all who follow him. I pray for them as a sign of my love for them and the remembrance of them that continues to be part and parcel of who I am. I ask them to pray for me because Christ has made them alive in a way that I cannot understand but which allows them to remember all of us in the Church militant with a purity my feeble prayers cannot achieve in the bonds of this life. Jesus could call to his friend Lazarus because he was alive and Lazarus could respond for the same reason.

So tonight I'll drive on and get ready for the days to come. It promises to be busy and fatiguing yet the light of it will find a way to stay with me whatever happens in the days to come a light that begins with the spark of Lazarus Saturday.