April continues our journey through the Lenten season, a time inviting deeper self-examination and spiritual introspection leading us into Holy Week and the joy of Eastertide. This particular Lent, my attention has been brought to the reality of the “new” brain science of mirror neurons, through which we come to know ourselves more deeply by way of the gaze of others. Like a good parent, God blesses each child of creation through God’s receptive and affirming face. Our familiar benediction, based on Numbers 6:25, says, “May God let his face shine upon you and be gracious unto you. May God lift up her face to you and bring you peace.”
In Lent, the two movements of mirroring are like the movements of the Holy Spirit:
1. God moving to embrace us as the beloved: to mirror to us that we are loved and cared for in an unconditional love, which nothing can break.
2. God also embracing the whole suffering world to which we mirror back the love and acceptance which God has shown to us as we offer compassion, empathy, just action and loving care to that created world.
Receive God’s compassion and you will be able to be compassionate. Do not condemn and you will not be condemned. What we have received or not received will be how we give or do not give. So the first blessing in our baptism, receiving the blessing of God “who sees you as beloved and delights in you” long before we have been able to “earn” this love, releases us from the idea that we must “earn” our way into the loving gaze of God. We are thus brought into the “wondrous loop” of Trinitarian Love, connected to the infinite Source of Love that will never let us go and from which we receive the energy to offer to others what God has offered us, as one people on one little planet, learning to trust Creator God and to trust life itself.
As Lent deepens our living into this truth, we are being prepared to live further into the great revelation of the Paschal Mystery: life to death to life again in an ongoing movement mirroring the reality of created life on this planet. We are learning to live with faith the Truth held in the events of Holy Week:
“the light of Love rises from the shadows of our broken dreams, the fire of Hope is kindled in the ashes of our unspeakable loss.”
Through the new commandment of Maundy Thursday, that we “love one another”, to the unspeakable death of Good Friday where Jesus joins us in the inevitable loss of our human life as we have known it, to the great silence of waiting found in Holy Saturday, to our transformation into resurrection hope at Easter, we let God be God, and realize that it is in God’s reality that all things are made new, even ourselves.
In Eastertide, we carry within our hearts a deeper understanding that the One who has kept us company in the worst that can befall humankind has shown us the way to a hope the world cannot destroy, the way into the very heart of God who is Love itself. We are able to proclaim with new liveliness and renewed faith, “All of us go down to the dust, yet even at the grave we make our song, ‘Alleluia! Alleluia!’”.