This week we have begun our celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. For fifty days we open our imaginations to the presence of our Risen Lord. His blissful body, filled with light, transfused with joy, is pressed upon us. He is our joy, our bliss, our home. 

Our identity as Christians begins with a strong belief in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, not as a myth or a symbol of rebirth or as expressing something that happened to the minds of the disciples, but as something that happened to the body of Jesus. The tomb was emptied, the body was raised and transfigured, suffused with the eternal power and peace of God.

The Christian journey only really begins when we are confronted with the presence of this Risen Body as a historical fact that walks unexpected into our lives. After this happens, the Resurrection is not something we are free to contemplate at arm’s length, free to politely agree or disagree about, free to have theories about, free to forget when ordinary life becomes so much more interesting. It is rather a reality that walks into the locked rooms of our closed minds and guilty hearts, waving away as misguided and irrelevant our most basic assumptions about life, the body, and death. This encounter leaves us still alive in this world, our whole selves ringing with its sheer and impossible strangeness and not quite sure, what to do next. Christian spirituality is the effort to discover what human life looks like after it has been opened and undone by this encounter with the Risen Lord.

In a previous meditation said that we can never find our fulfillment in anything creaturely. Referencing Julian of Norwich, I also said that we already possess our fulfillment in our essential selves. The spiritual life can then be understood as a process of letting go of everything, the whole outward search for happiness and rest, in order to sink down into resonance with the fulfilling bliss that is already our deepest reality. To this end, we risk honest awareness and we risk an ever-deepening habit of surrender. But it is important to note that there is nothing distinctly Christian about this understanding of the spiritual life. People of many different faiths may well use a similar language of selflessness, surrender, peace, prayer, wholeness, simplicity, service, and love. People of other faiths might well accept the idea that as we practice awareness and surrender we grow more and more aligned with an Eternal Blissfulness that is already our deepest reality. Contemplatives from many different traditions experience this.

But Christianity adds something more. What we say as Christians is that this process of spiritual harmonization is not only an internal affair that we navigate by methods, prompted and directed by an inner spirit along the way. Rather, it is something that comes to meet us in the Risen Body of our Lord, walking, as I said, into the closed room of our fearful and guilty lives, completely exploding everything we thought about reality, and inviting us into something so totally new that, when we first experience it, all we can know is incomprehension. All we can say is silence. All we we can feel is a sense of having been irreversible opened and claimed by we-know-not-what.

The ‘third bell’ is thus that our fulfillment as human beings is found in our reception of the energy and life of the Risen Body of Jesus into ourselves, and this is the exact same thing as the universal spiritual process of awareness and surrender that we have talked about, but it is meditated to us, as Christians, through our contact and relationship with the Risen Lord, that wondrous Body of Light. If we forget this as Christians, we are salt that has lost its saltness and is good for nothing but to be trodden underfoot. The most basic problem with our Church today and Christian spiritual practice is that we often do all the spiritual and religious things without having allowed ourselves to be completely unmade by the fact of the Resurrection. We don’t stand enough in the ringing strangeness of the Resurrection. Our Lord, whom we betrayed to be tortured and killed, walks into our locked rooms, wishes us peace and eats with us, breathes on us and gives us his own Spirit to breathe. It is in this shocking encounter that we claim as historical fact that we discover our outward lives being quieted and reconciled with that inward depth of soul so familiar to contemplatives of every tradition.