‘Practice resurrection’: Dana Smith’s Thought for the week
‘It almost always involves silence; except when it doesn’t.’
For me, practising resurrection means slowing things down. Right down, often to the point of stopping. It might involve lying on the ground, preferably outside (this may mean getting mud on the yoga mat). It means not carrying a device on which I can be reached. It almost always involves silence; except when it doesn’t.
Practsing resurrection has nothing to do with perfection. It has everything do with dying while being alive; living while dying. It may look foolish, like dancing in the kitchen in my pyjamas.
Practising resurrection may involve words, or no words. It involves what Papunehang, of the Lenape people, said to John Woolman: ‘I love to feel where the words come from.’ Woolman may have been practising resurrection when he found he could not write a will that made property of a man who was enslaved. Resurrection was practiced on the day that person was set free.
It may occur in worship, or it may occur with strangers on a bus, making noise. It might involve doing nothing. No thing. Or it may involve picking up the phone to connect with an elder, a kindred.
Walking out of our front door may be part of this practice. Especially when our neighbours are descending into violence. Standing between them, waging peace, may be a way of practising resurrection. I practised resurrection this morning when I took off my shoes, remembering a beloved friend who walked the earth mostly barefoot. It means remembering how we laughed when her child scolded: ‘I am not getting out of this car until you put your shoes on!’
It means reading Augustine’s words, which a friend emailed last week: ‘Our dead though invisible are not absent.’
Practising resurrection may be a form of practising detachment. I sit beneath a plane tree that is practising the lettuce leaf green of May. Like love it seems to endure all things – loss of branches or the seemingly-unending winter.
Practising resurrection involves truth: this will not be easy. Practising takes time, as when a friend invites me to use her potting wheel. Will my skin be worn away against the gritty clay? She assures me not. I sweep a mess off the wheel three times. She examines it, wipes it dry, cleans the wheel. I was pressing too hard. Practising resurrection means seeing where I was expending effort uselessly.
When my husband imitates Droopy, a depressed cartoon Basset hound, he is probably practising resurrection. Droopy greets his audience with ‘Hello all you happy people’. Those who see the absurdity of our world, its sadness and loveliness, may be the most devoted practitioners.
When a child teaches me how to drink dew from a blade of grass, I am being instructed in the practice of resurrection. It requires a complete attention to the world and its close mysteries – the few I am learning to see; the infinite number adventuring along endlessly beside me.
‘Practice resurrection’ is the last line of W Berry’s: ‘Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front’.
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