From Pastor Jess:

When I was a junior in college, I spent a semester in Krasnodar, Russia, a southern city near the Black Sea and the border with Soviet Georgia. I arrived there about 6 days after the coup that unseated Michael Gorbachev from power. It was a wild, chaotic, scary and hopeful time to be there, but I had an excellent, kind, smart roommate, another junior from a college in the Midwest. We kept in touch for quite a while after our semester abroad, and then lost contact, until I saw her name one day on an article in The Christian Century magazine. It turns out she was a journalist, editor, writer, contemplative, and the founder of the Sage Mountain Institute in Colorado. Her name is Amy Frykholm, and I recently came across another reflection she wrote about Easter and resurrection. In it, she writes about one of her first assignments as a journalist, to go spend time and write about Thistle Farms in Nashville, Tennessee, where she encountered

Magdalene House, a residential program for women who were exiting the cycle of drugs/prostitution/jail that had largely defined their lives. She wrote of her experience, “This was the closest I have ever come to feeling the awe and the power of resurrection. I saw in these women the resurrection of Christ, complete with the scars and the mystery.”

Magdalene House was started by Episcopal Priest Becca Stevens, who wanted to give women a safe place to work out their own freedom. The program provides two years of free housing, medical care, food, and whatever other needs the women have. They live together in the house, where they counsel and care for each other. They work, play, laugh, argue, and try to tell their stories to each other.

The telling of their stories is the hardest part for many. It can feel like the story you carry is too much, too awful, to tell, or that if you say it out loud you might not survive it. But for those women who initially refused to share, they noticed that those who had told their stories and allowed the other women to be witnesses got better. Those who kept silent had a harder time making the transition to a resurrected life. When they finally, gradually, were able to tell their stories, they came to understand that our stories, even our stories of healing, don’t belong to us. They belong to others. They belong in community.

In her time at Thistle Farms, Amy observed that healing took place through a gradual rebuilding and sharing through ordinary means- work, making and sharing food, sharing a living space- just as we see in the Gospels. It takes time for the disciples to notice and understand. Truth becomes visible over time, like a photograph in developing solution slowly becoming clearer and sharper. There’s a process involved, and resurrection can be gritty, painful work. It leaves scars. It takes time and truth. Maybe instead of calling it “the resurrection,” which carries the not a one-and-done finality, we should call it “the resurrecting.” However we call it, it deserves our acknowledgment and our awe.

My Office Hours for the week of 4/21 are: Tuesday, 4/22, 9-3 and Thursday, 4/24, 9-3

The Church Office will be Closed on Monday, 4/21.

Pastor Jess Lambert