Reaching for the Light
There is a small red button on the crematorium lectern. When you press it, the coffin slides through the curtains into the fire-chute. As I reached for the button, the doors at the back of the chapel suddenly swung open and a young, hand-cuffed man stumbled through. He was accompanied by two police officers, a man and a woman. The three of them came slowly, but determinedly, to the front.
The prisoner, Ben, allowed out for the occasion, was distraught. He tried to hold both sides of the coffin as if to embrace his grandmother but could not. In desperation he pulled violently as if to smash the chains that were denying his hands and his heart. Finally he bent down and laid his cheek against the still-sticky, newly-varnished casket and sobbed. The officers stood silent at either side, one impassive, one uneasy.
It was a heart-wrenching moment. There was a rage in the young man’s powerlessness. His frustration was tangible. He seemed totally impervious to the startled reactions of his family and relations. I wanted to walk over to him and hold him; to calm him at a time when words were worthless and only touch would heal. But I didn’t have the confidence. I was too overawed, too overwhelmed by it all.
I had never witnessed anything like this before. The atmosphere was full of death and anger, of thwarted yearning, of desire and denial, of the strangest beauty in the middle of stark, raw emotion. If ever I experienced pathos, it was then and there.
Silently, a slight figure approached the small group at the coffin. It was the old woman’s daughter, the young man’s mother. Numbing grief and unbearable love filled her aching eyes Gently, and with immense and graced authority, she put her arms around her manacled son.
In a mutual kind of covenant, with a certainty and confidence beyond my understanding, she drew him to the nearest bench near where I was standing. He lay across her lap, his limp body relaxed at last, his exhausted face on her shoulder, his dark hair lost against her black blouse. The police officers, aware of something beyond the normal, remained at a discrete distance.
A friend of mine was at the funeral. Like me, she was immediately locked into the unfolding drama, sensing something of the mystery of reality, of the interface between light and darkness, between death and life. As she watched that unforgettable scene of the mourning mother stroking and soothing her beloved son’s throbbing head, an image of the Pieta came into her mind. The image and moment have never left her.
As his two minders took Ben away to grieve alone, I was still shaken by the desperation of his efforts to express himself, to make contact with someone he adored, to break through into what was just beyond his reach. Another of Michelangelo’s sculptures flashed before me. It was the carving of the Emerging Slaves. Straining from the prison of their granite block, they were reaching for their freedom; confined in their darkness they were stretching, relentlessly, for the dawn.
The intensity of that image touches something in all of us. In the scripture reading at Ben’s funeral, St John reminded us that we are already the children of God, soon to be exactly like God. I am always filled with amazement at these words. I can scarcely believe what I’m reading. We are filled with the seeds, the glimpses, the echoes and the promise of the full possession of the divine essence. These real sentiments reverberate around the halls of our hearts. All of this is going to play havoc with our emotions and our grip on reality. We will, like Ben, be forever reaching beyond our grasp, drawn and driven by powerful forces within us.
Some of our best spiritual writers remind us that, because of the mystery of Creation and Incarnation, the energies and potential of God’s own self, are wrapped up within us. This must be too much to bear. How can fragile, precarious human hearts contain the infinitely transforming and ultimately divinising power of God’s presence within us? Like divine atoms, we are waiting to explode. Like exiles of the heart we are forever ready to risk escaping home. There is a loneliness and a secret need within us all that normal human intimacy will never take away. And there are times and places in our lives, mysterious moments, when such spiritual forces can lead to self-destruction or self-transcendence.
Ben’s chained hands were hammering on the gold plate that carried his grandmother’s name, on the lid of the coffin. But he was trying to do the impossible thing. He was trying to break through into a wholly different world; to connect the living present with what had already gone beyond. Are we tormented in somewhat the same way? If God has filled us with a divine, insatiable allurement towards life in its fullness, towards what is always over the horizons of our possibilities, then is it any wonder that we, too, are tortured by the impotence of our efforts to transcend our mortality? Do any of us ever succeed in expressing our love fully?
What kind of unspeakable loneliness, what inarticulate vision of fulfilment, would have, in the first place, driven that young man to drugs, theft and violence, to ruining his own life and that of his fiancé? And as we reflected afterwards, on that intense moment of human emotion, that brief disclosure of the pure passion of power and powerlessness, did we not all feel our own existential limitations? Did we not all somehow identify with the prisoner’s impotence, his inability to express the deepest desires of his heart just then, his frustrated outburst of despair? Were we not all battling with the chains around us, rattling the bars of our own cages, railing against whatever keeps us captive too?
The God within us is ‘insane for the light’. The bright spark we were born with will forever beat on the casket of death. And the liberation will come. We only fall into hopelessness when we mistake the true light for the imitation, when we are seduced by false beauty, when we forfeit the real treasure for ‘fool’s gold’. We do not need to stay hammering, anymore, on the coffin of Good Friday. We need no longer wait for the emerging slaves within us to escape the cold darkness. Once open to the source of life, they can now run free, leaping and shouting, into the morning light.
Our story of frustration and desperation is contained and integrated once we set it against the bigger story of another reality, another world, a Risen Christ. In the Pieta image, Mary held, at once, the despair of her son’s death, and the hope of his resurrection, within her arms. Her human heart, just then pulsing with intense grief and love, was able to transform and transcend the stark reality of that timeless moment. Mary was able to connect and hold together the twin mysteries of life and death because, from the beginning, she had pondered and rehearsed this terrible moment many times over. Maybe this is what that other grieving woman in the crematorium was doing too, when she touched the coffin of her dead mother with one hand, and with the other, drew her living son to her loving, trusting breast.