death and resurrection
Illustration by Jody Hewgill
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR was supposed to be a poet or a short story writer. She accrued a respectable stack of rejection letters to show she tried. Instead, she became an Episcopal priest. One day, someone asked for a transcript of her sermon, and Taylor realized she had published her first story.
She went on to publish several collections of sermons or what she likes to call “spiritual meditations.” Ranked by Baylor University as “one of the 12 most effective preachers in the English-speaking world,” Taylor left parish ministry in 1997 and taught religion from 1998 until her retirement in 2017. She is the author of 15 books, including Leaving Church, An Altar in the World, Learning to Walk in the Dark, Holy Envy, and Always a Guest. She now devotes most of her attention to the farm she shares with her husband, Ed Taylor, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in north Georgia, where they have lived since 1992. But she still writes. She is working on Coming Down to Earth, a book about reverence, and she shares short reflections on the beauty of life on her email newsletter with the same title.
Sojourners associate editor Josina Guess lives on a small farm in Georgia, not far from Taylor, and the two spoke in January over Zoom about caring for animals, finding balance, loving neighbors, and the power of resurrection.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
ON ASH WEDNESDAY the dust from which we came and to which we return is daubed on Christians’ foreheads. It is an intimate reminder that the Spirit of God breathes in us and we live; without the Spirit we crumble.
To be more Christlike means facing death in all its forms—the death of reputation, the death of truth, and the bodily death of our beloveds. Lenten scriptures keep before us stories of temptation, failure, and the heavy machinery of this empire or that, always shifting into position to crush those who threaten human power and wealth. There are hints of resurrection in the lectionary readings, but the pain and destruction of dreams and life that comes before is given its full due.
We are too well acquainted with the world and its ways not to imagine what massacre or plague filled that valley with dry bones in Ezekiel’s vision. And, in John’s gospel, Jesus is confronted by Lazarus’ grieving, accusing sister. Why did you not come when called? Mary demands, while Lazarus was alive and could be healed. The story is raw with the pitch of her rage and Jesus’ own tears.
IT IS HARD to tell time from inside a tomb. We cannot know how many minutes or hours Jesus’ resurrection took. Traditionally, he was in the tomb for three days. But how long does it really take for someone to rise—or be raised—from the dead?
Some resurrections start at a mundane moment. Dorothy Day, for example, was sitting at the kitchen table in a crowded apartment in New York’s East Village (writing a never-to-be published novel) when the French Catholic theologian Peter Maurin knocked on the door. “It was a long time before I really knew what Peter was talking about that first day,” wrote Day, who went on to found the Catholic Worker movement with Maurin. “But he did make three points I thought I understood: founding a newspaper for clarification of thought, starting houses of hospitality, and organizing farming communes. I did not really think then of the latter two as having anything to do with me, but I did know about newspapers.”
Some resurrections come through brutal suffering. Twenty-four-year-old Recy Taylor was left for dead in 1944 on a dark road near Abbeville, Ala., by the six white men who kidnapped and raped her as she walked home from a prayer meeting at Rock Hill Holiness Church. “A few days later, a telephone rang at the NAACP branch office in Montgomery,” wrote historian Danielle L. McGuire in At the Dark End of the Street. The president of the local branch promised to send his “best investigator” to speak with Recy Taylor. The investigator’s name was Rosa Parks. As part of Park’s organizing work on Taylor’s case, she formed what would become the Montgomery Improvement Association, the leaders responsible for instigating the bus boycott a decade later, an opening salvo of the civil rights movement.
Big Lights Big City promotional poster
How’s this for an unlikely scenario? One of the characters in Keith Huff’s new crime comedy, Big Lake Big City, is a petty criminal named Stewart who ends up not quite dead after a screwdriver accidently gets embedded in his skull. If the doctors try to remove it, he will die; if they leave it in, he will die. But somehow he isn’t dead yet. For a few days he walks around in a liminal space between life and death, more like a walking corpse than anything else. The sign of his violent demise is there for all to see but he manages to hide it under a Shriner’s cap. A pretty funny sight gag because you have to ignore that fact that the hat is kinda floating off kilter slighter off his head in order not to know something is terribly wrong.
Big Lake Big City is having its world premiere at Lookingglass Theater in Chicago this summer. After seeing the show and interviewing the lead actor Phil Smith for Voices of Peace Talk Radio here at Raven, I couldn’t help but see parallels to another unlikely scenario: a crucified man is resurrected with the marks of his violent death on his body for all to see. I’m pretty sure that Keith Huff did not intend to write a Christian allegory, but the themes of life, death, and resurrection reverberate through the play. Oddly enough, I think Stewart’s story can function as a parable of sorts for understanding the radical shift in the human relationship to death and violence that was made possible by the resurrection. Stay with me, now!
The gender discussion in the church today is captured succinctly by New Testament scholar Gordon Fee in
Father's Day has always been a bittersweet holiday for me. For most of my life, my father was absent, having abandoned our family when I was in elementary school.