salvation

Eating a twin banana does not necessarily mean that you are enjoying a double portion.

IT is only when we are no longer in control--because of sickness, death, or our own bad choices--that we no longer cling. The path to salvation is the path of humiliation.

We human beings are story-tellers, we pass on our values through the stories we tell. This is particularly true of Catholics, who get their identity through their histories, which they see as salvation history linking them to the saving actions of Christ. So, for Catholics, doing history _ passing on the values by telling stories _ is a pastoral imperative. We must look where we have been in order to know where we are going.

Is my faith so terribly pathetic that I have diminished God to the point that I doubt His ability to survive in the very world that He came to save? Indeed, I have done exactly that. And all I need to do to beat that mentality is to remember that a baby born in a manger with every disadvantage imaginable stills lives today.

Sooner or later I will realize that the very things I most desperately need are the very things I am unable to give myself. Therefore, I will either be left despising the fact that I am doomed to live out a life that is perpetually empty, or I will realize that an empty tomb is the single thing that will eternally fill me.

Maybe I don__ have enough beginnings in my life because I fought against the endings that were about to birth those beginnings.

Easter is God throwing everything at death so that I can give everything to life.

I am pressed to admit that I don__ have the capacity to understand the bloodied horrors of a cross and the wild exhilaration of an empty tomb. But at the point that I think I completely understand God, I have at that very point humanized Him and in that very action I have lost Him. Therefore, I much prefer to simply marvel.

We need to know that our limits do not define our limitations. And an empty tomb does exactly that.

Do I dare believe such an absurdly outrageous story that a man would die, lay lifeless in some tomb for three days and then somehow live again? Yet, if I dare to consider it, is that not exactly what I so desperately desire for this lifeless life of mine? And is Easter God__ tenderly outrageous way of telling me that that is exactly what I can have?

Reasonably speaking, we can see the cross as entirely possible. But in considering Easter, we see an empty tomb as entirely impossible. And is it possible that God had to do the impossible to finally get our attention?

A god of the __ossible_ is no God.

There are an incalculable number of things within me that I frantically wish to be emptied of, and despite my most earnest efforts to remove them, they remain. And it is Easter that reminds me that God empties out tombs.

Although I rail against it, death is the dark demarcation beyond which I am at the mercy of my own end. To the contrary, an empty tomb says that my end is at the mercy of God__ beginning.

Easter is the final solution to the finality of death.

God emptied out that first tomb so that He could turn around and empty out me.

My limitations abruptly define the frighteningly negligible extent of my existence, yet my soul utterly perishes if bound by those very same limits. And does this not somehow evidence both the reality of and need for God?

If God has the answer to every question, maybe my appreciation for God should be shaped more by the number of questions and less by the wisdom of the answers.