March 22, 2008

Glynn Cardy

The Great Vigil of Easter

Visualize a large slab of downtown concrete. It was poured some years back when grey was considered beautiful. In time a few cracks appeared. One early September morning as I strode across it I noticed a splash of colour in one of those cracks. I stopped and looked. There, through the crack, a lone flower had emerged – delicate, fragile, and beautiful. Its incongruence with concrete was startling.

Concrete has a flat finality about it. It is man-made, heavy, sombre, and used to encase tombs. You need a jackhammer to remove it. It boasts of permanency.

In theory concrete shouldn’t crack if it’s laid right. As a student I spent a summer once learning the finer points of concrete and the conversational skills needed to work in the industry. Yet, time and again, despite the best laid plans, it often cracks. Is it the earth moving? Or is it the sun, wind and rain? Even the hardest rocks are not impervious.

Like with the hardest people or the toughest regimes, given certain conditions cracks appear. The solid and steadfast, the invincible and enduring, are all conditional. All succumb in time. The permanence of power is an illusion. Like the concrete of heterosexism its certainty will crack open.

Flowers are about as different from concrete as one could imagine. They are temporal, lasting a day or two, sometimes a week. They don’t pretend to be permanent, but pride themselves in being ‘real’.

Flowers are fragile, to be handled with tenderness and care. Unlike concrete you don’t have to be physically strong to hold a flower. Although, sometimes, the strength to be different is needed.

Flowers are visually and fragrantly beautiful. They are often riotous in their colour and gaiety. Concrete doesn’t do beautiful. It doesn’t do riots, colour, or gay either.

Can flowers triumph over concrete? Maybe they’ll get uprooted, wither, or be trod on? Following a complaint by an officious bureaucrat maybe some street repair person will come and cement over the crack? Flowers don’t stand a chance.

Empires, like 1st century Rome do concrete. Imperial roadworks snaked out over the known world taking soldiers, bringing revenue, inflicting misery, enforcing submission.

The recent approval of torture by Emperor Bush is typical of concrete culture. Nothing shall resist the monolithic slab of subservient sameness and unfettered greed.

Empire-think can be found throughout history. Empires don’t do flexible. One rule for all. Empires don’t do difference. Deviance is threat. Empires don’t do love. Love is a private matter. Power is what matters. Empires don’t do flowers. They are for decoration, women, and tombs.

Empires don’t really get it. They don’t understand the human heart. They entomb their imperial hearts less they be influenced by them. They also destroy the hearts of their subjects.

But, thank God, the heart is resilient. It hides away. Closeted, it waits. It prays. It loves privately, and sometimes publicly. And it hopes.

The heart will flourish like a flower when the plurality it needs is allowed for. A flourishing heart needs space – flexible, uninhibited space. The heart will blossom when deviance is celebrated, when critical thinking and alternative dreams are valued, and when love is allowed into the centre of decision-making – not just bedrooms but boardrooms, not just kindergartens but legislative chambers.

The resurrection of Jesus is the central symbol of our faith. The tomb of concrete political and religious thought cracked, just a little, and a flower of hope emerged. It emerged not as a walking corpse but as a dysfunctional community of misfits that someone with a sense of humour called disciples.

Then slowly, over many years, the flower of hope bloomed individually and corporately among those misfits. The resurrection stories of ghosts walking through walls, barbeques at the beach and roadside epiphanies are all about finding hope and hope finding them. The stories are about hope in the midst of oppressive concrete. They are about letting the earth, the deep wellspring of spirituality, creep up through the oppressive sameness and heaviness of institutional power in order that the heart of humanity might find true sustenance.

The resurrection of Jesus is about our hearts. Our hearts need flowers, love, flexibility, space, and above all hope.

May the concrete continue to crack, and may we prise it along.