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There are some days when I feel small. I think small thoughts (about ‘inconsiderate’ fellow commuters), I say small words (usually snarky, usually in reaction to someone slighting me), and I live a small life of small actions (choosing convenience and self-interest over generosity and self-sacrifice). There are some days when I feel small. When I am small. But that smallness doesn’t have to become me. In every passing interaction of every passing hour, rather than shrinking into a smaller self, I can choose to expand. I was watching this cormorant diving in the harbour today, and after I walked away I kept thinking about the way it would stretch itself out, expanding into its fullest stature and holding itself out to the world. And I thought about how I too can expand into my fullest self. Rather than reacting with defensiveness or fear, I can reach beyond myself and offer kindness, exercising limbs and muscles of maturity and trust that otherwise will waste out of disuse. When you have been hurt or rejected or embarrassed, it can be very difficult to not shrink into petty deeds, petty words, petty thoughts. But those are the deeds and words and thoughts of a small person. And even when you feel small, you can choose to ask for help to stretch out your little limbs and your little lungs, and expand into a bigger self than you were a second ago. Because those expanded limbs tell a much brighter story of adventure and risk than any small ones ever could. And they are much more like the you your God had in mind when He made you. Some days I feel small. But I can choose to stretch my limbs with all the power at work in me and be big anyway.

The streets hum and the trees murmur. They are speaking of new garments and I hear only snatches as the sky brims with something caught between mourning and hope. “Not all flesh is the same,” it is said, and as I press my palm against her wooden torso I feel her otherness coursing through her, her steady attunement to her place and her self, if indeed she has one. She is other but she is also bound to me. In that twinkling of an eye, when I am changed and all that is shadowed and bruised is then healed and restored, I will look across at her and see her new garments, our shared fate. I like to think we will laugh until the former things have been forgotten, receding like the sun into the shadows on a cold near-winter’s afternoon.

The sky’s lids crinkle with joy, brandishing golden light throughout the heavens as the trees revel in their new outfits for a new day. All over the earth the chilly air nips at us with nervous excitement at the chance to try again, whispering with the cockatoos of possibility and grace. It’s an Autumn morning in May, and the promise of new life is everywhere, if only we have eyes to see.

[This Easter, I have been reflecting on the resurrection of Jesus and how it has changed my life. Here are some things I prepared in order to share with my church family in response to the question, “What does the resurrection mean to you?”]

1. Jesus is alive

It means that Jesus is alive today, at work today and can be known today. This is the transforming reality of my life: not a series of metaphysical beliefs or ethical convictions or religious sensibilities - but personal acquaintance with Jesus Christ. That is the magnificence of Easter: that the same Jesus who whilst on Earth healed the sick, advocated for the poor, associated with outcasts, can be encountered today. The same Jesus who spoke truth to power, who criticised religious hypocrisy, who bound up the brokenhearted, who defended the vulnerable, he is still at work today and can be encountered today.

I understand that is difficult to believe. To have a relationship with someone you have never seen can be complicated. But there are other ways of knowing, other than sight. Although my relationship with Jesus is different to the relationships I have with my family and friends, it is no less real. There is nothing remotely unreal about the way Jesus has been near to me in times of pain, disappointment or fear. The way He has gently filled me with peace in times of trouble. The way He has guided me through complex situations, nudging me, giving me wisdom that is not my own - there is nothing unreal about that.

And I think that just as the Jesus who Mary Magdalene encountered in the garden outside the tomb wasn’t the Jesus she was expecting, the God who can be encountered today probably isn’t going to be what or who we expect him be.

We all have our own ideas about whether there is a God & what she or he or it might be like. My experience of Jesus is that he usually isn’t what I expect him to be. He’s far, far better. Kinder, stronger, wiser, gentler, more merciful, more compassionate, more creative, and far more invested in my life and our world than I expect.

Rowan Williams (former Archbishop of Canterbury) says that “The resurrection displays God’s love as still and forever taking the shape of Jesus.” So if you want to know who God is, what he is like, and how he feels about you - look at Jesus.

2. There is hope

My old man said to me this week that if Christmas shows us that God is with us, then Easter shows us that God is for us. I think that’s true. And I think that should give all of us great hope.

Because it means that the same God who spoke and all things came into being is committed to us, and to our restoration. Nothing can deter him, even when we have done our worst and killed the Son of God.

Because it shows us that his love is stronger than death, than our brokenness, than the seeming inevitabilities of our lives. Our failures don’t determine the outcome of our story; his love does.

Because it shows us the sheer toughness and persistence of God’s love for us; that when things seem bleak, in our lives and in our world, that God is still at work and able to turn things around. At the moment when things seemed at their worst - God was dead - He was doing His most wonderful work yet.

And finally: Because it shows us the trajectory of God’s unfolding plan for all things: the restoration of our relationship with God, and the flow on effects of that — for our bodies, for the earth, for the systems and structures of our world, for our relationships.

A. Restoration of relationship with God

The narrative that the Christian Scriptures present to us is that there is a fracture in our relationship with God, caused by our defiance and distrust of Him, and that fracture has splintered out into our selves, our communities, and our very world.

That account of humanity is probably the most persuasive one I’ve come across, because I think it accounts for the perplexing coexistence in the human heart of the capacity for both good and evil. It’s as though there was this beautiful melody being sung throughout humanity and creation, and then something unwelcome interjected, corrupting it, distorting it. The goodness and beauty of the original melody was still there, just tainted, thrown into chaos. The good news of Easter is that God, like a very talented jazz musician, has entered into that chaos, and started to work with the distortion, coaxing it, working it back into something that harmonises with the melody - a harmony that is even more beautiful than the original melody.

The resurrection is the pinnacle of God’s intervention to restore our relationship with Him - but the restoration doesn’t stop there. It’s like in the world of Narnia - the reign of the White Witch affects even the very earth, causing it to be always winter, but never Christmas. Aslan’s return and defeat of the White Witch doesn’t just change things politically - it flows out into everything, causing winter to thaw and spring to arrive.

The same is true of the resurrection: it is the in-breaking of a new order of things. It is the first glimpse of what is to come - comprehensive restoration of all things.

B. Restoration of body:

Living with a disability has made the story of the resurrection take on new meaning. That God rose Jesus from the dead means that God has not given up on his physical creation. It means he cares deeply about the physical. The promise of God is that, for those who trust Jesus, our bodies will be made new, just as Jesus’ body was made new.

The fact that God took on human flesh imbues the human body with an incredible dignity; the fact that God resurrected the broken body of Christ affirms that the body has enduring value. It is God’s resounding “yes” to the physical.

We are embodied creatures and we will be embodied creatures in the new creation — our bodies aren’t just suitcases for our minds, which will be couriered off into an abstract existence when we die. No; the promise is that all things will be made NEW. As Christ was raised, so we will rise, with bodies made new, glorious, uncorrupted and incorruptible.

C. Restoration of all creation:

The same is true for our earth, our communities, our politics, and our very selves! The hope that is heralded by the resurrection is an in-breaking of a new order of things. This order is one in which all things are made new, the corruption which had splintered out into the very earth will be done away with, and all wounds (physical, social, political) healed. That’s pretty good news when faced with the injustice, environmental catastrophe, violence and division we see around us and on the news every day.

All of this deep and abiding hope because if the resurrection is real, it means Jesus did not stay dead — he is alive today, is at work today, and can be known today. That has huge consequences for me and you, body and soul, for the communities in which we find ourselves and for the very earth in which we live. Because, if true, if this Palestinian Jew in 33AD defeated death as he said he would, then that is in effect a vindication of the claims that he made about himself. It’s certainly worth a second look.

On New Years Eve, I walked a long way up and down this beach. I was alone and was not listening to anything other than the sounds of the shore: the tide and the terns and the mighty nor’easter. Dusk was leeching colour from the land and the sea but not the sky. A stillness had settled over me. I thought about the year that had past. The turbulence and rupture and the weight of disappointment. I took an inventory of my heart and mind and soul and it surprised me to discover greater peace, fuller joy, deeper assurance in the places I had expected to find the damage of rejection and grief. Because amongst the pockmarks and subsiding swelling, I noticed a self than expanded — from a fearful one that had shrunk from subliminal messages of inadequacy & being too much, to an emboldened one, affirmed and celebrated and cherished for who I am and who I am becoming. Thank you to all those dear ones who spoke such precious words of life over me. I thought about the year that was ahead, and I considered what theme I would choose for the coming months. Instead of resolutions, I’ve taken to praying and thinking about a word that I want to focus on in my life. Last year was grace in the face of frustration, the year before was choosing character over gain, and this year the idea emerging was something to do with attentiveness and expectation. I have thought a lot about the importance of silence and solitude in creating space enough to listen to my life and heed what is being spoken. Prone to overscheduling and filling all the gaps, there was very little time and very little space in my head and my heart to notice what was going on in myself, let alone the people around me. So much noise, so little listening. In the second half of last year, I started to deliberately spend more time alone. To carve out time to listen to what was going on inside myself, both body and soul. Most of you know about my dystonia, a chronic illness of a dysfunctional nervous system. The path to healing requires quietening down my body and mind, an approach I’d scorned as someone who has always felt the pressing need to do more in the little time afforded to us. But I’ve come to realise that living deeper is a better path to a full life that living busy. Because when I am rushing from thing to thing in my packed schedule, I’m not really paying attention to much more than the clock and the logistics of getting to the next thing. I miss things. I miss the gorgeous possibility hidden in side glances, I miss the subtle cues hinting at how a person is going, I miss the opportunity to soak in the beauty of friendship. I no longer see clearly where I am, and I have no clear vision of where I am going or could be going. And so I have been trying to cultivate greater attentiveness to the people and places and ideas and events in my life, that I might hear more clearly what God is showing me about Him and them and me through all of it. Attentiveness is fundamentally about a turning outwards, being freed from the shrivelling effect of self-preoccupation, and being freed to be so caught up in the interests of others that self-protection simply doesn’t occur to you. You just trust God to have your back. I think that when you do that, when you carve out space in your life and heart and mind, that expectation grows. Your capacity to imagine is enlivened and people and circumstances are filled with possibility rather than threat. When you pay attention to your life, you spot little side paths running to the left or the right, leading to places you wouldn’t have imagined yourself taking. Paths you would have missed had you been so busy ploughing ahead with packed schedules and cluttered minds. All of this is to say that this year I have tried to shift gears. In July I’m taking a break from law and moving overseas — to give my health a chance to recover, to study theology, and to steward a gift that I’ve been neglecting in the pursuit of a career. In the next few months, I’m going to prepare by unplugging from the social media I’m still on as a means of creating space in my mind and heart so that I can pay more attention to the things that are right in front of me. In the meantime, I love you all and pray that you continue to become a truer, clearer and brighter version of yourself this year and every year that’s to come.

The rain came and I could see myself grabbing your hand, slipping my pinky between your ring finger as was our custom, before running out into the deluge, through the sand and into the sea, laughing and laughing as we submerged our doubts and fears along with our very selves. I can still see you emerging from the salt and foam, curls slicked back against your crown, glancing back at me with a smile so free from the tangles held within. So utterly free. You swam towards me with a scheme in your mischievous mind and I squealed as you grabbed my waist and lifted me up — up and out of our present difficulties, of straining to become who we already were, we were held by one another’s selves with the familiarity and safety that comes from whatever it is that we were. My oh my. You are no longer mine. And I am no longer your “my” — just as you are no longer my companion, my confidante or my friend. Instead, we are one another’s past tense, memories of what was and what could have been that brim with nostalgia and loss. And so the rain came and I grabbed my resolve and ran to the sea alone. My stories will be magnificent and bright without you, but it seems at least for now that they will always carry the undercurrent of your absence. I dive into the sea, turning and turning until she lifts me up — up and out of my self and into a truer me that is nobody’s “mine” but Yours.

Wandering back towards the house, gin in hand, her mother continued their conversation from the street where she was watering the plants on the verge. “The prevailing attitudes of social Darwinism were completely at odds with any concept of human rights, a fact that is conveniently overlooked by those who purport to — honey, could you yank the hose from behind that rock?” Glancing back at the white weatherboards, she was suspended in the warm gaze of the late afternoon sun bouncing off the deck, which was brimming with the anticipation of what was around the corner. Prior knowledge that the side of the house held little other than damp towels flung over chairs and railings mattered little. Lingering in the promise of unrealised possibilities, every phrase of the currawong was a herald of the significance of the insignificant, and the beauty of it all overwhelmed all memory of sadness. She remained until the dusk enfolded them into the ambiguous dark.

We slipped off our clothes onto the abandoned beach and loped into the water. She dove elegantly into the gentle waveless bay and I dunked myself enthusiastically like the child I felt like again as the rain seasoned the sea. We could see the well-heeled socialites of Mosman observing our antics from the Pavilion, and I felt the glee bubble up through and around me. “This feels nostalgic,” I said. She grinned and replied, “Like running out in the rain before the storm hit.” A son and his son arrived by kayak on the shore from their adventures as we walked back to the car in our togs.

I thought to myself that we carry our Absences around in us wherever we go, sharing our present joys with them and speaking silent elegies as we absorb the colour and life that carries us forward. We see and hear and touch on their behalf as well as our own. Maybe that’s where the nostalgia emerges from: remembering a time when they would have shared the joy of running and diving into the sea in the rain and laughing at the chill and the thrill of being alive in the midst of such beauty. As we ascend the hill, bare feet on the warm bitumen, I thought of the day when nostalgia would be caught up in the immanence of the transcendent come near.

“First Swim of the summer, tick that off! Wanna go sit in a coffee shop?” “Let’s do it.”

The earth blushes with the shy hope Of long evenings with cicadas on the deck Having shaken off the rigid cold. I fold into the dark and it occurs to me That I have done much the same thing With you.

But life is grace, unheralded and incomplete in the way the tide is, ebb and flow, retreat and advance, arrive and depart. Held with my attention but not my grasping hands, these gifts will go as they have come. I have a quiet sense of something like nostalgia when her light deepens with orange and red, that we have not quite learned all there is to learn from one another, about one another. That there were momentary disclosures of self made in hidden glances and shy hesitations that were missed or not fully seen. Tomorrow brings with her another chance to take her in, all of her. Her boredom and pride and giddy delight: we are alive! What mystery.

We drink it in through our eyes and skin and sealed lips. Rise and fall, ebb and flow, the weight of peace settles upon me as these lungs fall into step with the planets and tides and sways of the earth. I have swallowed the silence of solitude and it has filled me. As my speech shrinks, my mind and heart expand, the quietness a lens clearer and brighter than any but the Word of life (perhaps). It is a reverent hesitation: 'Behold! I am making some things new.' Which? Where? Be quiet and you may see.

“Beauty will save the world,” wrote Dostoyevsky, and I don’t pretend to understand what he meant or how it could be true. But in the quiet of the morning light, gently speaking in streams of anticipation, I feel her voice before I hear it. Pressing in on all the shadows and greys loitering in forgotten places, she speaks of another time and place, in which the nameless fears that creep and slither around our minds and hearts will be cast out. For this is not a voice that is diminutive and weak, shy and impressionable. No, hers is a voice that is as strong as it is delicate, resilient and melodic as she sings over the distortions of the Corruptor. With steel in her gaze, she redeems the songlines back into the harmony that we each of us will recognise when we hear them at last. That is to say that I think that the things that are beautiful hold a power and a weight that will prevail over the things that are ugly and false. Perhaps that’s what he meant when he said that “Beauty will save the world.”

We sat at the brink of it, where land and sea and sky meet in an eternal greeting. Captivating in its unpredictable sameness, we wait to see our fill. It is never enough. We don’t realise that we are holding our breath, waiting for something to happen, something that we cannot speak but we believe in some opaque way we will recognise when we see. I’m sitting at the edge of my life, too, I think. Waiting and listening and watching for something. Something akin to the flash of a kingfisher’s wings or the song of a shy forest inhabitant or the silent convergence of tides. I am brimming with anticipation for what will be spoken into the spacious place that is the attentive life. For what I will hear when I listen with a quiet and deep trust that I am being spoken to by someone who wants to be heard.

Strangest of all is the strangeness now assumed; from colour and warmth and laughter and noise, to an abrupt and deafening silence. It is not quiet. There is none of the gentleness of quietness in this silence. Only an uneasy and pervasive absence.

And though and though, I know, I know: absence is not an evil and disquiet is not a wrong. Not all the time, at least. They speak the same language as the elusive draught at winter: something is not right.

Departure can be as magnificent as it is heartbreaking. If ways are parted with moment. If a time is honoured with delicacy. If what was is sealed with the weight and respect deserved.

But closure is a luxury not all of us are afforded! These sub-plots of our lives are rarely tidy. Weaving in and out and all about, full of mess and unresolved scribbles in the margin, it is all we can do to resist the over-correcting urge to interject! To neaten the colours, to straighten the lines, to write our own story.

And so and so, I know, I know: in those moments when control is wrested from our hands, and the strain of the chaos tears and wears, it is perhaps worth attending to this thought: that it isn’t altogether a bad thing to give over the pen to the Author of life, to the master of Time.

When we resist the urge to fill the silence, we create space. And it is in that space in which we allow Him to begin to weave all the fraying and tattered and loose ends of our lives into something that will, in the end, be more coherent than we could imagine. Something more beautiful than we deserve.

Weighted tones sound out across the cool of night. I stand unmoved and immovable, tethered to thoughtlessness lest I stray into thought. I am afloat upon it all, the surging tide beneath and the bracing cold all around. I have a mind to go. To swallow it all with sound and light and the wondrous fury of beautiful things. To be swallowed by the noise of beautiful things.

And yet, there is a stillness that bids me stay. With chords of silk and steel, I remain, both against my will and of it. I watch, wide eyed and waiting, witnessing the waves. Time and again, they advance and retreat, carving tunnels and trenches and places to hide. But I do not remain to retreat.

Wittled and wanting, I am cavernous and void, a small child screaming the sacred profanities that I am afraid and am I loved. Her echoes are held in my limbs and organs with white-knuckled calm that is about to fracture and break.

And then it comes. Not more than a breeze, gentle and quiet.

I stay to be filled, emptied and filled, polished and dulled. I stay to fill the silence as it fills me in turn, until I am brimming and bright. As I am in his sight.

We are shipless seafarers, bound to the sea and beholden to its ways. Its unpredictable temperament can undo or reform us most magnificently as we wade out into its speech of eddies and breaks.

I wonder how I will fare today.

Wave after wave, its procession towards the shore is an uncomplicated revelation of its mood: of anonymous cruelty and arbitrary deprivation, of playful tenderness and rough indifference. At times, we will sail with gladness over a gentle swell, spinning like children who are unafraid of the world. We are met with tumbling white, charming and playful as it runs toward us, uplifted and uplifting. The sea is a friend from whom we expect good things. Other times, the winds pick up and our friendship shifts. We are no longer sure of the sentiments she holds for us, with her ambivalent hues of metallic grey. Sets of white-tops loom before us - but we dive beneath them before they break, exhilarated by the flex of her strength.

Then there are the long silences. We wait and wait, and in our waiting we forget as we feel we are forgotten.

Then, her harsh indifference reads as though she has turned against us, with tangling currents and pounding surf. We are off-guard, and each time we push ourselves off the seabed to the surface, gasping and blind, we are met with the unforgiving sight of a towering wall, teetering and dark, with no time to gather ourselves before it crashes down over our heads.

Wave after wave, they will come without regard to our preference. What good is it to be tossed about, unsettled and anxious about what lies ahead? It is not ours to decide what the tide will bring. It is not for our hands to shape the swell, nor to bleach the waters with the gladness of sunlight. It is only ours to receive whatever words it has for today. And it is ours to choose to receive them with humour and grace, adventure and courage, whimsy and joy.

I wonder how I will receive them today.

The morning was bright. We had parked streets away, and the walk toward the church was laden with an obliged solemnity. Cars filled with familiar faces cruised by, stalking parking spots. Arriving at the archways, we were greeted by people who knew us and kissed us and said “hello Stephie, hello Tom”, but of whom I only had a vague childhood recollection. I smiled back, returning their greeting with abundant familiarity: “good to see you, how have you been lately?”. My mum was getting tearful and her voice was swelling and then cracking in the way I had only known it to do all too often over the past two years. I slipped my arm around her waist and gave her a squeeze. We moved away from the doorway so she wouldn’t have to greet the streams of people now filing in.

We sat at the front and the right. Wooden pews and stained-glass windows affect the quality of light. The air seems thicker. I’m not sure whether that makes what takes place feel more real or less real, ethereal. It made me think of a passage in ‘Til We Have Faces’ that someone once read to me in the car down at Blue’s Point about holiness being thick and dark like blood. As I stood to survey the faces, searching for my cousin Jane, I spotted an oversupply of bishops and former archbishops. I looked at their purple clerical shirts and poise, and also their tired faces and fading minds, and I thought of the mystery of high and holy things dwelling in lowly places.

The best thing about funerals of this type is the singing. The voices roar. The organ blasts and the tenor and alto parts are sung and momentarily the veil between the Church militant and glorified is parted and we are united it that common song of eternal praise and I feel more real than I did earlier in the day.

My uncle had worked all his working life at a school, and so the former principal of that school read from Isaiah chapter forty. He spoke the words of renewed strength and eagle’s wings and I noted that the lectern he read from was an eagle carved of wood. My uncle Peter did the testimonial, and he did it well. We laughed at his anecdotes of Mark’s obstinate refusal to succumb to the civil war his own body waged on his own self. There was a photo slide that Mark had prepared himself, and I thought, “his life was full.” We sang, and it was Mum’s turn to read. She commanded the attention of the room in quite a different way to the others. Everything suddenly fell several degrees of silence and filled with an immanence, her words rushing toward us. She read from Hebrews chapter twelve, which had been the passage Reverend Rob had read to Mark when giving him communion the night before he died. Her voice was full of strength and tenderness, and she finished with a fierce emotion as she read, “for our God is a consuming fire,” and departed. She walked back to her seat, directly in front of me, with wet eyes and I saw in them something that broke me and made me proud. I started to shake as tears I couldn’t restrain fell down my face. I was surprised; I hadn’t expected them. Andrew felt it, and put his arm around me and gently kissed me on the head.

I tried to pull myself together as Reverend Rob began to deliver what would be one of the best sermons I have ever heard. Reverend Rob had been the minister of my home church when I was little, but had moved to this church fifteen years ago. Mark had followed him there, because of their mutual love of liturgy. Reverend Rob spoke, half tongue in cheek, half serious, about the way he and Mark would bemoan the state of contemporary services. Reverend Rob said that Mark liked the prayer book, because he wanted to focus on God and not on man. I thought on that and wondered about it. We said the Te Deum together before Andrew and Jane and I stood to say some prayers from the AAPB. A great calm was on me, and I delivered the prayer clearly and deliberately, without even a flicker of emotion in my voice. Just how Mark would have liked it.

“Amazing love, how can it be that Thou my God shouldst die for me!” and then my brothers and cousin and uncles and Mark’s good friend Andrew formed rank on either side of the coffin, and my mind momentarily returned to a nearly-identical scene just over a year ago at my grandmother’s funeral. We followed them out, and I remembered to avoid looking at my cousins or the others in the congregation, lest their tearful faces trigger more of my own. I accidentally looked up at a man standing in the second row from the back. He was tall, and poised, and his face was broken into unashamed sobs. The dignity of his weeping was remarkable.

Later, at the wake, the boys would comment, joke, about how much heavier Mark’s coffin was compared to Ma’s. But there was no hint of the strain they felt. They lowered the coffin into the hearse, and I felt an anonymous emotion as I stood watching my brothers perform this sacred deed.

Stephie Jane and I were hugging side by side. We could each feel the tremors throughout the other.

The hearse started up, a beautiful old car, and the three clergy in their vestments began their solemn march in front of it, the white and red and black billowing out in a fitting display of moment. Then, in a second of silent agreement, three figures began to follow it. Their gait was purposeful and nostalgic, resolved and vulnerable. The woman reached for the hand of the man to her right, and held it firmly. The third man, tall and poised, patted the second man’s back, all three of them full of emotions they were hesitant to express. As they walked up the stone driveway, gone were the woman and two men in their sixties. Making their way to the sandstone gates, was a sister and two brothers, eight and ten and twelve, with pigtails in her hair and knee-length socks on their legs, brave and broken as they said goodbye to their little brother, who had finally gone home.

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