Wednesday in Holy Week

You, however, are not in the realm of the flesh but are in the realm of the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they do not belong to Christ. But if Christ is in you, then even though your body is subject to death because of sin, the Spirit gives life because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you. 

Romans 8:9-11

Of course we shall all die. We have this in common, tax collectors and astrophysicists, lay and ordained, good and bad, black and white, and every human possibility of birth or nurture. We are all going to die, sooner or later, and some of us much sooner than we had anticipated. Sometimes the ghostly drone of our approaching mortality is barely audible beneath the birdsong and lovers' cries; sometimes it roars in our ears like a waterfall; but it is there.

We are so frail, each of us, so easily broken. A few years and we are gone anyway, scraps of memory on the ebbing tide, that choking ache in an old friend's chest long after midnight - then only the odd printed reference, maybe, letter in a tin box under the bed, ghost link on the web.

And yet.

To have been faced with the imminent likelihood of one’s own death, as I have been blessed to be once or twice, is to know that that frailty is only one side of the coin. Reality is not what it seems. The loneliness of our human separation, our differentiation, is mere uncertainty. The light that opens in that moment is so sure, so utterly dependable - more solid and certain than the chalk and flint of Mount Olivet - that in the end, truly, it's OK, in the most absolute way possible. That in each of us which is love itself is beyond all the dimensions of time and matter, beyond the reach of thought, but there, at the centre of every heart.

We never were alone, and love is a very good name for God - for that Source and centre of all in which all things from galaxies to wood mice grow, and are held: that Ground of Being out of which, finally, we can never fall, but which will call us home to endless light, and the healing of all wounds.