In Search of Resurrecting Love
Luke 24:1-12 (NRSV)
April 4, 2010 - Easter Sunday
Rev. Nancy Pfaltzgraf
On January 12, 1994, at 8:30 am, my friend Cyndie was walking into her kitchen when the phone rang - a call that would affect her life in ways she could never have dreamed of or imagined. Listen as she recounts what happened next.
A woman I'd worked with several years earlier had called to tell me that the 17 year old daughter of a mutual friend had just been killed in a car accident. The shock that went through me was disproportionate to the rather slight depth of relationship I had with this bereaved mother. But I felt a wave of anguish of immeasurable proportion crash over me. I called my sister, Faith, whose best friend had lost 2 children to senseless accidents, to ask what I should do for this friend of mine. Faith said - "call her, she probably won't want to talk to you, or even know you called at this moment - but it will signal your concern and later when she does need help - she'll know that you are there. Then just be there for her over the long term". So I called and was told she wasn't taking calls but my thoughts would be conveyed to her. As I hung up the phone I was again buried by immeasurable grief. I sat down on the nearest kitchen chair, my legs weak with the feeling. I removed my glasses, closed my eyes and covered my face with my hands - something I habitually do when under stress. But this time my action brought me a vision like I never had before or since. The instant I covered my eyes, I was awash in whiteness, a whiteness that was not only visual, but permeated every corner of my consciousness with a feeling of love and joy so vast that the words "love and joy" are just a hopelessly inadequate interpretation of it. Between me and the light was a figure of a fully realized woman. I could see her only in silhouette. It was as if she stood between me and the light to protect me from its full impact. She was a buffer between me and a feeling I could not have walked away from if I'd seen it complete. The figure, I knew, was Christina, my friend's daughter. She was "complete", engulfed by infinite love and certain of everything. Her hair was ruffled by a gentle breeze. But the grief that had taken possession of me pulled me back - raging that such joy was wrong in the face of her mother's grief. I opened my eyes to my dimly lit kitchen, aghast at what I'd seen and once again released to the full impact of the uninvited anguish. Again, answering my habitual response to such confusion, I covered my face with my hands, and again I was immersed in the joyous, loving whiteness, protected by the gentle silhouette. Then she placed in my heart the unassailable understanding that all was exactly as it should be. That her mother was asked to handle this, only because she could. That her death was part of something vast and beautiful and that someday her mother would share the understanding that she, Christina, now embraced.
