He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Matthew 28:6

From an early age, I found myself living vicariously through the suffering of others. My mother recalled that as our family gathered around our big console TV set, and the theme song of the television series, Lassie, began, she would look over at me to find I’d already begun to cry. During each episode, as someone was lost or hurt, I’d be on the edge of my seat, anticipating the impending loss with tears. So, you might imagine how I responded when I first watched Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ. For me—and I suspect for many—the viewing was excruciating, my gut churning, my muscles clenched, and every sinew twitching in response to Jim Caveziel’s portrayal of Christ’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane and on the cross. Although I always believed that I would, that I must see the film again, I’ve never been able to bring myself to view it a second time.

I’ll forever hold images from this film in my mind, though, as I continue to live vicariously through them in these days leading up to Easter. They still hold the power—as they should—to prompt the physical, emotional, and spiritual reactions I experienced years ago when I sat in a theater with a cloud of witnesses who filed out in silence. We’d all suffered through a cinematic reenactment of Christ’s suffering, painfully acknowledging that as brutal as Gibson’s portrayal was, it wasn’t real. It could only suggest the magnitude of Christ’s physical and spiritual agony.

Yet even as we vicariously suffered, we knew the glorious end of the story. We left the theater in darkness on that Good Friday, as we embraced Jesus’ assurance in John 16:33: “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” We got into our vehicles with our hearts already fixed on Easter Sunday and the suffering Savior’s defeat of death.

As I’ve been walking each day at the nature preserve, I’ve watched a stand of cattails in the eastern corner of the pond I pass. In late March, they’d finally split, their brown bodies spilling pale fibers which fell like powder puffs and dotted the trail. One day, as I passed, the wind teased these puffs into the sky and carried them over the trees and toward the sun. And I thought about this death, the remnants of life bright and airborne now.

I thought about these brown, brittle bodies offering their souls to the wind. I marveled at their ascent. And I felt unmerited joy as I remembered the words of 1 Corinthians 15:55: “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?”

May you be blessed this Easter and always with Christ’s unmerited grace.

Scattering Your Ashes
   --for our father

In late March, 
the cattails stand at the water’s edge, 
engorged once but now split, 
their stalks bent and prone across the earth;

their entrails spilt in ivory puffs
and strewn across my path

where the wind will feather them 
into filaments so fine they will rise 
like vapor over the fields.

Into this tabernacle of death you went 
as the marrow of your life ran out,
your bones quickening to fiber
and sluffing from your death bed
with each shallow breath

so that when the veil was torn,
the moment was soft
but no less final.

But now, your ash fibers rise,
catching the current that will bear them beyond

while on the riverbank below, your children look up 
into the warp and weft of your great ascent.