Fr Ben Garren

Dear Siblings in Christ,

She is prepared to isolate herself for the next seven days and to seek out the purification through water and ash before again seeing friends and family.

She is prepared, laden with oils and cloth, to confront and assuage the reek of death.

She is prepared to look one last time upon his face, now ashen, to touch one last time his skin, now cold, to be with him one last time even if he is already gone.

She is prepared to begin in full a time of grieving and discovering what life is like without him.

She is not prepared to meet him again, to meet him anew.

Mary Magdalene was prepared in so many ways for Jesus. She was willing to take up every responsibility required of her, however arduous. She was ready to take up the hard work of serious and true grieving.

It was finding Jesus in the unexpected that was out of her grasp that day in the garden by the tomb. There Jesus came to her alive but as the outcast, the tender of graves, and she was confounded. She was ready to tend and be unclean but not ready to meet Jesus who had tended the graves and made them clean.

As we spend this week meditating on the Easter Miracle we should contemplate how we are like Mary Magdalene, ready to take up all forms of hardship for the work of Jesus… but perhaps unready to see where and how Jesus is already working amidst all the hardships around us.

Are we bracing ourselves to do our duty for others in the name of love… or are we walking into the midst of others’ needs to meet and find Jesus overcoming them already?

Jesus’ resurrection is working its way into all liberation occurring around us, if we can only let ourselves see the resurrected Christ in those tending to the needs the world wants left untended.

Pax,

— Ben