Love that Offends

"And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid."

Mark 16:8

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Dear Alex,

In your email to our prayer group today, you’ve drawn back the curtains for us to re-enter the ending of the Good News in the Gospel of Mark, verse 8. How could Jesus, Son of God, our Hope and Magic, get axed from the script with this pooh-pooh finale? What would you say to him, you’ve asked - or if we could imagine grandpa coming back from the dead and show himself to us this morning?

I’ve never met my maternal grandpa. He had died from an accident in his car, a rarity of ownership in the 1940s in Indonesia, when my mom was about 6 years old. His legacy from birth to business, marriage to morgue, surpassed his four decades of ambitious living, honor and brilliance sealed on mom’s tongue whenever she revived her memories of him. Or maybe she was recalling a deity in flesh, the origin to her existence, her earthly abba gone missing for most of her childhood to patent his sky-bound inventions.

I saw two or three black-and-white photos of him dressed in a cream cool suit with a matching fedora, an ensemble of person and promise yellowing in her album. At the perennial bearing of 30-plus degrees Celsius, his town, cleaved in the world’s largest archipelago at the equator, would have made him drenched in his suit as fiercely as the monsoon that baptized his good-living, god-enabling communities. It was an era erupted for dreaming and gurgling with hotties and hot pots in endless swagger.

Whether mom’s version of grandpa was amplified or subdued in the reel unspooling for my education, I could not be sure. But insured I felt of my success in the family box office, knowing my role reforming in her re-enactment of grandpa, the drapes pulled for my show on cinematic widescreen. So I felt hollow through my teenage turmoil, hopping to and from four high schools in the clip of my half decade before graduation. I turned circus.

Now if grandpa were to overturn his end and arise for a chat with me, I would say... he had been silly. Recklessly mad as a hatter. His fedora - was it wool or willful? Why did you prance on stage and left mom fatherless in your history? How could it be that a father in fedora, captain of green-cash car, patriarch to orphans and ravens like me, could spoil the stage with glamor tenuous as confetti?

Could it be, dear grandpa, that you have been making theatre on tombstone, even in mom’s sleep and mine? The contest hurt you - and it’s ruining me. I cannot consider or write about a sweet conversation with you. I have been punching on screen my thoughts for days now, nights crawling on the pages of Exodus, going up and down the mountain, spotting down there the shrines in me, my conceit and comedy, my absolute need for Father on crucifix and Easter.

I think our prayers on Sunday will be most intruding and offensive, the stuff of bare-bone repentance and bloody forgiveness, the impulse for my letter tonight. Good News is news of terror, love for offenders like me in flight for restoration.

Yours, Kate