From The Innkeepers

April 2024 Blog
We are the Makers of Resurrections

Easter having come early this year, we are just fresh from having celebrated the holiday with our family as I begin to think about this blog. The weather this Easter weekend was only partially amenable to celebrating this traditional rite of Spring so we went bouncing between March Madness basketball, the new baseball season and the Detroit Tigers winning their first 3 games, and poking around outside to see what was unfolding on the land. Our dining table took turns holding old traditions and new. The new tradition was a variety of Ryan’s homemade pizzas made from scratch with dough he had been blooming for several days, and ingredients he had been obtaining from a variety of sources like the fresh basil grown from seedlings by our neighbor Annie, to mushrooms foraged on hikes through various woodlands around Ann Arbor by Aaron and Erin. The old tradition was honored with a variety of Polish breads, meats, cheeses, and the traditional butter shaped like a lamb brought by my sister Pamela from Chicago. And then of course there always has to be Sharon’s (and now also Ryan’s) homemade pierogi, the recipe for which was handed down by my maternal grandmother to her daughters, and then to Sharon.

Now that you’ve had the rundown of our family Easter weekend we can move on to talk about why we celebrate this rite of Spring. There are two stories of resurrection in the Christian tradition, the one where Jesus is raised from the dead and his friends find his tomb empty when they go visit his grave. And then there is the story of Lazarus a friend of Jesus, who had died several days before Jesus could come to visit him. As the story goes Jesus asks the family to roll back the stone and then he calls Lazarus forth from the tomb, and Lazarus comes out, clad only in the traditional burial cloths of Jewish people in those days. Even as a child, I had a hard time believing that this actually had happened. I had experienced the death of my grandfather at a very young age, and I knew nothing was going to actually, physically bring him back. But I knew that he came to life when we talked about him, and told stories about him coming from the old country and making a new way of life for us here in this country. As an adult I now see that the concept of resurrection is not necessarily about something physical that happened to Lazarus or to Jesus, but rather something that we can do for one another. Just as Lazarus was loved back to life by his friend, we can do that for each other. Parts of us dies sometimes when we go through hardships, like illness, loss of a job, the breaking up of relationships, or bouts of depression because sometimes life can feel like it is too hard to handle. Life has a way of hardening and deadening us sometimes. Easter is about learning that we can roll back the rocks of our pain, and help one another open up to new possibilities.

There is a poem by James Broughton entitled “Easter Exultet”. Exultet is the Latin word for proclamation and in the Catholic tradition it was sung as a proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus at the Easter Vigil service. What James Broughton does for us here in this poem is proclaim how we can live a life in the spirit of resurrection.

Easter Exultet

Shake out your qualms.
Shake up your dreams.
Deepen your roots.
Extend your branches.
Trust deep water
and head for the open,
even if your vision shipwrecks you.
Quit your addiction
to sneer and complain.
Open a lookout.
Dance on a brink.
Run with your wildfire.
You are closer to glory
leaping an abyss
than upholstering a rut.
Not dawdling.
Not doubting.
Intrepid all the way.
Walk toward clarity.
At every crossroad
be prepared
to bump into wonder.
Only love prevails.
En Route to disaster
insist on canticles.
Lift your ineffable
out of the mundane
Nothing perishes;
nothing survives;
everything transforms!
Honeymoon with Big Joy!

In the spirit of bumping into wonder at every turn and taking each other’s hand as we leap across an abyss, we wish you the blessings of the season, the miracle of the mustering up the fortitude to raise ourselves and each other up, to pay attention to what has deadened us, and loving one another back to life.

So may it be for you.
Marcia, Pat, Sharon, and Ryan
Keepers of the Rustic Gate