BIG ENOUGH

I like to think that it was a day like this one.  I stepped outside this morning, and everything felt alive.  I like to imagine it that way as Mary Magdalene left home early on her way to a graveyard.  In the first light of new day, things feel hopeful.  She thought she knew what to expect – aren’t all dead people the same?

During communion today, I heard a small voice behind me asking persistently, “When will I be big enough?”  The small cups of juice must have looked tempting, and he was impatient to know when he could have one himself.  In his mind, there must certainly come a time when he would be big, like the adults, and share in this grown-up tradition.  It was an honest question.  “When will I be big enough for this?”  Will you ever be big enough?  “When will I understand the reason?”  Do we truly understand, or just obey? 

Am I big enough now? I would have asked him, if I thought he could give me the answer.  Am I big enough to know what it was for God to be like me, to have sweaty palms and a racing heart and short breath?  Am I big enough to understand why he would die – that thing which every man fears most? 

I’m not sure what his father told him, but it couldn’t have been enough to answer that question, asked innocently.  If I am ever big enough, it will be a surprise to me.  I don’t expect that the necessary big-ness is something I can get.  The small voice who sat behind me today will grow older, and he will be “big,” and maybe he will realize that all you get by being big is the knowledge that this juice stands for something even bigger.  There is a difference between knowledge and understanding.

Mary Magdalene did not understand.  She started to leave, confused and frightened; she had expected a dead man, and had found what amounted to an empty hole.  He couldn’t have been shining like in the movies when she saw him, because she thought he was someone come to work in the gardens.  It was not until she realized that he knew her name that she recognized him.  He was not as dead as she had expected.  In the light of a finally-beautiful morning, I could see her there.  I like to imagine it like that, not because it brings me closer to knowing, because how can I know what it was like that day?  But it brings me closer to understanding.

And every new understanding is a step toward “big enough.”  I am getting bigger every day.