Editor's Letter - 4th issue
If you stood up long enough in a icy cold storm, winds lapping against your body until nerves start to slow down to a crawl, what would you do? It would be helpful to mention that you can't escape the place or the situation. In fact, as much as you're suffering beyond fathomable comprehension, you don't want to leave. You don't and yet you want to, the most immediate reason being your flesh close to failing you.
The wind ripping at your arms, the cold unfolding over your chest like a thoughtless rash, your sight weakening as you stare straight ahead, somehow conjuring up enough strength to quieten the mad rebellion raging in your mind, Why are you doing this! Get out of here! Come on!
Could mental strength, in such a situation, stem from another source? Could resolve and willpower be maintained without the surge of adrenaline or inflamed emotions of persistence? What could motivate you? It baffles the mind.
I forgot to mention something else. Someone in the distance is watching you as you put yourself to this exercise which, without explanation, borders on the extreme masochistic: a wrist-slitting experience gone on for too long. It's not just someone; it's humanity in its entirety.
You're Christ, you're a shunned servant, you're a ostracized fighter for the oppressed, you're a lonely daughter, opting to stay in your abusive parental home.
The saying, it baffles the body: "It is complete!", Tetelestai!.
How can it be complete or finished or all fulfilled when you're coming to the end of your own life? How can completion come when you're not around to witness the completion? How can death be completion?
I stand in that crowd of entire humanity and I ask those questions. And then I race up the Cross to see humanity from the eyes of Christ. When I'm up there, I don't know how to make sense of what I see. I begin to scratch the experience of what he felt. When I say scratch, I mean dent granite with a toothpick.
The single moment in my life most close to the Cross, the day I was shunned by a girl I loved and told to leave her house in broad daylight, seemed like a good example. An exact image? Never. There was no completion to that. But in that moment, I experienced a love that did not own or smother. It was a limitless love that was whole, without a doubt. But still, it was to one person within a single moment and it faded soon after.
But on that Cross? No. That love was eternal, pre-existing, and ever-running. And there was completion on that Cross.
He cried, "Tetelestai!" when everything he had come to earth to do was done. And everything to be unravelled upon and after his thunderous resurrection continued to echo that solemn, succinct victory chant. A victory chant clothed in fatigue, it still rings today.
This is the 4th issue of Efmevi, the Resurrectional issue. Come look at and from the Cross.
Midiane
Editor, Efmevi.
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