One of the greatest writers of the last Century was the French author Antoine de Saint-Exupery. He wrote only a few books, however, because he was killed while flying reconnaissance missions in World War II. In the spring of 1940, shortly before the fall of France, the American author Dorothy Thompson begged him to stop risking his life by volunteering for the most perilous missions. “Other men can fly planes,” she pleaded. “But you can write.”
The great French author replied: “You are mistaken. Nobody has a right to write a word today who does not participate to the fullest in the agony and trials of his fellow human beings. The Christian idea has to be served: That God’s Word became flesh in love, and like Jesus, one must write one’s love with one’s life.”
The empirical fact which suggests to people that something of world significance happened on Good Friday and in the resurrection of Easter Sunday is not any scientific attempt to prove the saving grace of God, but it is the existence of the Body of Christ, the community called upon to “write love with one’s life.”
The person who goes to the end of his or her rope, and then some, so a child or teenager may know the love of God knows something of Christ’s stooping posture. The group who dares to start something new for the people left out with only the promise that God will be with them, realizes that the open heart of Jesus on the cross is now an open resurrected heart in them. The person who ladles soup to the hungry or reveals God’s resurrected grace by extending care to the physically or mentally challenged is the person who is awake to God’s promises.
We are meant to make all of our words flesh, to write with our lives, to narrate volumes with the way we live. We are given the severe blessing of Good Friday and Easter to be a deep and abiding blessing to others.
I extend to each of you a joyous and holy Easter of writing love with your lives.
Bob Dannals
Interim Rector