Telling the Story All the Way Through

Homily for April 20, 2025
Easter Day
John 20:1-18

“We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.”  So begins our Creed we recite each Sunday.  Our Creed speaks to questions such as:  “Is Jesus human or divine?”  “What is the relationship between the Father and the Son?”  “What is the role of the Holy Spirit?”  And I want to get back to the Creed and its questions, but first, the avant-garde artist and musician, Laurie Anderson, who is perhaps best-known for her 1982 hit, “O Superman.”  At age twelve, Anderson broke her back in a diving accident.  She writes:

One day I was at the swimming pool and I decided to do a flip from the high board, the kind of dive when you’re… magically suspended midair and everyone around the pool goes, “Wow!  That’s incredible!  That’s amazing!”  

I’d never done a flip before.  But I thought:  How hard could it be?  You just somersault and straighten out right before you hit the water.  So I did.  But I missed the pool.  And I landed on the concrete edge and broke my back.

I spent the next few weeks in traction in the children’s ward at the hospital… I was in the same… unit as the kids who’d been burned, who were hanging in rotating slings sort of like rotisseries…  that would turn you around and around so the burns could be bathed in cool liquids…

The worst thing about this was the volunteers who came every afternoon to read to me.  They’d… open the book:  “So, where were we?  Oh, yes! The gray rabbit was hopping down the road…  Before this… I’d been reading books like A Tale of Two Cities, and Crime and Punishment, so the gray rabbit stories were kind of a slow torture.  

Much later in my life, when someone would ask me what my childhood was like,sometimes I would tell them this story about the hospital… and how horrible it was to listen to… stories like the one about the gray rabbit.  But there was always something weird about telling this story that made me uneasy, like something was missing.

Then one day, when I was in the middle of telling it, I was describing the little rotisseries that the kids were hanging in. And suddenly it was like I was back in the hospital...  And I remembered the missing part:  It was the way the ward sounded at night… the sound of… children crying…

And then I remembered the rest of it.  The heavy smell of medicine… How afraid I was. And the way some of the beds would be empty in the morning and the nurses would never talk about what had happened… they’d just go on making up the beds and cleaning up around the ward.  And so the thing about this story was that actually…  I’d forgotten the rest of it.  I’d cleaned it up just the way the nurses had.

And that’s what I think is the creepiest thing about stories…  You get your story and you hold onto it, and every time you tell it you forget more.

The great Feasts of the Church tend to center around our most difficult questions:  Christmas, for example, speaks to how Jesus,fully-divine, also became fully-human – “by the power of the Holy Spirit, he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,” we say in the Creed.  Easter tells about Jesus’ rising from the dead – “On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures,” we recite.  The Feast of the Ascension celebrates how “he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father,” we say.  The Church’s Feasts tend to center around our most difficult questions.      

But I must say (to paraphrase Anderson):  There’s often something “weird” about telling these stories, like something is missing.  For example, we’ve never known anyone who was “born of a virgin.”  We’ve never known anyone who has risen from the dead.  And we’ve never seen anyone “ascend into heaven.”  These stories seem so unlikely, and to tell them can make us uneasy, like something must be missing.

To complicate things, the "Enemy of our human nature” (as St. Ignatius of Loyola calls it) [the “Enemy of our human nature”] would have us forget parts of our story and leave things out, would have us “clean up” these stories “just the way the nurses had.”  We all have developed different ways of “cleaning up” these stories.  Our wider culture, for example, cleans up Easter with bunnies, Christmas with trees and wrapping paper, and the Feast of the Ascension by ignoring it altogether.   Personally I can “clean up” these stories by burying myself in books and “theologizing,” which – while not without benefit – yet can be a way of keeping these stories at arm’s length.  And as Anderson points out, the more we tell these ersatz stories, the more we forget the real story:  “You get your story and you hold onto it, and every time you tell it you forget more.”

A colleague tells me that in his own Confirmation class years ago, a classmate asked, “Are the stories in the Bible true?”  “They’re all true,” answered the priest, “and some of them even happened.”  I have a hunch that, deep-down, we know these stories to be true:  Christmas, Easter, Ascension, all the Bible stories.  We might “clean them up;” and we all have different ways in which we “clean them up.”  But were we to search within, my sense is we know these stories are true.  

I am going to be so bold as to say why we clean these stories up:  We clean these stories up because we find it difficult to face how much God has forgiven us, and perhaps especially how much God loves us.  Deep within each of us there is an Adam or an Eve who, as they hid from God in the Garden of Eden, so do we out of shame want to hide from God.  So we clean these Bible stories up.  And the more we tell our half-true, half-complete stories, the more we forget the full one, the one that truly has the power to heal.

Every year, to make sure we don’t leave something out, we celebrate Christmas.  Every year, in order that we don’t “clean up ”our story, we celebrate Easter.  And every Sunday, to make sure we don’t “forget our story even more,” we recite the Creed and there are reminded of what is true: “He became incarnate from the Virgin Mary…  On the third day he rose again… He ascended into heaven.”  

I will leave us with a quote from Dorothy Allison:  “Two or three things I know for sure,” Allison wrote, “and one of them is that telling the story all the way through is an act of love.”  Celebrating Easter – making sure we tell this story all the way through – is an act of love.  Celebrating the Eucharist, and by it telling the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection, is an act of love.  Reciting the Creed, as we do every Sunday, is an act of love.  I wonder, if by celebrating Easter, if by regularly celebrating the Eucharist, if by our weekly recitation of the Creed, [I wonder if] our acts of love might bit by bit help us to set aside the deep and ancient shame that leads us to hide from God, and if we might then more fully accept God’s forgiveness and love for us?  I invite us to try.  For here the stories we tell are true.  We lovingly tell them all the way through,leaving nothing out.  And – faithfully telling these stories week by week – we open ourselves to fully remembering,and knowing in a felt, interior way, how much God has forgiven us and how much God loves us.