Resurrection Resilience
“After the Sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb...”
Clara Copeland and I spent time talking in the early 1980’s when she was in her early 90’s and I was in my early 30’s. As associate minister at First UMC in Huntsville, I had a stack of 3 x 5 cards with the names of shut-ins that I visited every six weeks or so.
Clara was always at home...sometimes found on the ladder in the backyard picking figs from the ladened tree...that became as good of fig preserves as I’ve ever had.
Clara lived in a sturdy white bungalow on Holmes Street. In fact, she and her plumber husband Ollie Copeland – she always referred to him with both names – had moved into the house in the 1920’s. Such and more came out in our conversations, which began with her being polite to the young preacher dutifully checking off his cards, and ripened into a delightful friendship that has blessed me since.
Here’s why I woke up with Clara on my mind and heart yesterday. Clara was a young nurse during the 1918-19 flu pandemic. As matter of factly as one could, she recounted her experience in Tuscumbia, where she recalled coffins lined up three high at the train station being loaded and unloaded.
Three doctors nurse Clara worked alongside succumbed to the flu. Though humor is sparse in this, her experience came out related to raw garlic. One day, when I knocked, she cracked the door. “I have a cold, don’t think I am contagious, but you might not want to come in, because of the garlic.”
For Clara, I discovered chewing raw garlic was both a preventative and curative medicine. I am glad I went in because in the pungent fragrant conversation, her memories of the epidemic came out.
She shrugged, “No way to be sure, but I think chewing raw garlic may have been what helped me survive. I don’t know but I just took care of people day and night chewing it. You did what you had to do.” There was understated emotion in her quiet voice and in-your-face gaze.
In our conversations, I learned more about this person of simple, but a zillion miles from simplistic, faith. You do what you have to do.
Clara told how she and Ollie Copeland worked hard together to hold on to their house during the Depression. My memory is there were no children. She mused with a trace of a smile: “Ollie Copeland worked long days. Sometimes he got paid and sometimes he didn’t. ‘People need their plumbing fixed whether they can pay or not,’ he said.”
Paired with those words, Clara continued: “Ollie Copeland always had a clean bed, clothes, and house. Ollie Copeland always had good food I cooked for us.”
Understand, these words expressed a proud parity. Clara a great servant person was subservient to no one! He did what he had to do and she did what she had to do. You may know the difference between a get-to privilege and a got-to drudge approach to life: Clara and Ollie had a get-to life together.
Perhaps, our most tender conversation, looking at me but seeing someone else, Clara relived a day, “One day, Ollie Copeland walked downtown to pay bills. They came to the door. Said Ollie Copeland had fallen out on the sidewalk. Said Ollie Copeland was gone.... For over fifty years, Ollie Copeland worked hard and Ollie Copeland had a clean bed, clothes, and house. And I cooked good food for us. You do what you have to do.”
The Easter story begins with resolute women going to a tomb. Best we know, the ‘brave’ men had taken flight. Eventually, as the reality got out that when all good sense said Jesus was a dead and gone dreamer, people began to experience his presence more not less than before. Those who ran away experienced something that gave them the courage to come back and go on.
If we think it went from dark Friday to bright Sunday happy ever after, we need to actually read the New Testament and accounts of early Christianity.
It was a couple centuries before it was safe for Christians to gather in big numbers. A lot of people resisted a God who loves others and even us so much more than we want to love and be loved.
Resurrected Jesus is present and powerful among us in the dappled mix of ongoing dark and light that comprise God’s gift of life. Occasionally, we soar.
More often, resurrection power is doing what we can do for one another. Sooner or later we realize that we can actually go on, stammering and stumbling perhaps, by strength beyond our own. Resurrecting and amazing grace.
*****
PS: Let’s try chewing on garlic. That may motivate others to keep a safe distance from us.