“Be Not Afraid.”

 At our church’s Easter service yesterday, one of the traditional scriptural readings told the story of Mary of Magdala and Mary, Jesus’s mother, learning about Jesus’s resurrection and finding his tomb empty (Matthew 28: 1-10). The angel, or God, or young man (depending on the translation—maybe they’re all the same thing) says, “Do not be afraid.”

Angels are always saying "Be not afraid" in the Bible. In all the instances I can think of when an angel says, “Be not afraid,” there is good reason for fear: the angel who appears to the shepherds before Jesus’s birth says it; an angel says that to Mary the mother of Jesus before telling her that even though she’s a virgin and engaged, God’s going to make her pregnant (whoa); this angel says it….

I searched “Be not afraid” on Bible Gateway and came up with 26 examples throughout the Old and New Testaments. (Some translations have “Don’t be afraid.” These translations use more vernacular English, but I find the elevated poetic language of the King James version more appropriate: the angel probably wasn’t speaking English, so it’s not a direct quotation anyway, and I’m guessing angels are poetic.)

At brunch after the service, a friend said to me, “If an angel ever tells me not to be afraid, I’m getting the hell out of there.”

Saturday afternoon, Easter eve for Ann and me, we participated in a Jewish Seder at our friend Ellen’s home. At this Passover celebration, we shared the Haggadah, remembering the Jews’ exodus from slavery in Egypt and the story’s relevance today. I was struck by the similarities between the Easter story and the Haggadah: both stories’ themes of rebirth and renewal; the call to move through bitterness, death and loss to a new way of living; the courage required to “shed the familiar” as Marge Piercy’s poem “Maggid” (in this Haggadah) describes. 

The exodus from Egypt must have taken great courage: claiming life instead of slavery of body and spirit. You guessed it: Moses says, “Be not afraid” at least twice in Exodus. (Exodus 14:13 and Exodus 20:20  -- Interestingly,  Moses never appears in the Haggadah.)

It amuses me that Easter fell on April Fool’s Day this year, and that seems to have amused our minister Ann as well, who referred to Jesus as a “trickster.” To me, the term “trickster” seems lighter, less distant, and therefore less frightening than, say, “Redeemer.” I would guess she intended for the word to make me think of mythological tricksters who appear in many cultures’ stories, and I did think of Native American tricksters and learned about tricksters of many other cultures, on—yes—Wikipedia. 

I looked first to Wikipedia for reminders about tricksters, and though the site gets a bad rap from academics, I found the entry complex and interesting. The resources and references are particularky extensive and helpful.The site notes that in Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (1998) also re-published with the alternate subtitle: How Disruptive Imagination Creates Culture in 2008, Lewis Hyde describes tricksters as “boundary crossers.” (I’d say crossing from death to life and from Egypt to The Promised Land both count as crossing boundaries.) The site continues by quoting Paul Mattick’s February 15, 1998 review of "Hotfoots of the Gods" in the New York Times: “Tricksters ‘...violate principles of social and natural order, playfully disrupting normal life and then re-establishing it on a new basis.’” I don’t know that either Moses or Jesus was “playful”, but otherwise the description fits.

         For me, that move from one life and way of being to another emerges from the Exodus and Resurrection stories. It’s a move like the move from winter to spring, from darkness to light, from cold to warmth, from slavery to freedom, from death to life.

         That move requires going through the darkness and the fear. Through the loss. First into it. Then through it. Not around it. I see no other way. The move requires courage. It requires moving from the known to the unknown. Maybe it’s like birth.

That move makes me think of my own moves. My passages required me to move from my vision of myself as a straight wife to a lesbian, from life as an athlete to life as a disabled person, from an independent woman to one depending on “the kindness of strangers” (and family and friends. And especially my partner Ann.)

         As Stanley Kunitz says in his poem “The Layers”, I have lived through many lives, some of them my own…I am not done with my changes.” I don’t know how we keep living new lives without fear and courage. I don’t know how else we go through our changes other than diving (or falling) deep into the swirl.

         So I lift this proverbial glass to change and discovery, to old lives and new ones, to Moses and Jesus and the Native American crow, to birth. Thus, I guess I lift my glass (reluctantly at best, to be honest) to loss and death and disease, to depression and meanness and sorrow, as Rumi calls me to in his poem “The Guest House”. (This poem pisses off most people I know.)

         I reluctantly see that Rumi calls me to welcome brain tumors and addictions. Loss, and death, and disease. Depression and heart break. And so forth. He calls me into joy and misery and the joys and miseries of everyone I love.

In this bold moment, I toast, “L’Chaim”…to life. All of it. Unless… Except…