What’s your takeaway from Holy Week and Easter? For me, it’s a growing awareness of my smallness. Remember the movie, “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids”? The Spirit is shrinking me.
Aging, retirement, declining energy… they’re shrinking me. Yesterday I taught a class at the Sem and led a tour, which is what “president emeritus” means, you ain’t what you used to be. And watching the news, reading the papers, scrolling my iPad, the world is back to being itself, it’s all so self-centered, so vain. This world is charging on without me. No need to read Ecclesiastes, I’m feeling it.
It’s my own version of a common experience. How many middle age, career stunted people, how many who feel they’ve failed in love and life, how many aged confined to a chair or bed despair? How many young people have more despair than hope? Peggy Lee sang about years ago. “And when that final moment comes and I’m breathing my last breath, I’ll be saying to myself, ‘Is that all there is?’”
Holy Week and Easter are teaching me to enjoy being little. The world has moved on, and in many ways organized religion has too. Let them go. “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). As I’m convicted of my own smallness in the scheme of things, Jesus Christ becomes a greater and greater mystery who more and more commands my thoughts and devotion. He didn’t just die and rise. He is the cosmic Christ. “The Lord make His face to shine upon you.” His face is upon little me, upon little you, but it’s hard to experience that when you’re full of yourself.