Resturrected
Raphael: Resurrection of Jesus Christ (1502)
" … already arrived and on the path intended …"
©2022 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved
Perhaps the gravest error when Reconning lies in the usually innocent attempts to plot courses to the past. We know the past much better than we know our future, so it seems a smaller stretch of imagination to project that rather than to muster fresh visions, but resurrecting's no less speculative and much more dangerous. This universe, for better or for worse, runs exclusively forward, from past toward future, and any attempt to reverse this sequence should properly create serious consequences, however unintended. That a major world religion was predicated upon resurrection seems curious if also telling, for Jesus' great works all came before the resurrecting rather than after. After, he managed an ascension, which I guess amounted to another separation, with promises, of course, but he seemed just as gone after ascension as he seemed just after crucifixion, leaving an observer to wonder what resurrection accomplished other than to confuse a question. After ascension, the legend remained, plenty powerful and present, same as just after he first departed.
I suppose I speak heresy or disclose my lack of biblical literacy, but on this Easter morning, I find myself considering another sort of celebration than one focusing upon defeating death with resurrection. I'll call this one Resturrection, for it above all else reveres the resting property of prior passage. I imagine that death brings a kind of balance, an end to survival's struggling, and as such might not necessarily welcome a reintroduction of the essential dilemmas inherent in life support. Resturrection focuses its energy upon continuing the legend, upon retelling the stories rather than attempting to create any new ones again. My Darling Daughter Heidi is now dead and gone, but her memory and her influence continues to carry on. I can Resturrect her at any time. In that way she's now immune to distance, proximity, and disease, which seems plenty close enough to in heaven as this grieving father needs.
I need nobody to turn back any clocks this morning. I was waiting for the sunrise, not a reset. Sure, those past times were great and almost tragically under appreciated, for we never seem to successfully anticipate the absences following any experience. And God, or somebody, please bless us this innocence, for we might not ever experience any moment without that essential inattention to its presence. We should not have been meta to any of it then, but immersed and therefore not in any way objectively or completely observing. More than half of every original observation seems destined to be experienced in reflection, anyway, after the experience has ended and without any promise of resurrection. In this sense, rebirthing, resurrecting, seems certain only to take something away from the primary experience to create an inevitably disappointing reunion of sorts. Remembering back resurrects nothing except an abiding sense that one must have missed something the first time through. Nobody ever misses nothing and nothing recreates any past.
I ache to let my previous lives rest. I do not care to resurrect any of any of them, however sweet they seemed then or however reformable they might appear now that 20/20 hindsight's clicked into gear. I struggle enough to live forward without trying to find this gearshift's reverse. I ache to experience whatever's next and not to seem too awfully heartless about any of this, I ache to feel more present. If my past has tried to teach me anything, it's struggled to encourage me to focus, to not gaze off toward some not yet present horizon's promise nor to space out failing to relive some prior disappointment's betrayal, but to inhabit each fresh morning, each dawning with promise all its own, not really needing to re-own anything already lost or pre-own anything emerging, but just as it is. Just as it is seems promise enough if I could just manage to focus my attention upon it.
The Reconning one never considers seems to be the one already possessed and eager for recognition. If I could see through my vanity over my past and my insanity over my future, I might one day find myself already arrived and on the path intended, Resturrected.