The Garden at the Tomb
In the book Faces of Jesus, Frederick Buechner said that “Over two thousand Easters have taken place since the women visited the empty tomb—two thousand years’ worth of people proclaiming that the tomb was empty and the dead Christ alive among people to heal, to sustain, to transform. But if we are to believe in his resurrection in a way that really matters, we must somehow see him for ourselves. And whenever we have so believed in his resurrection, it is because in some sense we have seen him. It is not his absence from the empty tomb that convinces us but the shadow, at least the shadow, of his presence in our lives.”
Cooking fish by the sea
“The Resurrection is no metaphor; it is the power of God…Jesus alive and at large in the world not as some shimmering ideal of human goodness or the achieving power of hopeful thought but the very power of life itself.”
At our Shrine Mont retreat with Christ Church, Spotsylvania, we sought our Resurrected Lord as we went with the disciples to find our Risen Lord in the garden, by the sea, along the road, in the breaking of the bread, and in the gift of the Holy Spirit. In order to do this, we re-created the following stories and found ourselves in the stories; with Mary in the garden on Easter morning; with the disciples having breakfast with Jesus by the Sea of Galilee; with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus;and at the commissioning of the disciples on the mountain. We imagined what it would have been like to be present for the Ascension, and finally, we experienced a hint of Pentecost.
Walking the Road to Emmaus
Carl Jung said that “Bidden or unbidden, God is present.” Jesus said that “Where two or three are gathered together, there I am in the midst of them.” So during our time together at Shrine Mont, we sought the Risen Lord, not only in the stories we heard, but here there among us, in our very midst.
Here is the gallery with the Stations of the Resurrection described above and other pictures of the retreat – eating, playing games, hiking to the cross on the mountain, watching the sunrise and worship.