All his life Bill Kerr struggled to believe, the way a man pushing a two-ton boulder up a hill with his forehead struggles: push as hard as you can until either the boulder moves or your head breaks. After forty years of bandaging up a bloody forehead without much belief to show for it, a person gets pretty depressed.
Sometimes resurrection happens, and the boulder flies away. I wonder if we're capable of knowing what it felt like for Jesus to lie dead in the tomb for two days before he rose from the dead. Sometimes I think we can, just a little bit, like the way we notice parts of ourselves when they come back, parts that we didn't remember existed - the way the desire to practice guitar scales suddenly shows up after two years of all musical ambition dustily lying dormant in the personality attic, filed "irrelevant part, probably hubris." Moments in life actually do take on meaning we wouldn't have imagined possible or imagined at all; picking random notes on the guitar along to a Sufjan CD alone in the bedroom at one in the morning all of a sudden is not just a distraction from the depression that miraculously gets displaced from a room when Jesus walks into it.
I don't think Bill Kerr could have expected the way Jesus was going to walk into his hotel room that night any more than the futile boulder-pusher expects to make it to the top. I'm not sure why he decided not to booze himself into oblivion at the bar that business-trip night, or why he didn't space himself out to sleep in front of the catatonic channel-surf available to him in his four-star television set. Sometimes, like that night, resurrection happens in the form of a blue (or was it brown? the details didn't matter) Gideon Bible that appeared in his hand. What he actually read that night he does not remember, but what he remembers is the way Jesus walked into the room and told him that he would never be alone again.
I was once in the presence of a wisely old Philippino man when he said, "If the God you believe in does not set you free, then it is not the real God." If you'd been there slumped against the mahogany booth of the restaurant that night listening as I was to the hotel room story, there would be no doubt in your mind that Bill Kerr was free. Correction: that Bill Kerr was set free, by a very real God, the same God who was sitting next to us in the booth as Bill looked over at me with that amazed shake of his head and breathed, "I'm so in love." Somewhere in the eighteen inches of space between Bill's face and mine, somewhere moving in the eighteen inches of space between the crown and the chest where the Spirit descends from head to heart as the Easter Orthodox chant
Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner
Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner
Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner
as many times as it takes, as much time as the Spirit takes to make his space, as God prepares a place to make himself known
in our hearts as in our words, Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner
Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, help me say it enough until it starts to make sense
Lord Jesus Christ, son of God who lives in me now, have mercy on my unbelief
Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me a sinner, who is a sinner . . .
Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me a sinner, because I need it
Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me a sinner, because you can
Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, I am a sinner, but you are merciful
Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, you show up.
The Eastern Orthodox wise men who use their minds to pray this prayer until it reaches their hearts know, as I am learning to know, that our position before God is that of beggar. We need Jesus, and we need to ask him to come. And the miracle is that when we hold out our hands to receive him, his body and blood are there too.
One time Bill was kneeling in church for prayer, distracted by the long chestnut locks of the woman in front of him. The hair, and the woman, were beautiful, yes, but it was the deadness of the hair that distracted him. It was all dead, all the length of the hair and each strand and each head that every strand of hair in the entire chapel was attached to. Each person was dead, filling the sanctuary with a congregation of corpses, come to kneel before a sleeping God.
Then something happened. These rows of dead men began to stand, and walk forward, and hold out their hands as though in sleepwalking prayer - except that something happened to them somewhere between walking forward and walking back. Something happened, and the corpses were alive now, and they were not corpses at all. The living God, in the shape of starchy wafers and germ-tipped wine, entered them. They walked back awake into their rows with his fragrance on their lips, breathing God all over Bill's tired face. Jesus sat next to Bill in his pew and told him that he would never be alone again in a room full of dead bodies. That if he ever walked into a tomb, it would be empty.
Somewhere mixed in forty-five minutes of story coming out of Bill's mouth in the restaurant, sometime between the beginning of the sentence explaining how the Eastern brothers think of "the Jesus prayer" and Bill saying "have mercy on this sinner," Jesus happened. Energy flooded me to remember all the ways in twenty-one years he's shown up to a depressed consciousness and touched spirit to body like the birth of a new song. And that's all I know about it: that I can remember Jesus, that I know what it looked like when he resurrected, that I can recognize him when he does it again, and that I want to watch resurrection for the rest of my life. I keep being surprised to find out that he is making new life happen all around me when I don't expect it. Or perhaps I tend to wait for life sullenly like Mary Magdalene sitting by the grave before she recognizes that the gardener actually is the Lord. Either way: Jesus shows up, and I find myself resurrected. This sinner better believe it: it sounds like mercy.