As if to confirm this message for me, while writing this chapter on a lovely
fall day in New Mexico, I heard the trumpeting and “shouting” of sandhill
cranes immediately above my little house. I went outside to witness a gyre of
maybe fifty elegant birds circling in the thermals of the clear blue sky above me.
It was almost like they had stopped on their journey south along the Rio Grande
just to rejoice for a while—circling again and again, shouting encouragement to
one another and to me. What jubilant noise! After a full twenty minutes of pure
celebration, they reassembled into the V formations of their journey,
determined to move on and yet clearly in no rush at all, each “announcing your
place in the family of things,” as Mary Oliver so beautifully puts it in her poem,
“Wild Geese.”*15
I hope many others saw what I saw, enjoyed what I have enjoyed so often,
and received what I received. Resurrection is contagious, and free for the
taking. It is everywhere visible and available for those who have learned how to
see, how to rejoice, and how to neither hoard nor limit God’s ubiquitous gift.
*1 See Matthew 8:11, 22:2ff.; Luke 13:29, 14:15ff.; and Revelation 19:9. All those passages draw
on the source texts of Isaiah 25:6–12 and 55:1–5.
*2 John Dominic Crossan, How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (New York:
HarperCollins, 2018). Here this same point is made in a much more detailed and scholarly
fashion than I can.
*3 Walt Whitman, “A child said, What is the grass,” in Song of Myself, 6.
*4 Michael Dowd, Thank God for Evolution (New York: Viking, 2007), 118ff. A really
brilliant, life-changing book.
*5 John Dominic Crossan and Sara Sexton Crossan, Resurrecting Easter: How the West Lost
and the East Kept the Original Easter Vision (New York: Harper One) 45–59.
*6 Maximus the Confessor, Greek Fathers 90.621.A.
*7 Gregory Palamas, The Triads. Translation by Nicholas Gendle. Edited and with an
introduction by John Meyendorff (New York: Paulist Press, 1983).
*8 Athanasius, On the Incarnation 8, trans. Oliver Clement, The Roots of Christian Mysticism
(New York: New City Press, 1995), 263.
*9 Jon Sweeney, Inventing Hell (New York: Jericho Books, 2014).
*10 Benedict XVI, The Faith (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 2013), chapter 10.
*11 Hilarion Alfeyev, Christ the Conqueror of Hell (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press,
2009).