"Commit your fate to Yahweh; trust in God and God will act; making your virtue clear as the light; your integrity as bright as noon," Psalm 37 prays.

It is a lesson designed to make long nights short, and days hard as cement soft around the edges. If God does bring an end to darkness, then the darkness is bearable. If God does turn our little ignominies into virtues, then no cost is too high, no effort is too much, no discipline is too demanding. The problem is that we do not always see God act, at least not in ways that we understand or want. So, we are inclined to crawl into the tombs of our failures and waste away. It is just then that the resurrection becomes most real in our lives.

It is just then that we can see, if we will only look, that tombs are meant for emptying. The temptation, of course, is the same for us as it was for the women in the garden: to give ourselves over to tending our tombs rather than to expect to find new life there.

In every life something good fails, something great ends, something righteous is taken unjustly away, something looms like an abandonment by God and is counted as abandonment by God and is felt like abandonment by God. But that is exactly when we must remember the Jesus of the Cross who rose from the dead as sign to us that every little death died for some good reason is life become new all over again. Everyone rises over and over again in anticipation of that moment when the last resurrection comes and the light never dims again.

The Jesus of the Resurrection stands as stark, illumined sign that life is a process of dying and rising that someday will bring us all to wholeness, if we only allow it.

—Reflection from “Mary of Nazareth,” an eCourse by Joan Chittister, available on the Monasteries of the Heart website. Click here. (You must be logged in at Monasteries of the Heart to access. To create a free account, click here.)