Come Out!
Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Then Jesus looked upward and said, “Father, I thank you for having heard me… When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” (John 11. 39-43)
THE REEDS and the grasses on marsh and hill, they are they who remember.
Stones will be rolled into sand, dragged to the sea. But the reeds dance and the grasses keep whispering, passing down, generation to generation, the stories, the names: Lazarus whom God will call out from his tomb, Mary rebellious child of the poor, Martha home-maker in the mud and the dust.
The reeds and the grasses, they’ve no desire to recall the rich or the powerful, who never took off their sandals to quench their feet in nature’s holy sustenance, or turned to her for refuge in the dark night of the soul, who have never joined her to sing in praise of the One who Is.
The rich and the powerful have left their own grand scars on the landscape, made of stone or iron and, latterly, of neon might. But the reeds and the grasses, they call out the names of martyrs and heroines of a wholly other kind. This is a kind who will give away their lives to receive Life. This is a kind who will die to the self, be cocooned and bound in the darkest tomb of self doubt, four days, four nights, or even for years and years.
They are not rock gods or celebrity gurus, they do not make a sound in the big-noise places. They are a simple kind, mortal, fallible, vulnerable and, most often, wounded. These are the ones remembered by the reeds and the grasses on marsh and hill. Theirs are the stories passed on by the flowers and the wind. They are the ones who hear from their cocoon in their tomb the voice of God calling their name, “Take away the stone, child. It’s time for you to come out into the Light.”
The reeds and the grasses on marsh and hill, they are they who remember the stories of the names of the names written on God’s Hand and in the Wind.
Tonnau Duw ('God's waves') Fr Tim Ardouin 