The Stone Is Rolled Away. Now What?
Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb. (John 20:1)
She comes before she knows what she is coming to find. Before the angels. Before the explanation. Before faith has found its language. She comes with her body – her feet that knew the way, her hands that had held spices since Friday – and she comes in the dark.
This is where we are, the morning after Easter. The stone is rolled away. Something has happened that has no precedent. And the body – yours, mine, the Body of Christ – is standing at the entrance to something it doesn’t yet have words for.
It can see. It just doesn’t yet know how to see.
The Fifty Days Nobody Talks About
We speak of forty days of Lent. Fewer of us speak of the fifty days of Easter.
And yet here they are – seven full weeks from the empty tomb to the fire of Pentecost – and the Church has always known that resurrection is not an event you simply receive and walk home from. It is something you grow into. Something that takes time to inhabit. Something that, if we are honest, the body needs to learn.
Look at the disciples. They receive the Risen Christ through locked doors, and they are still hiding a week later when Thomas finally gets his turn. The two on the road to Emmaus walk with Jesus for hours without recognising him. Mary mistakes him for the gardener. Peter goes back to fishing. Nobody – not one of them – moves smoothly from the empty tomb to confident resurrection faith. They all need time. They all need the encounter to come again and again, through different doors, in different forms, until something in them finally opens and receives it.
What if fifty days is not a liturgical formality?
What if it is exactly as long as it takes?
We Were Born to Recognise
There is something in the body that already knows. Before the mind has caught up, before faith has found its footing – something in us responds. A burning in the chest on the road. Knees that want to bend before we have decided to kneel. Eyes that fill before we understand why.
We were made for this. The capacity to recognise the Holy One is not something we acquire – it is something we recover. Something that was placed in us at the beginning and that a lifetime of noise, of shame, of mismanaged encounters, has slowly covered over.
The Easter season, I want to suggest, is the season of that recovery.
Not a programme of spiritual improvement. Not fifty days of trying harder to believe. But a slow, gentle, bodily attunement – sense by sense, Sunday by Sunday – to what was always already present, waiting to be received.
An Ancient Rite, A New Journey
Hidden within the Church’s initiation rites is a blessing so beautiful and so precise it calls for receiving it over and over again.
The newly baptised – those who have just passed through the water, who are still dripping with the paschal mystery – are signed with the cross, sense by sense. On the ears, that they may hear the voice of the Lord. On the eyes, that they may see the glory of God. On the lips, that they may respond to the Word. On the heart, that Christ may dwell there. On the shoulders, the hands, the feet – each one consecrated, each one turned toward something.
It is the body being taught, gently, what it was made for.
This Easter, we are going to walk that rite. Seven Sundays, seven senses, from the locked room where Thomas stands with his questions to the upper room where the wind comes through and changes everything. Not as a programme to complete, but as a journey to make – with our whole selves, in our whole bodies, in whatever bathtubs and kitchens and ordinary spaces God finds us in.
Because that is precisely where God tends to arrive.
The Thread Running Underneath
Alongside the Sunday journey, there is a second thread – a quieter one, for those who want to go deeper.
In Dust to Grace this season, we follow Joseph. Not the triumph of the palace, but the moment just before it: a man in a pit, in a prison, looking back at the wreckage of his dreams from the inside of their apparent failure. A man whose body has been the site of betrayal – sold, handled, accused, forgotten – learning, slowly, to trust what he still carries.
The senses Joseph has to recover. The dream that will not die. The God who was there in the pit all along.
These two journeys – the Sunday community learning to recognise the Risen Christ, and Joseph in the dark learning to trust what his body already knows – will run together through these fifty days. You don’t need to follow both. But if you find yourself somewhere in the middle of your own pit, wondering whether the dream still holds – there will be something here for you too.
What’s Coming
Beginning this Sunday – the 12th of April, the Second Sunday of Easter, the Sunday of Thomas and the locked doors – we begin.
Seven weeks. Seven senses. One body, learning what it was born to do.
Receive the sign of the cross on your ears, that you may hear the voice of the Lord.
We begin with the ears. We begin with Thomas. We begin with the question he had the courage to ask out loud, while the rest of the room stayed silent.
Unless I hear. Unless I touch. Unless I know for myself.
That is not a failure of faith. That is a body insisting on its right to real encounter. And Jesus, when he comes back through the locked door, does not rebuke it. He offers his wounds. He says: here. touch. know.
The encounter is real. The body is the site of it.
The Sunday Toolkit resources for each week of Born to Recognise – biblical background, Sunday experience, and prayers of the faithful – will be published here on Full-of-Grace throughout the Easter season.
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Sacred & Scattered
Delivered with love. Occasionally with sass.
