That Easter Magic
April 21, 2019
I took the kids to a magic show in February. It was a fundraiser for the schools. This one illusion sticks out for me from that show.
A contraption that looked like the lunar lander is rolled on stage. The magician stuffs himself inside it with the help of his assistant and is locked behind glass. The magician sticks his hand out of this little hole in the front of the glass and they cover up the lunar lander with a sheet. The assistant puts one end of the sheet into the magician’s hand and then she backs up about 8 feet. She holds the sheet up so she’s behind it and when the sheet is brought down a second later, the magician is now holding the sheet OUTSIDE of the lunar lander. Then the lunar lander COLLAPSES. And the spot light shines on the assistant walking down the middle of the aisle.
The audience was very quiet and then the room exploded. People whistled, shouted, clapped, one woman behind me yelled out in shock. The kids and I just looked at each other in wonder. I’ve been thinking a lot about wonder ever since.
When we’re little, wonder and awe seem to be our constant companions. We make the same noise over and over just to hear it. Stand on the shore of a lake and throw rocks in it for hours. Now as adults, we don’t really do those things. We take photos of our kids doing those things, but we’re a step removed from the wonder.
When we celebrated Eve’s first birthday, we sat her in her highchair outside and gave her the first cupcake of her life. She reached out and touched it and tasted it tentatively. Then she grabbed it and stuffed it in her face. I remember how her eyes lit up and looked at Kate and I as if to say, “YOU HAVE THIS HERE, TOO?! YOU’VE BEEN HOLDING OUT ON ME! THIS IS AMAZING!”
Yet now, as an adult, I feel more insulated from wonder. Wonder and awe are rarer in my life. Magician and author Nate Staniforth writes, “It’s easy to go through a day without ever really waking up— to look without seeing, to listen without hearing, to live in the story you tell yourself about the world rather than the world itself. It sounds obvious when I say it but this is just because it’s so common. We assume an overfamiliarity with the world around us that maybe makes it easier to live from day to day but harder to see things as they are.”[1]
Maybe that’s you, too. Maybe you’re in a career that’s what you used to dream about and write about in your “What I Want to Be When I grow up…” essays but it’s now eating at your soul or you’re counting down the years to retirement. Maybe you feel like you’ve seen it all and now your friends are dying and all you can think about is your mortality and the “good old days.” Maybe your schedule is so stuffed that there’s no time for awe. Maybe you go to class, then debate team and then to track and then work until 11 then homework to 1 and then you wake up and head back to class again only to have our parents wonder why we sleep past noon on the weekends.
Right after the applause died down at the magic show and the magician went onto his next trick, I don’t even remember what it was because my mind immediately tried to dissect what I just saw. It was really a matter of angles and timing. Maybe the hand waving from the curtain was mechanical while the magician shimmied out of a trap door to get behind the curtain. I saw this from the website that the school sent out to promote the event that the assistant had a twin, so the assistant walking down the aisle was the twin, and the other was hidden backstage. I felt safe with that explanation. I felt like that explained everything. That was a rational and reasonable explanation. But why..? Why did I go there? Why did I feel so smug when I had felt so alive moments before?
That moment of joy and awe I shared with my kids was gone. Sam and Eve were still in the thrall of it and talked about it for days to come. When I asked them this past week if they remembered the magic show, they both mentioned this specific illusion independently of one another. Yet here I was… on the hard-packed earth of my certainty. I felt like I figured out the bare bones of the illusion. I long to believe in magic and I had just proved to myself that there is no such thing.
We live in a post-Enlightenment world that’s fact-based. We need evidence. We get mad when our phones don’t work perfectly. We have grown accustomed and numb to the marvels around us, and we resent “magic.” We call it names like “stuff and nonsense” and “wishful thinking.” Yet I believe as Nate Staniforth writes, “It’s not that a modern audience doesn’t want magic. It’s that they want it so badly but have already decided it’s not out there, and dislike being told that maybe they were looking in the wrong place.”[2]
The disciples looked in the wrong place that first Easter Sunday. Mary Magdalene came with a crazy story. “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb!” Simon Peter and the other disciple ran to the tomb and saw, but did not understand. They looked, but did not see. As it is written in verse 8, “He saw and believed.” Believed in his certainty that someone stole the body. Believed that Jesus was still dead, not that he was alive and moving around. And in his certainty that what dies stays dead he returned home not knowing he was looking in the wrong place.
Maybe you feel like today is a big magic trick. An illusion. And you are here because it’s the polite thing to do for your family, to listen to a story that the feeble-minded tell year-after-year to keep believing in magic. I was there as well for a long time; a few years after seminary in fact. Simon Peter didn’t believe either. The disciple whom Jesus loved didn’t believe. Mary Magdalene didn’t believe and thought Jesus was the gardener until he said her name. We don’t believe because maybe we’re looking in the wrong place.
Maybe wondering HOW the resurrection happened is the wrong place to look. Instead of shifting to the logistics, because maybe it’s God’s way of saying, “for all your clever categories, you will never have me or this existence fully figured out. The point isn’t to master and control, but to be in awe of the journey of life.” That’s where the magic is. That Easter magic is somewhere more mundane. A place closer to us. Sure, there are HUGE things in the world that fill us with awe. The photograph of the black hole. The more I look at that picture, the more I’m in awe. The technology it took to get that photo and the coding to piece that picture together through a whole bunch of different satellites is incredible. It’s closer than that.
When we go to the movies, we don’t get mad at the magic there. We don’t get mad that the Avengers aren’t real, we get excited about it. We don’t get mad at Steven Spielberg that the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park weren’t real. We go along for the ride. Hollywood is doing some incredible things these days that were just dreamt about 20 years ago. Now movies can be shot on a phone, edited with an app, and put on Youtube and get a million views or more. It’s amazing what we can do now with movies… but it’s closer than that.
I was looking in the wrong place at the magic show. The magic isn’t the illusion. The magic is the reaction. The illusion is the tool that unlocks the joy, the awe, the wonder. A whole room of people and all the personal stories and what we all carry and we were at our very best; where all the stuff we carry: our personal image, the image we want to convey to the world with how we dress and speak and what brands we wear… all that is gone and we are our unfiltered selves. That’s the magic, and yet… it’s closer than that.
We have gone through a long winter. The flowers have returned. On the trees. The daffodils and crocuses and violets. The hibernating world has awoken yet again and the air is filled with pollen, and heavy with scent and quacking ducks, honking geese, and singing birds. Neighbors are outside more. The magic of creation and the turn of the season is here and we are in the midst of it. One of my first photos I took of our church when I moved here was of flowering dogwoods with our steeple in the background. It’s that close!
Do you see it? Do you see the magic? Or are we taking it for granted? Or looking for it in another place?
The magic of Easter is more than the raising of a dead body, but it’s not less than that. It’s more that the disciples who abandoned, denied, and betrayed him stood in awe and leapt and rejoiced to see their rabbi again. Can you see Mary’s face transform? Mary who was so worried a moment before is transformed! Rabbi! She shouts! She tries to hug him but Jesus tells her not to as she has to tell the rest. Tell them that he isn’t missing and that he’s back.
We would understand if Jesus came back with harsh words. We’d understand if he came back for revenge. We would understand if he came back and scolds and hits and demeans the disciples. Instead, he comes back then and now with the words, “Peace be with you.” He comes back with proof for Thomas. He comes back with love and signs and broken bread on the way to Emmaus. He comes back to restore Peter and forgive his denial. Jesus comes back with a powerful persuasion that seeks to woo our hearts over to the belief that God is good, the universe is kind and rigged in our favor, that we are not alone, that we are surrounded by God’s spirit and our neighbors, each of whom bears the image of God, each of whom is a gift from God to us. Can you see that magic? The resurrection is the tool to unlock that sense of joy. For God to say, “I will not force you to join the kingdom, it’s your choice. I will try to persuade you into it. I will try to love you into this way of life.”
The Easter magic is the first 300 years, the church persisted through all threats and murders. Of an Empire trying to literally feed the movement to the lions and those first men, women and children singing their faith as they faced down death. That old Easter Magic is that we’re still telling this story and we still don’t quite know what to make of it some 2,000 years later. It still blows our minds and our neat categories right out of the water. We have gathered together as a church in Medina for 200 years and we are still in awe. There’s the Easter magic. That we are gathered here, young and old, new visitors and long-time members, people from different economic levels, strangers, friends and family, we are here and it is now.
There is magic in our midst. The magic that we share this life together. That creation is singing resurrection and new life. Don’t take it for granted. This afternoon, long after our last hymn is sung, take some time away from the screen. Turn to a flowering tree, or shrub, or a flower that has just pushed itself out of the dirt and marvel at it. It’s never been about the flower.. it’s all a gift. This whole thing… This WHOLE thing… As it was in the beginning, is now, and forever shall be… has been about you. And us. And this universe. It’s all a gift. Amen.
Works Cited
Staniforth, Nate, Here is Real Magic: A magician’s search for wonder in the modern world. Bloomsbury USA, New York, NY; 2018.
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