Life Inside a Tomb

IT IS HARD to tell time from inside a tomb. We cannot know how many minutes or hours Jesus’ resurrection took. Traditionally, he was in the tomb for three days. But how long does it really take for someone to rise—or be raised—from the dead?

Some resurrections start at a mundane moment. Dorothy Day, for example, was sitting at the kitchen table in a crowded apartment in New York’s East Village (writing a never-to-be published novel) when the French Catholic theologian Peter Maurin knocked on the door. “It was a long time before I really knew what Peter was talking about that first day,” wrote Day, who went on to found the Catholic Worker movement with Maurin. “But he did make three points I thought I understood: founding a newspaper for clarification of thought, starting houses of hospitality, and organizing farming communes. I did not really think then of the latter two as having anything to do with me, but I did know about newspapers.”

Some resurrections come through brutal suffering. Twenty-four-year-old Recy Taylor was left for dead in 1944 on a dark road near Abbeville, Ala., by the six white men who kidnapped and raped her as she walked home from a prayer meeting at Rock Hill Holiness Church. “A few days later, a telephone rang at the NAACP branch office in Montgomery,” wrote historian Danielle L. McGuire in At the Dark End of the Street. The president of the local branch promised to send his “best investigator” to speak with Recy Taylor. The investigator’s name was Rosa Parks. As part of Park’s organizing work on Taylor’s case, she formed what would become the Montgomery Improvement Association, the leaders responsible for instigating the bus boycott a decade later, an opening salvo of the civil rights movement.

Closer to home, I can testify to another kind of resurrection. One family has owned a decaying, 100-year-old apartment building on my block for much of its history. They have deferred maintenance for about half that time. Seven years ago, the 50 or so low-income tenants living there were about to be forced out—until they began to organize. They rallied neighbors to help them hold the owners accountable for the deplorable living conditions—which include pervasive mold; infestations of bed bugs, rats, and roaches; and a dangerously neglected boiler system.

Felipa Arias, the co-president of the tenants’ association, has lived in the building for more than 20 years. Arias’ husband pastors a small church, and she cleans office buildings. “Since most of us are low-income people, we can’t afford to buy condominiums or go somewhere else,” she said. “So all we can do is look for help and continue fighting.” Recently, the tenants won a legal case against the owners, who may be forced to rehabilitate the building and provide safe and clean housing for the tenants whose rent they have meticulously collected. Affordable housing may come back to life on one corner in rapidly gentrifying Washington, D.C.—and a resurgent community has been born between tenants and neighbors. Small resurrections.

When one is inside the tomb, it is hard to tell how long you have been in or when the stone might be rolled away. The tomb of dehumanization, distortion, and domination is holding many of us now. If resurrection happens over time and if one learns it by example (as Christianity implies), then stay alert. Listen sharply for the many sounds of scraping stones. Like the disciples (Mark 9:10), question among yourselves what this “rising again from the dead” could mean.