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THE TELLING OF THE RESURRECTION
I subscribe to a writing organization whose aim is to encourage members to write about memories that might otherwise not be shared with family or friends. One week the suggested topic was to describe what your mother was like when you were a child. After I’d written down three things, I decided to ask my two sisters to text me their answers to that question. Of the nine descriptors, only one appeared on all three lists: Mum’s love of singing. Others were listening to classical music, dancing around the kitchen when she cooked, and her willingness to partner with our dad in making some of his schemes come to life. Taken as a whole, we wrote about her kindness, how she made almost all her daughters’ clothes, pasteurizing milk from a local farm. Her willingness to forgive and forget and to laugh at herself.
I wasn’t surprised by any of the answers because they were my memories, too. But as our text messaging continued, I realized that the details of exactly what we remembered weren’t. Once, when I was a teen, Daddy convinced Mom to fashion a plastic swimming pool cover in an effort to extend our Western Pennsylvania’s September swimming season. Once in place, Daddy turned the cover into a “pool house,” keeping it air-filled with an industrial blower. I remembered that it sorta worked. But I’d forgotten how after the first thunderstorm “the bubble” escaped its brick moorings and blew into our neighbor’s yard 50 feet away. But my sisters did not, even though their memories were not precisely the same.
And so, it is with the Resurrection story. It used to bother me that the four Gospels tell slightly different versions of what happened that first Easter morning. Shouldn’t they be completely alike? But when I started writing Memoir, I realized just how much the same event seen through different eyes can vary. Just like my sisters’ and mine did.
The more I read about writing memoir versus biography, the more I learned that variations in the telling of a story give it credence and not the other way around. If all four Gospel stories of the Resurrection, whether it’s who got to the tomb first or the appearance of angels were told verbatim it would make the Easter story more like a memorized poem than a real event. Something that often bothers unbelievers, as it once did me.
Scholars may argue for many more centuries over who was first on the scene. That’s not the important part. What is, is He is Risen.
Indeed.
Barbara Kautz