A Palm, A Jewelry Box, and an Empty Tomb

I set God a test on the Palm Sunday of my eleventh year. I was attending Catholic catechism classes and had started to wonder if God was real. I had heard something in class that sounded ugly and wrong. My teacher explained that Catholics would be going to heaven and that everyone else—even if they were good, even if they loved God—would be going to hell. That didn’t sound right. I flat-out could not believe it the moment I heard it. We are extremely lucky people, Mrs. Thurlow said, because we had been chosen. I knew then there was definitely a mistake, because there was no way God would single me out for special privileges. I lied during my first confession. I could not think of any sins and the silence felt awkward, so I made something up. Surely hell befit me more than the upstanding non-Catholic people I knew. She cannot be right about that, I thought. Soon, all that Mrs.Thurlow taught became suspect. If she could be mistaken about heaven and hell, what else was she mistaken about? Maybe she didn’t really know anything about God. Where did she get her information? What if. . . what if. . . she was wrong about God?    

So I devised an experiment to test whether God was real. On the Sunday before Easter, Catholics commemorate the story of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, being greeted by people who, instead of rolling out the red carpet, blanket his path with palms. To observe Palm Sunday, my family would dress up, get clusters of palm fronds at church, and visit both sets of grandparents. At each home, we greeted our aunts, uncles, and cousins, saying “Happy Palm” while passing each relative a palm. Grandpa Pete twisted thin strips of palm into crosses and gave them out. Grandma Ann cooked giant pots of spaghetti and meatballs. We ate dinner at Grandma Ann’s and dessert at Grandma Jo’s--an all-day affair. On this particular palm Sunday, I hung back in my room as my family piled into the car. Just before joining them, I peeled and folded a palm, stashed it in my jewelry box, and put the matter to God: “If You really exist, please make the palm disappear so I can be sure.” I explained to God that it would be rude not to accept a palm, and that it was a pretty small miracle to request. When we arrived home after our day-long odyssey of feasting and palm-passing, I raced to my room to check the box. The palm was gone.  

To this day, I have no explanation for its disappearance. I can invent many natural explanations for what I didn’t see. Perhaps I only imagined placing it in the box, but actually unconsciously carried it with me because I so much wanted to believe in God. Perhaps a palm-thief broke into the house while we were gone and absconded with my little God-token. (And nothing else.)  Perhaps my eyes played a trick—a temporary palm-blindness caused by a fervent desire to believe. All possible. Predictably, knowing in retrospect the intellectual I became, my Palm Sunday miracle (or imaginal exercise) did not settle my question. When I saw the empty box, I felt surprised, spooked, and skeptical. I was sure that it wasn’t possible. I must have made some mistake.  God or no God, a palm cannot disappear. I must be imagining things. But whatever happened, I never forgot. That’s probably why, between the ages of twelve and thirty, I was more of a functional atheist than a fully committed atheist. Some people reject or doubt the proposition that God is real. Because of my Palm Sunday memory, I could never stop doubting the proposition that God isn’t real.

As Gospel stories tell it, Christianity grew out of experiences similar to mine.  Depending on which Gospel you’re looking at, some women (or one woman) whose beloved rabbi has just been executed go to his tomb to prepare the body for burial. They remember finding the tomb empty. Again, depending on which Gospel you’re reading, either two angels or two spiffy-looking men (or one young man or one angel) explain that their teacher has risen from the dead (in Gospel of John, the angels don’t say this). Later, the women, and then their male counterparts, report a disruptive experience: they begin talking with someone they don’t recognize as their teacher, then suddenly realize that they are actually talking to their teacher, whom they experience as alive. However the story gets told, the upshot is that a group of grieving students become convinced they are in the presence of their teacher after his death. As with my vanished palm, there are many ways to explain their experiences naturalistically. Grief-stricken people even today report experiences of seeing lost loved ones. Perhaps it’s a kind of extra-vivid memory flash or trauma-effect. Perhaps the forceful desire to recover a lost loved one triggers real-seeming figments of the grief-stricken imagination. Perhaps the students were misinformed about the location of their teacher’s tomb. Perhaps someone moved the body. 

However we may explain their report about the empty tomb, they became convinced that their rabbi had risen from the dead and become present to them after death.  They also became convinced that this resurrection--which was a well-known Jewish concept around the turn of the first millennium--meant that their teacher had been and was still “The Christ,” “The Anointed One,” “The Messiah” of Jewish prophecy, a kind of “King” who would somehow bring an end to Roman (or Persian, Babylonian, or Assyrian) occupation of Jerusalem, restoring the land of Judea to Jewish control and inaugurating a new era of peace, prosperity, and freedom from oppression and evil.  

The empty tomb story became a sticking point for me during a time when I wanted to identify as Christian but felt it would be inaccurate. Some Christians define “Christian” based on whether a person believes the same thing as those tomb-visitors: that their teacher was and is God, was and is The Messiah of Jewish prophecy. Later Christians developed a belief that by voluntarily accepting an agonizing death, this Anointed One erased any culpability his followers might have for their own less-than-perfect attitudes and behavior. For a long time, as I pursued a life of faith, I did not know exactly what I believed. If you have to be precise, I thought--and I’m a stickler for linguistic precision--I guess I don’t belong. I have always been more of an experiencer of God than a “believer” in God.

I first felt God clearly while perched on a fern-covered boulder that I frequented at age eight. Having moved to rural Connecticut when I was seven, I grew up tromping the woods, building forts, hacking paths to the reservoir with machetes. Laura Ingalls Wilder in New England. I loved being alone in the woods. Being indoors felt unnatural; being outdoors felt like home. I often occupied one spot for hours, constructing twig villages, collecting acorns, roasting oak-leaves for dinner over make-believe fire. One afternoon I sat on my fern-rock long enough to notice that the forest felt alive. There seemed to be something perceiving me as I was perceiving it. Whatever it was felt peaceful, attentive, alert. “Oh,” I realized abruptly, “That must be God.”

Painful experiences in the Catholic Church erased the simplicity of that perception. After that erasure, however, I started searching for whatever would provide the same sense of peace and wonder. My development into a literature scholar complicated that search. The more I flexed my intellectual muscle, the weaker my connection to emotion and intuition became. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston writes, “There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.“ For me, dwelling for years primarily at the level of word-thought closed off access to the region where I feel and experience the phenomena so often called “God.” 

The empty tomb story is no longer a sticking point for me. It feels like my vanished palm frond. I don’t experience the empty tomb as an intellectual certainty. I behold the tomb in the stories and wonder at the experiences shared by Jesus of Nazareth’s closest friends. I cultivate that wonder.