Death and Resurrection

Last Friday night, I went with my choir to something called a “miaratory” (I’m not 100% sure if that’s how that’s spelled, but that’s how it sounds).  It was a powerful, moving experience, and I am going to try to share it with you, even though I’m afraid it may just sound like I’m recounting the facts of the evening. Miaratory happen when someone dies, and my choir usually goes if that person was a member of our church. The word means to "leave sleep," I had no idea what to expect, I just knew that we were meeting at 8:30pm, and wouldn’t get home until after midnight.

We met at the house of one of our choir directors (at closer to 9:30 instead of 8:30 – gotta love Malagasy time!) and walked to the house of the deceased. We waited in the free space between houses for the visitors before us to finish inside. When my choir and I entered, I was more than a little shocked to see the body of the deceased man laying directly to my left. In his bed, under his mosquito net. Just as if he were sleeping.

We proceeded to surround the bed and fill the man’s room, and then the pastor that came with us conducted a brief devotion. We sang, we read from the Bible, and the pastor preached about how we are given everlasting life in Christ. Looking at the man on the bed, surrounded by his friends, family, and community members, I couldn’t help but cry.

When we were finished, we went and sat out in the yard. We sang and sang and sang – choir songs, songs from the hymnal, songs that people in the crowd would start in the silence between songs. And while we sang, I took in my surroundings. Most of the women of the family were sitting on the floor in the house, surrounding the man’s bed, or in the neighboring room. All of the doors and windows were open. Most of the men of the family were sitting in a little cluster of couches out in the yard. And the rest of us, the community, expanded out into whatever open place we could find to sit on the ground.

I was struck by what a communal experience it was. The men were being pretty rowdy, which kind of surprised me. When the women weren’t keeping vigil by the bedside, they were serving tea, coffee, soda, and bread to their guests. I had never been to a miaratory before, but I had been to a “mamangy,” which is the visiting that happens in the days after a death, and is equally as communal.

Several members of my community lost family members during the cyclone in January, and I went with various groups to mamangy (the word literally translates to visit) those community members. I remember two things about those visits. The first, thinking that it would be challenging, as the grieving family, to constantly host people and be prepared for people to come visit in the days after a death. That thought is probably because of the different culture in which I was raised in the United States. I think we end to skirt around the topic of death. We bring the grieving family a casserole and say we will pray for them, and then we leave. I am not trying to make a quality judgement about either culture, but I think my experiences with death in the States have definitely shaped what I see and how I experience grief in the context of Madagascar. For example, my second observation from these experiences was that crying was not encouraged, which was not something I was used to. One of the people who died from the flooding was the brother of the Directrice at SeJaFa. When the teachers went to visit her and her family, we were all crying. All except for one of the teachers who kept saying that we should stop crying. Because we have health, we are strong, and we have the belief in Jesus Christ who brings us eternal life. So, we all did our best to stop our tears and sniff up our snot. I believe everything that the woman was saying, and I think that yes, we should rejoice in the promise of the resurrection. But that is SO HARD when the sting of death is still throbbing.

The day after the miaratory, exactly one week ago, one of my country mate’s father’s died. I received a text message from Pastor Kirsten during an antsampanahy at my church, and immediately had to get up and leave. I am not adjusted to the Malagasy expectation of not crying. I don’t want to write too much about my friend’s father’s death, mainly because I do not know what she is experiencing. I can’t put words to what her family must be going through. My country coordinator wrote a blog post in the week following that is much more eloquent than anything I have to say. I would encourage you to read it here.

In the midst of death here in this world, Christians around the world observed Good Friday yesterday. I don’t know exactly why, but the words in the Gospel leading up to Jesus’ crucifixion hit me especially hard this year. Who of us can even imagine the loneliness Jesus must have felt as he was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. The dread while going to a “trial” that he knew was going to, in fact, had to, end with his death sentence. The rejection when the crowd shouted “CRUCIFY HIM!” and the ultimate, excruciating pain of death on a cross. And with the reading of the Gospel during worship last night, I, once again, found myself in crying in church.
In this Saturday between Good Friday and Easter, we wait. We feel the overwhelming burden of death. We are still, we are silent, and we wait for a promise to be fulfilled. Despite the burden, I think we have to be hopeful. Whether we are waiting on Easter, or waiting on a time when we can be reunited with our loved ones in the Kingdom of God, we have to remember that death does not have the last say. If we lose sight of that hope, of that promise, the weight of death will crush us. On this Holy Saturday, we mourn. We mourn the death of Jesus, and we grieve those we have lost in our time on this earth. But tomorrow, we rise with Jesus to claim victory over death and the promise of everlasting life in the Kingdom of Heaven.