Back to the Parking Lot

The man in the car is not carrying too little. He is carrying exactly the right thing. What he has in that parking lot — the weight of three years of unresolved distance, the poverty of spirit that has no comfortable account of itself to offer, the hands that are genuinely empty — that is the form that the Beatitude takes for him on this particular morning.

He is not being asked to produce a sufficiency that closes the gap between himself and God, or between himself and his father's memory, or between himself and the stone he cannot face. He is not being asked to generate enough virtue or grief or sincerity to earn his way to a position from which he is allowed to stand in front of a grave and feel entitled to the consolations the book has been offering.

He is being asked to do what poverty of spirit does, which is receive.

The asymptote between the finite soul and the Creator was crossed from the other side. The descent happened. The condition that his failure and distance and all the unfixed things of his life had been accumulating toward — the Sheol-separation, the relational knowing severed, the soul cut off from the source of life — that condition was entered and broken by the one who crossed the asymptote at its lowest point. What remains for the man in the parking lot is the posture that receives that crossing as the fact it is.

His father, if he knew Christ, is not in the ground waiting for his son to produce something sufficient. He is in the far better, outside the sequence, already received by the same love that receives every soul who has ever held out empty hands. The unresolved things between them are held by the one who holds everything unresolved — not as debts waiting to be paid, but as the raw material of a reunion that the resurrection will make possible in a mode that neither of them has the vocabulary for yet.

He can get out of the car. The stone is not an accusation. It is a marker. The man under the stone is somewhere else. The accounting has been handled by the one who does the accounting. What remains is the flag, and the heat, and the empty hands, and the walk from the parking lot to the stone — which is a short walk and does not require any preparation that poverty of spirit does not already provide.

In the next chapter we take the map into the strangest territory it has entered yet: what it means to exist outside of time.