Here and now in this new dawn there is someone who weeps, broken-hearted, in a garden and hears her name. The young man is risen, death is taken into victory, but it is still a time of tears, both of sorrow and of longing and of wonder for amazing love. It is overwhelming: as Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) wrote, meditating on the meeting of this new Eve in this new garden with the new Adam:
The Lord called her ‘Mary’,
the name he had so often called her by as if to say,
‘I know who you are, and what you want;
behold me; do not weep, I am he whom you are seeking.’
At once her tears were changed;
I do not believe they stopped at once,
but where once they were wrung from a heart
broken and self-tormenting,
they flow now from a heart exulting.
From In the Company of Christ: A Pilgrimage Through Holy Week by Benedicta Ward. Copyright © 2005. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org.