DORCAS

Dorcas

By Kathie Anderson Houchens, April 15, 2013

This week’s lectionary readings include the passage in Acts 9:36-43 that recounts the resurrection of Dorcas, also called Tabitha and meaning Gazelle.  Just a couple of weeks after Easter, resurrection is a word that haunts my comprehension.  Yes, I believe, but, Lord, help my unbelief.  This is, to the logical grown-up mind, a great mystery.  Even more so as we watch our friends and acquaintances meet death and leave us wondering, “How can this be?”  Perhaps, once again, it takes the childlike willingness to trust in Truth not yet fully revealed, to trust that in time “when we grow up” we will understand, even embrace the ultimate “Good News.” 

Clear images surface each time the story of Dorcas comes around for me.  I played the part of Dorcas in a church play when I was a child.  I can remember the green and black pattern of the cotton fabric that my grandmother had made into a skirt and a head scarf that I wore.  We took our places in the organ loft at the front left of the sanctuary.  As in the scriptural account there was much loud crying by the “widows” when I fell lifeless to the floor.   The physical involvement created a visceral memory for me as I first “played dead” and then “arose” after “Peter” prayed over me.

I was probably about nine at the time.  When I was five I had been quite ill with an extended period of fever, strep throat, ear infections, achy joints and other unrelenting symptoms.  I spent months in bed with twice daily visits from our family doctor.  The hushed conversations in the hallway outside my bedroom and then the visits from well-meaning clergy introduced me to the limbo-world of expecting to die.  Friends brought coloring books about missionaries, boxes of little “open one a day” gifts to cheer me, simple embroidery projects and art-oriented games to play in bed.  There were prayers said over me by family and local pastors, and the doting attention of my “Nanny” (maternal grandmother who lived with us, or rather we with her.)  After a long siege of treatments, medicines, and a tonsillectomy (a topic for another day)I was healed!

So the “Dorcas” story cycles into my awareness yet again.  I remember the ease with which I accepted the “resurrection” story as a child; yet I am challenged in my “adult world of thinking” to believe without seeing.  So I return to another childhood memory that has served me well, Psalm 23, also in this week’s lectionary.  So good to have memorized these precious promises…..of goodness and mercy and forever dwelling with LOVE eternal!

I wonder if the rising of Dorcas (who in many ways IS the grandmother who loved so warmly, who sewed so expertly, who baked so deliciously, who shared so generously) happens when I invite those same passions and gifts to expression through me?  Let the Creator keep on creating and bringing us to life anew and renewed.