Teilhard de Chardin is believed to have said that ‘for those who know how to look, nothing is profane.’ The sacred and the profane are not polarities to be defended but perspectives to be imbibed. Perspective – the way we look at realities – matters.

The mind almost spontaneously tends to name, analyze and judge everything. This propensity of the mind to judge controls our way of seeing. The mind does not allow reality to present itself without naming and classifying it. Tony D’Mello used to say: we do not see things/people as they are, but as we are.

This coloured seeing becomes the norm of the day. We are dictated by the mind: thought patterns, ideas, biases and prejudices. Contemplation in Ignatian tradition is to let oneself be invaded by the other – the scene in the Gospel, a mystery of faith – without naming it. To look at the Nativity scene, and to view Jesus in the Gethsemane is not thinking about the scene but being absorbed by the event so much so the separation between ‘that time’ and ‘this time’ vanishes. It is pre-sencing.

Mary of Magdala at the empty tomb represents a change of perspective. She saw yet she did not see; she heard yet did not hear. Then it happened: she saw not what she wanted to see; she heard not what wanted to hear. She was absorbed by the reality of the empty tomb; the presence of the One she was seeking transformed her.

Resurrection is not in the past but in the present: a new way of seeing; a different way of looking. It is to find life in dying; to see emptiness as fullness; to embrace the other as me; to reach out to the frontiers as the centre. It is to know that Gauri Lankesh is still alive; it is to believe that Rohit Vemula is active; it is to say that Nirbhaya is all of us. Everything dies; everything rises.

As Michael Dowd says, “Without the death of stars, there would be no planets and no life; without the death of creatures, there would be no evolution… The gifts of death are joy and sorrow, laughter and tears… The gifts of death are lives that are fully and exuberantly lived,..and then graciously and gratefully given up, for now and forever more”.

George Pattery, SJ

The author is the former Provincial of Calcutta Province and former President of the Jesuit Conference of South Asia (POSA).