As the Church celebrates Easter Sunday, Fr. Marion Nguyen, OSB, offers his thoughts on the day’s liturgical readings under the theme: “Inflamed by What is Missing.”
By Fr. Marion Nguyen, OSB* “On the first day of the week, while it was still dark…” (Jn 20:1). The Gospel begins with darkness, confusion, and absence, not clarity and joy. Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb not because she understands, but because she loves. The stone is rolled away, the body is gone, and what she expected to find is not there. This is where Easter first meets us—not in triumph, but in the disorientation of a love that cannot yet see. If we have taken Lent seriously, this moment is not foreign to us. Fasting has revealed how little power we have over our desires. Prayer has exposed our discomfort with silence, where the “unurgent” but essential questions of the heart rise to the surface. Almsgiving has uncovered how deeply we cling to security, to comfort, to control. We begin to see that what we long for most—to love freely, to be whole, to belong entirely to God—remains just beyond our grasp. And so, like Mary, we arrive at the tomb while it is still dark. St. Gregory the Great offers wisdom: the absence of Christ is not meaningless, it is medicinal. God permits Himself to seem absent in order to deepen desire. “Holy desires grow by delay” (Homiliae in Evangelia, 25). We discover, perhaps painfully, that we only truly find what we have first learned to miss. The empty tomb, then, is not only a sign of resurrection, it is also a school of longing. In the Gospel, Peter and John run to the tomb, see the burial cloths, and return home. They perceive something, even believe in some initial way, but they do not remain. Mary, on the other hand, stays. She does not understand more than they do; in fact, she is more confused. But she refuses to leave. She stands outside the tomb weeping. Gregory sees in this a truth for every disciple: not finding immediately does not mean failure—it is a test of love. There is a kind of faith that is quick, efficient, and moves decisively once it has gathered enough evidence. But there is another kind—the intuitive and affective kind—that lingers, that waits, that weeps, that refuses to abandon the place where God was last encountered. “She sought him whom she had not found; she wept as she sought.” Her tears are not a sign of weakness, but of perseverance. Many today feel that “the tomb is empty”—that faith seems hollow, that God is distant, that prayer yields little consolation. To these Gregory exhorts: do not leave too early. Stay. Remain. Let the absence stretch your desire rather than extinguish it. For if the desire fades, perhaps it was not yet the deep desire God wished to purify. Christ sometimes permits himself to be missed so that he may be more truly found, and held with a grip that a casual seeker could never know. Easter is objectively real: Christ is risen whether we feel it or not. But subjectively, existentially, Easter unfolds in us at a speed outside of our control. It comes when the heart, purified by longing, becomes capable of recognizing Him. And this recognition is given not to those who analyze and depart, but to those who love and remain. Mary Magdalene reveals that perseverance in the dark is already a participation in the light. The resurrection will come—at God’s time. Our part is simpler, and perhaps harder: to stay at the tomb, to seek even when we cannot see, and to let desire grow until absence itself becomes the threshold of presence. * Abbot of St. Martin Abbey—Lacey, Washington