John 20:11 · World English Bible
John 20:11 Meaning But Mary Was Standing Outside
But Mary was standing outside at the tomb weeping. So as she wept, she stooped and looked into the tomb,
What does John 20:11 mean?
Grief keeps a mind standing outside, weeping over a place it believes still holds what it has lost. To stand without is to remain in the ego's reading of things, certain that love is inside the tomb and that its absence is cause for sorrow.
From the Christian Psychology reading below.
John 20:11 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Christian Psychology
CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY
Christian Psychology
Grief keeps a mind standing outside, weeping over a place it believes still holds what it has lost. To stand without is to remain in the ego's reading of things, certain that love is inside the tomb and that its absence is cause for sorrow. The weeping is real, and it is the honest cost of believing that death can take what love is.
Yet even in tears the mind stoops to look, and this small willingness to bend and see is where correction begins. What is sought in the grave was never there, but the looking itself turns a mourner toward the truth. Sorrow that consents to look into the very place it feared is already leaning toward the sight that ends it.
Sepulchre: the tomb where the grieving mind keeps searching for a love it thinks has died, the place it stares into for what was never lost. Mary: the mind in mourning, faithful in its love yet still reading absence as loss, standing at the edge of a sight it has not yet received.
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Live John 20:11 today
- If there is a loss you keep circling, sit with it for a few minutes instead of scrolling past it. You do not have to fix the feeling, just let yourself look straight at it.
- When someone tells you about a grief of theirs, resist the urge to send a tidy reply. Stay in the message with them, and let your answer be short and present rather than hopeful and fast.
- In a hard meeting or a tense call, when the fear rises that something is being taken from you, take one breath and look right at the fear instead of away. The willingness to see it is enough.
What have I been standing outside of, afraid that looking would make it worse?
The same truth in other traditions
Tao Te Ching
Grasping at what has gone only tightens the hand. Let the loss be looked at openly and it loosens, because nothing real was ever held in the first place.
Zen
A student mourns at the place where the teacher sat, until someone asks him to look carefully at the empty cushion. The looking, not the leaving, is what opens.
Stoicism · Epictetus
Never say of anything that you have lost it, only that you have given it back. What you loved was always on loan, and remembering that softens the grief.
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