For many years, I have worked both professionally and as a volunteer with women survivors of sexual and domestic violence, especially in relationship to their faith concerns. Women who have been raped, for example, even after they recover from physical injuries, come to counseling and their skin is pasty, their hair is limp and their upper bodies often look bent and folded in on themselves. And then, sometimes, after a while they start to stand up, their eyes brighten, and they begin to live again.

I look at the photos of returning veterans of this war and talk to those whom I know personally and I see that some of them are broken in body, mind and spirit. Can these bones live? Surely they can.

A compassionate civic and religious community response to all the bodies and spirits broken by war is imperative. It is doubly imperative due not only to their need, but made even more urgent by the hypocrisy of an administration that talks the language of sacrifice and pride and instead delivers moral callousness and ineptitude.

Yet I continue to believe in the resurrection of the body, the bodily return to life of those who have been treated violently and yet who can survive and finally heal in both body and spirit. I am also struck by the mystery of why some will find resurrection and healing, and others never are able to.

Will there be an ultimate healing for those who do not find it in this life and for all those whom violence has totally destroyed? All humans will finally die of many causes and I believe that no human spirit is lost, but that all in the end are joined in God. The issue for me is never the re-animation of dead tissue, a position that in my view has nothing to do with faith, but the belief that somehow, as Paul says, “we will all be changed.” But that starts now, in this life and extends, we know not how, beyond death.

Obviously, holding such a view of the resurrection, a collection of bones, even if “proven” to be those of Jesus of Nazareth, is irrelevant to my view of Christianity. The suffering and death on Good Friday, the descent into hell and the resurrection of the body on Easter are all too real to me here and now for some bones to shake my faith.

My favorite Easter hymn has these lines: “Every morning is Easter morning from now on. Every day’s resurrection day, the past is over and gone. Goodbye fear, goodbye guilt, good riddance, hello Lord, hello sun! I am one of the Easter people, my new life has begun.”

These bones can live.