Still Waiting for Easter
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I understand why folks wanted so badly to celebrate Easter this year. Easter brings the good news transforming the pain of loss and death. It offers us hope and a promise of new life. Attending to the stories of the end of Jesus’ life—and the beginning—teach us important lessons about our own lives.
My Quaker forebears refused to celebrate Easter or any other holy days. They claimed these could show up in our lives any day of the year. They were operating from inside the text, where they “knew experimentally,” as they put it, what it was to come alive in the Spirit after living through much suffering. We need both the teaching and reflections on the text that come with Holy Week readings and the experience of death and new life available to each and every one of us.
Where is our felt experience of the Easter story now? Just like the disciples when Jesus was taken from them, our sense of normal and predictable has vanished. The disciples had left everything to follow him. The meaning and purpose of their lives revolved around him. And then Jesus was arrested by the authorities in the big city where they were strangers of no rank and little means. All normalcy evaporated. They ran in confusion and in fear for their lives.
When we don’t know what’s happening, we try to control things. One way we do this is by trying to figure it all out, to predict, to assure, and to create order out of chaos. Some of the disciples may well have held out the possibility that Jesus would be threatened, roughed up and sent packing, and they could all just get out of Jerusalem and go home. They had to figure out what real information they had to go on or what they were just spinning out in fear and anxiety or what were rumors or even misinformation. Some of them were probably in denial, at least in moments; some probably flipped into anger as they tried to come to grips with Jesus’ arrest.
They didn’t have long to wait and speculate until they saw the One who’d brought meaning to their lives executed as a traitor to the empire. The men watched from a distance, not knowing if they’d be tracked down and slaughtered. Some of the women who followed Jesus, having nothing to lose, stood at the foot of the cross and watched Love be cruelly crucified. After the women followed to see where they put Jesus’ body, the disciples all went into hiding for the Sabbath.
As we think about our own experiences of death and new life, the Easter story offers a very truncated time frame in which these occur. For most of us, there is a more extended period of suffering before any hint of new life. We cannot expect our own stories to follow any other in detail, but the human experiences of loss and death eventually come to all of us. The disciple’s story gives us a sense of the human process and offers us all hope wherever we locate ourselves today.
“Is it today?” by Melanie Weidner. This image and many others can be purchased in a set of art and spirituality cards at ListenForJoy.com..
Some of us are still on Thursday night, reeling from the confusion of the lost normal and working to make sense of things with rapidly changing information as well as misinformation and rumor. The simple inability to plan keeps many of us off kilter. We need almost daily to figure out how to do what we need to do in the world as safely as possible. Habit and routine can’t be counted on. And those of us who feel a need to do things perfectly will be tied in knots; this and similar expectations of how we function are an unnecessary burden. Certainly for many of us these times feel really inconvenient, and the full reality has yet to dawn on us—and may never have to. Some of us may be trying to come to grips with a feeling of betrayal by someone we’ve trusted, as the disciples were gobsmacked by Judas’ betrayal of Jesus. Or with how someone we’ve trusted to have the best interests of the group in mind operated out of self-preservation as Peter did when he denied Jesus and ran for his life. And, like Judas, some of us may be wondering if we can actually live with what we perceive to be hopeless and perhaps unforgivable.
Others of us know personally the bigger losses of Friday. Some of us have lost our incomes and are thrown into the panic of providing food and shelter and other necessities for ourselves and our families in a time of pandemic. Not to mention all the normal loss of esteem, purpose and relationship accompanying sudden job loss. Some of us have lost friends and relatives or our own health and well-being. Some of us have certainly moved into the deep wordless grief of Saturday. The disciples stayed inside, hidden away as they tried to come to terms with what they couldn’t possibly know. They sat in the grief of overwhelming loss and uncertainty, having only one another. In the internal and external chaos, they turned as they were able to prayer.
We’ve heard many hopeful stories of people reaching out in kindness one to another. These kindnesses continue to multiply and may gradually bring significant change for many. But are they the new life promised by Easter Sunday, or are they simply encouragement to have hope and to keep going? We long to see New Life springing up, defying the claims of death and death-dealing, and proclaiming victory over the grave that had held it captive. As a community, as a culture, we are not there yet. We still have a lot of people who want to recreate the normal we’ve always known as fast as possible. Denial and anger are legitimate responses to loss. While they are legitimate, we have to choose whether we will let them be in charge or do our best to see them and make the most life-giving choices we can anyway. Sometimes, in the pain of loss we hurt other people. The more we move with a focus of me, my, and mine the more people we will hurt.
Where do we locate ourselves or those around us in the Easter story today? If we’re in the what if’s of fear or the frantic desire to go back to normal tomorrow, or in the complete lostness of real grief (and we may well alternate between these daily), how do we hold space for the new life we are promised will come? How do we keep faith alive and trust in what has yet to emerge into the light of day? Look at the picture once again! How do we stand in all the patience we can manage and welcome and hold space for the new life it is not yet time to see, but is there waiting and growing nonetheless, awaiting its moment?
We have to use all the spiritual tools we can muster. We do our best to maintain the spiritual practices that have gotten us through hard times in the past—prayer, meditation, silence, walking, art, song, talking with someone who can really listen. If what once worked suddenly seems hollow, we extend ourselves compassion and talk to someone or read or petition God to find a practice that might work now. And we take up daily the practice of self-compassion because our shoulds and oughts weren’t very kind in the first place. In pandemic they’re downright cruel. They are not part of the new world we want, so let them go.
Thinking about what we truly want in this world and holding those images as a prayer can help bring it into being. We have to anticipate and look for the new life we may despair in moments of ever appearing. We trust the wisdom and timing of the One who makes the seed sprout and grow and one day pop up above the soil. Let us wait and watch for the new life we long to see in this world. And in the meantime, do the next right thing before us.
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