Easter

Holy Week

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This week I was handed an invite to a series of Easter services to celebrate Christ being risen. There was no nuance in the invite, as far as I could tell, between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. I wished, for a brief moment, that I could start celebrating Easter on Good Friday, that I could crack open some chocolate and make a cake and stop doing the small things that I am trying to offer during Lent.

I am writing this post at the end of Holy Week, and I am tired. I am tired of Lent, and I am wrung out emotionally. Easter Saturday has the feeling of the aftermath of a funeral, quiet, subdued. Christ is in the tomb alongside many of my hopes and dreams, alongside my memories of loved ones, of past successes, alongside present pain and uncertainty for the future.

It seems so glib, to say ‘Christ has risen!’, to celebrate, unless that comes out of a place of pain, holding onto hope for the resurrection despite suffering. Yes, I have encountered the risen Christ in the depths of my being. That’s what brought me back into the church. That’s what has sustained me since losing one of my siblings to suicide. But this Easter Saturday, Christ is in the tomb and that is where a large part of me is, too along with hope. I don’t know when or how I will experience the resurrection.

Previous experiences of Easter

Advent and Holy Week are times when I often reflect on the disjunct between my experiences as a Protestant and what I now experience as a Catholic. The Presbyterian church I attended as a child was so reformed that we no longer had any sense of liturgical seasons. The preacher often described Christ’s suffering and death in graphic detail, but this could happen at any time of year.

Easter, like Christmas, was for us a wholly secular festival. I have dim memories of decorating hard-boiled eggs with felt tip pens. I might have been given a Cadbury’s cream egg, but that was likely to be because they were on offer at that time of year, rather than because we were celebrating Easter.

Image by Couleur from Pixabay

When I was older, I tried out other churches. One Easter, I attended a Baptist Church which was in full celebration mode. I watched the joyful faces of the choir as they sang about Christ’s resurrection, and I did not understand. Religion for me had always been sombre and solemn with an emphasis on our sin and Christ’s death rather than on forgiveness and the resurrection. The joy on the faces of the singers seemed flippant, even offensive. I was out of synch with other churchgoers and eventually I stopped going to church altogether.

After many years of agnosticism, I found myself, by what can only be God’s grace, becoming Catholic. Now I see elements of everything that went before in my experience of Holy Week and Easter.

Good Friday

Although I knew what to expect on Good Friday, it was still a shock to see the statues in the church shrouded in purple and the tabernacle gaping open. The priest and the altar servers walked up the aisle in silence. My first thought was, “This is crazy.” We were gathering to remember and re-enact a horrible death that took place almost 2000 years ago. It was crazy UNLESS that death is still relevant today, UNLESS the suffering and death of Christ speaks to my own suffering and loss and disappointment and uncertainty.

There were no revelations, the clouds didn’t part, but as the long service went on, I had the sense that I was taking part in something profound that gives meaning to my own pain and that of others. The Gospel of John was read with the priest taking the part of Christ and other parishioners representing Peter, Pilate and the servant girl. I thought about my sister who was vulnerable and marginalised because of mental illness. I thought about the many people who are in weak and vulnerable positions because of disability or illness or war or climate change. I thought about my present difficulties. I have tried to give up worry and anxiety for Lent, but it has come back again and again. Again and again, I have tried to let go.

While I waited to venerate the cross, I decided to take these things with me, but by the time I actually stood in the queue all I could think of was my anxiety. Did I have to kiss the cross? Was it acceptable to just bow my head, or would people see that as disrespectful? Did I have to be in this line at all? What if I kissed the wrong part? The people ahead of me blocked my view, but I craned my neck to work out which part the altar boy was rubbing clean with antiseptic wipes.

In the end, all I could do was bundle up the pride and sense of discomfort I felt as an ex-Protestant and offer that to God as I bent to graze my lips against the cross. The wood of Jesus’ foot felt warm and lifelike from the pressure of all the lips which had touched it before me.

This Lent I have been reading the letters of St Francis de Sales and his spiritual daughter Jane de Chantal, who also became a saint. In one of Jane de Chantal’s letters to her brother, she writes about hearing the news that her daughter-in-law had died in Paris. She had already lost her son some years early. She wrote:

‘But when I consider that by means of these privations, lovingly accepted, God wishes to be Himself everything to us, that the least progress we make in His holy love is worth more than the whole world with all its consolations, and that in the most bitter trials which strip of us our greatest satisfactions, God treasures, above all, the union of our wills with His. When I consider all this, then, truly, my dear Lord, I find so many advantages to affliction, that I can’t help admitting that the more we suffer, the more we are favored by God.’

I cannot understand suffering. I would never choose it; I do what I can to crawl away from it, and yet, and yet … This Lent, for the first time perhaps, I am beginning to understand that there is a gift hidden in suffering, whether that is Christ suffering on the cross out of love, or my own pain, including the deep suffering of suicide bereavement. The hope I bring from Good Friday is that none of this is without meaning even if I am too close to the messiness and the pain to be able to see the gift clearly.

Good Friday

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Why is the day marking Christ’s death called Good Friday? What is Good about someone suffering a horrific death? Are we meant to be good on Good Friday? Or are we meant to think of God’s goodness in giving us His son. Is it because death was necessary in order to reach the greater good of the resurrection? When I was Protestant or agnostic, Good Friday, simply meant, ‘Great, a day off.’

My train of thought was started by the realisation that today is simply Dihaoine na Ceusta in Gaelic (Friday of the cross), which just tells us what actually happens. This is another example of language throwing a different perspective on things.

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I’m also thinking about how the joy of the resurrection makes no sense without the sorrow of the cross. At the same time, the cross is just a meaningless loss without the resurrection. I’ve reflected before on how the emptiness of the church on Good Friday has helped me to recognise the presence of Christ at other times.

We’ve had a very difficult year, perhaps the hardest of our lives. As I look forward, sometimes I just anticipate more suffering. To be honest, I often just want to curl up in a corner and not even try, because living is so darn hard.

When I was thinking about Gethsemane and Jesus anticipating his suffering and death, I wondered if he only saw suffering, or if he also looked forward to joy. Perhaps he didn’t know exactly what God was going to do. Maybe he didn’t know that after his body was broken, it would be raised to life. However, I think he knew and trusted that God would bring good out of his suffering.

That’s the challenge for me right now: to look ahead in the hope that God will give us strength and also to trust that God knows what He’s about.

Sally Read’s poems

I want to share two things. First of all, I’m sharing a link to Sally Read’s website on which she has a poem about the crucifixion. Sally is a Catholic convert and I really enjoyed reading her book Night’s Bright Darkness, an honest account of her conversion.

A short piece on Easter

Secondly, here is a short reflection on my different experiences of Easter:

We don’t do Easter in our church, but the minister tells us about Christ’s agony on the cross. I feel sad, because it’s my fault Christ had to die, and the nails must have hurt a lot.

Mrs Higgins tells us the Easter story at school. I draw a picture of the stone rolled away from the tomb, but I can’t see Jesus.

I attend a different church when I go to university. My friend’s plump cheeks glow with joy on Easter Sunday as she sings about being saved. I feel angry. What right have these people to be so happy? We could never be sure God would save us.

I’ve stopped doing church altogether by the time I spend Easter in Spain. On Good Friday, I wake in the night, and see men walking down the street in silence, bowed down by the weight of chains. I think of my childhood, dragging the weight and guilt of my sins without hope of relief.

Many years pass. Easter is marked as no more than a holiday, a few days of freedom. I begin to let go of the guilt and pain. Perhaps, just perhaps, God created me for joy.

My faith is no bigger than a grain of mustard seed when I begin attending Mass with my husband. I’m taken aback by Easter. I see the joy of the resurrection in the faces around me, feel it in the water splashed on my cheeks, smell it in the incense, and hear it as we once again sing, ‘Glory to God in the Highest, And on earth peace to people of good will’. I don’t yet taste it.

Over the next few years, I learn the rhythms of the church: forty days of fasting and prayer, the solemnity of Holy Week. On Good Friday, I find the tabernacle open, the statues hidden in purple drapes. Jesus is dead and in his tomb. I weep in the empty church, feeling as if I have lost a loved one.

Easter comes, but it feels as if Lent continues. My daughter is ill and her condition worsening. As I kneel in church early on Sunday, I don’t look for Easter joy. How can it come this year? Something catches at my heart, opens it a chink and God’s love floods in. Later, we drive up the mountainside and take a hike. My daughter has a few hours reprieve, and Easter Sunday feels like a taste of heaven.

My daughter’s condition worsens. She spends most of the summer in hospital, and things slowly turn around. I learn a new rhythm in the hopes and disappointments of caring for someone with a long-term health condition. In each small sacrifice, I share in Christ’s death, and in her tiny steps towards recovery, I see signs of resurrection.

I am learning that Easter is present every day, in suffering and joy, in the death of self and worn out dreams, and in the slow turning of my soul to God.

Nit-picking

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As I write this, I’m enjoying my first piece of chocolate since the start of Lent, and my first cup of coffee in, well, not quite so long as that. I haven’t met my own goals. Giving up some of my favourite food and drink was the easier bit. However, there were so many exceptions: chocolate cake at family celebrations, times when I was invited out and didn’t want to make a fuss, and a few occasions when I was working and felt that I couldn’t stay awake without a strong cup of coffee.

Giving up what I consider as ‘my time’, was much harder. By the time I pack the oldest child off to bed, I don’t want to talk to anyone. My husband doesn’t get a look-in. I don’t feel like trying to talk to an elusive entity called God who doesn’t seem to reply in any direct way, although if I pray regularly, little glimpses of a response seem to slip quietly through my defences.

A few nights I did manage to keep my Lenten resolution and go to bed early to do yoga and meditation in order to calm my mind. Each time I did this, I felt so much more alive and peaceful that I resolved to do it more often. The next night, however, I found myself surfing the internet or finding some urgent thing which needed done. By the time I dragged myself to bed, goggle-eyed, I was too tired for exercise or prayer.

I didn’t manage the fast on Ash Wednesday, but I thought I had Good Friday sorted. I had read the rules. Every Catholic over the age of fourteen is required to take part in a not too onerous fast, which means eating only one meal plus two snacks which together don’t constitute a full meal. Even though I was staying with my Protestant family, I managed to skip breakfast without anyone noticing, and eat a meagre snack for lunch. That afternoon, I congratulated myself on finally managing to keep one of these new Catholic rules as I experienced hunger pangs.

I was half-way through my one meal of the day, when I realised that I was eating meat, and therefore breaking another rule: no meat on Fridays during Lent. Since I had made the dinner myself, I had no excuse although it is harder to cook when you’re away from home.

Our inability to properly keep the requirements of the law is a recurrent theme in the New Testament. Galations 2:15 and 16 says, ‘We who were born Jews and not gentile sinners have nevertheless learnt that someone is reckoned as upright not by practising the Law but by faith in Jesus Christ.’

Why do we have Lent, then? Is it just to throw up our own inadequacies and lack of self-discipline, or is it to help us realise our need for Christ and enable us to appreciate his death and the joy of his resurrection?

One of my Catholic in-laws kindly sent me a card wishing me joy for my first Easter as a member of the Catholic church. I was really looking forward to Easter, especially since the church in which I was brought up was so reformed that we didn’t celebrate either Christmas or Easter. However, it didn’t happen. One child became sick and couldn’t go out, and on Easter Sunday itself, I discovered that another had head lice. Aaarch!

I have spent most of Easter Sunday nit-checking. By some miracle, the lice haven’t spread to the rest of the family. My external circumstances aren’t particularly peaceful. Shortly after I sat down to write this, the dog knocked my precious cup of coffee over my foot. It was another reminder that faith and spirituality isn’t just, or even mainly, about sitting in church trying to have holy thoughts and be on my best behaviour. Faith has to run through the nitty-gritty things in life (excuse the choice of words), or it isn’t relevant.

I did manage to get out in the sun with the family. For anyone who’s reading this, I wish you a peaceful, healthy and nit-free Easter.