Easter peace

some thoughts & good wishes for the final weekend of Easter

Allow me to begin this post by acknowledging that I dropped a fairly heavy Holy Saturday reflection on you a few weeks ago, and then sent nothing by which to share or celebrate Easter Sunday together.

I think I’ve been trying to get my hands around the season of celebration. I’ve been trying to decide what it is, what it gives, what I ought to receive from it this year. My need to sit with those questions, and my lack of clear language for what I have received so far, has paused me when I’ve thought about writing another post.

I approached Easter along the path of a difficult fall and winter, in which love asked much of me and in the end did not bear the fruit I had dearly hoped to see. In the months since, I have been trying to reflect on and sort through that experience: what I gave, what I lost, where hope is and isn’t rising to meet me as I look toward the future.

Holy Week, when it came, presented an opportunity to give up my claim to my own love and the suffering it had required for many months. Both my love and my suffering had become quite precious to me by then, and it was difficult to open my hands and release them.

So the invitation I was given at the start of Holy Week proved another opportunity to try to bind my love and its pain to the Cross and trust Christ to make life where I could not. To once again face a truth I prefer to avoid (as I suspect many of us do): that the Cross is the most beautiful example of love we have in this life, and all of us are called to its standard of joyful, self-emptying generosity. The Cross is the language and essence of divine love expressed in human life. It is that to which all human love must ultimately conform or else exhaust itself in fruitless suffering.

I am grateful to report that in Easter weekend I felt released from a heartache I’d been carrying for a long time. With that release came relief, and peace, and an ability to begin pursuing healing in new ways. But I was not freed from sadness. I have continued to contend with sadness on and off all through Eastertide.

It’s had me thinking about the disciples, and how they must have felt on Easter morning. Christ had risen, joy Himself had returned — but just days before they had experienced, first hand, the worst loss the world has ever known. Some, like Peter, had also been faced with an overwhelming revelation of the staggering weakness in their own hearts.

One does not simply feel happy in the wake of a loss like that, even when the One who was lost returns. Grief is nonlinear, complicated, and often irrational. The body and soul can feel its aftershocks for a long time. And grief can coexist with joy.

In the wake of His resurrection, the victorious Christ is lighthearted and patient. He does not ask His disciples to feel anything other than what they feel. In the garden, He does not tell Mary Magdalen to stop weeping. Instead, he gives her a task by which to inhabit and express her complicated grief-joy — go to My brethren and say to them, “I am ascending to My Father and your Father, and to My God and your God.” He answers Thomas’s shellshocked doubt with a tender invitation to touch His body and experience His return. He walks Peter slowly through a step-by-step restoration of his courage and love.

And then He calls them, all of them, to continue suffering like He did on behalf of their love for God and God’s love for the world. Most of the disciples went on to undertake extremely difficult mission work, to be despised by the communities they did their best to love, and often to have their lives cut short by violent martyrdoms.

If we can’t expect perfect earthly happiness as a result of Easter’s triumph over death, what can we expect?

Well, intimacy with Christ’s resurrected life made new in our selves, souls and bodies. The difficult, glorious work of allowing Him to recreate us in the likeness of His life. The gift of opportunities to offer our lives to the work of loving others after the pattern of Christ’s love. The sure promise of perfect life, of an eternity to enjoy Christ’s love and be enjoyed by Him in return. And we can expect peace: a peace that surpasses understanding, by which I mean peace that sustains and upholds us, that remains still and quiet, that steadies our souls no matter our circumstances. One can suffer greatly and still be at peace.

This is what I’ve started to look for in the wake of Easter this year. Maybe I suffered a lot, for far longer than I needed to. Maybe I am still sad sometimes, unsure if my desire will be answered, pained at the thought that what I have given will not be received or returned. But when I quiet myself in prayer enough to hear what the Lord is offering me, do I find myself at peace in the knowledge that I am doing my best to honor the call He has placed upon my life today?

If the answer to this question is yes, perhaps that’s enough for my soul to be satisfied, and find itself made still. Even if I continue to suffer sorrow, I can rest, and be at peace.