EASTER MONDAY
I go to Mass this morning, Easter Monday, to figure out where we’re going. The journey through Easter is not only brighter than Lent. It is longer, by ten days. Going through Lent is like traveling in the belly of a whale. Easter is a bright sea strewn with white petals. But it’s one I haven’t; navigated, or haven’t paid enough attention to before. What is the use of the fasting and the penitence of the last forty days if I don’t know how to live in Easter? That was what all the fasting was for.
On Holy Saturday at the vigil that makes Easter, we all stood in the church and as the priest sang in Latin, “Light of Christ,” and we sang back, “Thanks be to God,” from the newly lit candle at the altar all the little tapers we held in that night blackened church were lit until we stood there, a hopeful galaxy of wavering points of light. What were we all hoping for? Why were we all excited? Because it would all be well? Because despite everything it would be alright. Because we had begun to see and to believe, without being able to go into the details of it, only touching bits and pieces of it, resurrection.
I know I cannot go back to the old way, but what exactly the new way is and the new rules I am not quite sure. Some things needed to be figured out alone, but we the journey doesn’t have to be made alone. We came through the pit of the year together, Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and before that Ash Wednesday. We were together enough to remember what we so quickly forget, that we do belong to each other and travel with each other. Though, yes, some may travel better, farther, with more grace than others, we do so together.
All through Lent we said, on our knees, the confession of sin for over forty days, sometimes twice a day. Now there is no confessing, there is no penitence, there is learning joy again and the new song is “Christ Our Passover is sacrificed for us, therefore let us keep the feast.” It continues, “Not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.”
So I come to learn this new bread because it seems that until now I was fueled on jealous, spite, the inability to see past my nose or believe in possibilities, rash judgments, attributing to everyone around me the worst motives for their deeps. Hopeless, the desire to give up all too quickly. And now I get up these days, sort of like a baby. Having consumed all of this pseudo-food I must get up, take this new bread, and to learn how to eat.
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