Three days now since Easter Sunday, and it still doesn’t feel much like resurrection. The calendar confirms that Easter has occurred. The liturgical calendar, too, says it’s Easter Season. My husband and I “attended” the Triduum liturgies—Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil. We watched them from our home, streamed from the Archdiocese.
On Holy Saturday, we witnessed the new fire, the celebration of light at the Easter Vigil. We listened to the story of salvation history. We heard the bells ring at the Gloria. We listened to the Archbishop’s words about resurrection in the context of a pandemic. We renewed our baptismal promises, and we followed along as the service continued with the celebration of the Eucharist. No organizing the music ministry for the Triduum celebrations this year, no personal practicing, no rehearsals, no church attendance. Just the two of us, in our home, part of a virtual community of more than fifteen hundred people.
That was Easter? But it still feels like Lent. Although the sun rises at 6:00 a.m. now and it’s still daylight while I’m cleaning up after supper, I wear my winter coat, boots, gloves and a toque for my afternoon walk. We are at home, not visiting our children. Our lives continue in letting-go mode: letting go of cuddles with our grandkids; letting go of the work community; letting go of visits with friends; letting go of community gatherings. Doing our part to flatten the curve means that Lent continues—for weeks. We are still in the tomb with Jesus, longer than at any time in my memory. Millions know that tomb much more intimately than we do. They experience a much more daunting impact: illness, the loss of loved ones, job loss, business shutdown, income constraints, family stresses. Heart-rending loss. Despite our collective eagerness to reclaim normalcy, we hear even this morning that we will be in the tomb for weeks more.
Easter, beyond simple marking of the day and experience of the ritual, will come. Resurrection will be ours. One day, when it’s safe for all, we will leave the tomb. We will rise again. Resurrection 2020, though, can be a surprise, if we let it. In the Epistle for the Easter Vigil from Romans (6.3-11), we heard: “Just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in the newness of life. For if we have been unified with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” Resurrection is about NEW life. Not just life. Not normalcy. Not the status quo. Resurrection is about transformation, change, surprise, pushing boundaries, things never being the same again.
So, the big question for me is, Will we allow this resurrection to realize its full potential impact on us individually and as a society? How could we seize the opportunity?
1. Find personal meaning in the suffering and the isolation.
As Ross Douthat writes in the New York Times, “bringing meaning out of suffering is the saving work of God.” He adds, “even people suffering the sharpest pain will eventually leave the graveside and begin life after tragedy. And in both cases — suffering that endures and suffering that belongs to the past — there is a need for something more than solidarity as time goes by; there is a need for narrative, for integration, for some story about what the pain and anguish meant.” (my bold). We need to know that our time in the tomb has significance. Does a return to the normal or the status quo respect the suffering in the tomb? How does what we learn translate into a visible, tangible difference in our choices, our behaviour, our values, as individuals and as society?
2. Resist attempts to ease back to the status quo.
We will be vulnerable to attempts to continue as we were, unmarked, unchanged. Julio Vincent Gambuto, writing in Medium, anticipates “the greatest campaign ever created to get you to feel normal again.” How can we resist that pull? He suggests that we “take a deep breath, ignore the deafening noise, and think deeply about what you want to put back into your life.” It’s like cleaning out a corner of the house because there’s been a water break. Might as well take advantage of the necessity to sort through what’s worth keeping, and redesign the space to make it more comfortable and more functional. “This is our chance to define a new version of normal,” Gambuto continues, “a rare and truly sacred (yes, sacred) opportunity to get rid of the bullshit and to only bring back what works for us, what makes our lives richer, what makes our kids happier, what makes us truly proud. We get to Marie Kondo the shit out of it all.”
3. Maintain an openness to what “new life” and resurrection could look like.
Sonya Renee Taylor, performance poet, activist and transformational leader, is emphatic: “We should not long to return [to a normal]” that, she says, “normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate and lack.” New life will mean re-envisioning the value we attribute to the roles in our society, and the congruence between those priorities and the resources we allocate. All of us have an obligation to consider paradigms that might be outside our normal or habitual view of the world. That, too, will be painful. But it’s part of getting out of the tomb. It’s the essence of resurrection. The light could be blinding.
