Easter, in the Anglican way, lasts for seven weeks–longer than Lent, longer than you think it’s going to, longer than Advent and Christmas put together. It’s the time between the Resurrection and Pentecost. Pentecost is when the Holy Spirit arrives on the scene and everyone can go back to the long season of boring green and the endurance of ordinary time. Ordinary Time is easy because it’s just where you are, whether you are feasting or fasting. And seven weeks of feasting peters out, for me anyway, by the third week.
One reason that Easter season is so long is because it is extraordinary. And, being so, we need more time to assimilate the strangeness of the celebration–that of all the things that have died, this time it is death itself.
I write a lot about death because it’s easy for me to find it and see it. I don’t live in a place abounding in life. New businesses aren’t exactly springing up on every corner. Babies are a rare charm. Winter lasts for most of the year. The brokenness of the town and the people is easy to see without making any effort at all. Add to that the nature of our work, which is to face head on the broken, death dealing nature of everyone’s heart and mind–both in a general way and in the peculiarities of the individual–as well as the gentle rhythms of a life that means often saying no to the self, and death is often on the menu.
And then sometimes, people do die, even in Easter Season. Two, if you’re counting, for us at Good Shepherd, within weeks of each other. And so, even when you are meant to be keeping your eyes on the glory of Jesus’ resurrected body, the body that shows, incontrovertibly, that death has been trampled down like so much dust, that life eternal for the unified soul and body is what’s on the menu, you still are holding a cupful of grief that cannot possibly understand that reality.
Death is the worst thing ever, even when we try to think of other things that might rival its wretched blight. When someone dies, there isn’t anything you can do any more. Until the moment of death, to say something obvious, there’s time. The human person can strive for control, ambition, hope, and things like happiness and community. But when the last breath is drawn, all that goes away and God is the only one who can say anything about anything. We lean over and try to look into the darkness of a person utterly and irretrievably gone, but we can’t do anything, except turn around and try to pick up the pieces.
It’s why the disciples didn’t believe that Jesus was alive, on Sunday morning, having seen him die on Friday. They weren’t born yesterday. You can say you’re going to rise again, but, well, that doesn’t make any sense. Death is final. So there you are.
But Jesus was alive. And continues to be so, whether we feast or fast, whether we understand it or not, and at some point, his first shattering destruction of death will take over the whole cosmos the way each individual death does now. The loss of control that we fight so hard against will be the reality of everything all at once, as God suddenly sorts it all out and puts it back together.
And now I will go and thread together all the tendrils of grief, because it’s all I can do, and I have to do something.
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