There’s always a letdown in this Octave of Easter– or, at least, there is for me.
Sometimes it even makes me cry.
All this talk about Resurrection and glory, but we’re still here on the ungodly mess that is the fallen Earth. Once in awhile, at the Easter vigil when we’re all singing our Alleluias, I feel carried away to Heaven, but the rest of the Easter season can tend to feel sad. He is risen, and I’m not yet. That’s something that’s going to happen, but for the moment it hasn’t.
I don’t know if that’s just my weird quirk, or if other people feel like that– in ordinary years, I mean. But I think that many of us might feel like that this year.
We are trapped in our homes. We can’t see our family or throw a party except among ourselves. The feeling in the whole world is grim and terrible, traumatic. That terrible death toll doesn’t seem to have peaked yet. People are dying right and left. And in the middle of it, we can’t even go to church. We can’t take solace in the sacraments– I haven’t even received the Eucharist in weeks.
Here it is, the octave of Easter, and we can’t even have the Body of Christ.
I know an Orthodox priest on social media, who’s still waiting for his Easter to come a week after ours. Today, he mentioned, At the dismissal time the priest dismisses the congregation by saying “You have received the food for the journey.” Usually the Journey lasts one week and we return. But this time journey is longer. Lord’s bread will keep us full.
That’s what I keep meditating on.
The last time I received the Eucharist was Saturday, March Eighth, in the middle of Lent. I felt a little too sick to go to Mass, not with anything contagious but with a moderate case of my usual fibromyalgia aches. It wouldn’t have been wrong to stay home, especially since I knew I’d be taking the buss to the vigil and walking back. But felt like I couldn’t stay away, and I went. There weren’t any low-gluten Hosts, but there was a celiac chalice, and the priest knows me by sight so it wasn’t difficult to get in line and receive from it. For some reason I took an extra big gulp.
It doesn’t matter that I took an extra big gulp. Christ cannot be divided; even the tiniest taste of Holy Communion is all of Christ. But I took a gulp.
And very few of us had another chance to go to Mass after that. Easter Sunday has come and gone, and we can’t receive the Body of Christ. But Christ is still here.
The gulp of Holy Communion dissolved in my stomach, but in a different way it’s also still here. The Spring of Living Water that the Samaritan Woman in the Gospel didn’t know to ask for is welling up inside of me, always, until I have the chance to top it off at Holy Communion again. That’s a silly way of talking about it. All human words are silly and inexact when we try to talk about something like the Eucharist. But it’s something like that.
There is, still inside of you, a Spring of Living Water that you can drink from whenever you wish. You can’t feel Him with you right now, but that Christ you received is still here. Christ is still with you.
There is still a Resurrection that began at the tomb thousands of years ago, and that also began at your baptism, and in another way it won’t really happen until the return of Christ and the Resurrection of the dead. This festive time of year is like a birthday celebration for that Resurrection, but the Resurrection is always here. And the good thing about things things that are real, is that it doesn’t matter if you can’t feel them just now.
The message of Holy Week is that Christ is not separated from us, no matter how deeply we suffer– no matter how nightmarish, how traumatic, how scandalous, how pointless, how embarrassing, or even how boring our suffering is. Even if we should descend into Hell, He is there. The message of this Octave of Easter is that the suffering is not the end. All of this has a meaning, an ending and a redemption. It’s going to get better, and it’s going to be worthwhile. You will be happy, and that happiness will not go away. Even if you’re still feeling the trauma of Holy Week, that trauma will end.
The message of Easter is that all our hope was dead and we were crushed, we hid in isolation in the upper room, the women in mourning could not even find the Body of Christ and they felt even more abandoned than they had before. But then Christ came to us, saying “Shalom,” and everything in the world was changed.
If you feel nothing but letdown, trauma and exhaustion right now– that is also an Easter feeling. That is the feeling of the women who went to the tomb and could not find the Body of Christ.
He is still with us, and our sorrow will be turned into joy.
Image via Pixabay
Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross.
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