The Happiness Now
By Debie Thomas
Lent to Eastertide. It's the most dramatic transition of the liturgical year, and — for me — the most jarring. Agony to ecstasy, defeat to triumph, death to life — all in three short days. Most years, I stumble out of church on Easter Sunday feeling dazed, saturated, and exhausted.
In one sense, of course, this is exactly right. On Thursday, Jesus was betrayed. On Friday he died. On Sunday he rose again. There was nothing gradual or soothing-to-the-senses about Jesus' victory; the resurrection came so fast and so unexpectedly, it shook the first eyewitnesses to their foundations.
My problem? I stink at transitions. They do me in, and when they're too abrupt, I resist them. I dawdle and dilly-dally. I linger for as long as I can between what was and what is, because the messy in-between places are where I feel the most truthful, the most myself.
In the version of Christianity I grew up with, my in-between-ness was a problem. A shortcoming. Black was black and white was white. Good Friday was Good Friday, but Easter was EASTER. Or rather, EASTER!!!!!!!!!!!! Sorrow was something to overcome, and joy — the Christian's truest birthright — was supposed to be pure. Bright. Unalloyed. To muddle the two — to dwell in sorrowful joy or joyful sorrow — was considered unChristian.
But sorrowful joy and joyful sorrow are precisely what I felt during Holy Week, and they're precisely what I feel now. On Maundy Thursday, when the priests at my church stripped the altar bare, extinguishing all light, removing all ornaments, eschewing all color and softness — the grief I felt was torrential, but it was tinged with sweetness, too.
Sweetness because Jesus' willingness to be stripped bare — to experience such extreme vulnerability for love's sake — is precious and sacred to me. Sweetness because my own experiences with vulnerability are equally two-edged; it's when I'm vulnerable that I feel exquisitely alive.
On Good Friday, as I sat through the Three Hours, listening to reflections on the cross from my fellow parishioners, the sadness inside of me was deep, but so was the gratitude and the relief. I felt grateful to have a community of believers around me, sharing my sorrow. I felt grateful for the gift of liturgy, which at its best braces and grounds me, giving my trembling emotions a safe place to reside. I felt a shuddering relief as the third hour approached, bringing Jesus' long, unspeakable agony to an end.
On Easter Sunday, in a gorgeous church packed to the rafters, my heart soared when the choir started the service with Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus." It was with absolute joy that I recited the miraculous words my priest proclaimed again and again: "Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!"
When it was time for Communion, and people kept coming and coming and coming down the aisles, hungry for bread, hungry for wine, hungry for a hundred million secret things only God in his vast wisdom knows — time seemed to stop to make room for something eternal. I could almost see a banqueting table, long and laden with feast food. Hovering over the altar, I could almost see the strong, generous hands of God, offering the best nourishment possible to everyone who asked. Enough blessing, enough hope, enough life, enough joy — for the whole world.
And yet. Even at the height of that celebration, my joy was inseparable from many kinds of sadness. Sadness that my favorite liturgical season is over for another year. Sadness that Jesus' resurrection marks the near-end of his incarnate time on earth — an absence his followers still feel, two thousand years after his parting.
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CS Lewis and his wife Joy. |
Sadness that I can't celebrate holidays like Easter with my closest friends and extended family, who live too far away. Sadness that though my priest ended the service inviting everyone present to please come again the following Sunday, the majority of them — who attend only on Easter and Christmas — will not.
I'm writing from Maui this week, where my husband, children and I are vacationing for Spring Break. From the hotel balcony where I'm sitting, my view is breathtaking: pristine white sand, a startlingly blue ocean, and scores of palm trees waving in a perfectly temperate breeze. A few minutes ago, a pod of dolphins swam by, close enough for bold snorkelers to touch.
An island resort might sound like an odd place to contemplate joyful sorrows, but they're just as real here as they are anywhere else. Yesterday, we hiked through a landscape of bleak and forbidding lava formations — down to a blowhole that seemed to shower liquid diamonds every time a wave hit the rocks around it. Austerity and glory — inextricably bound together.
Later, we hiked through a rainforest that was so gorgeous I won't attempt a description. But it smelled exactly — exactly — like the India I remember from my childhood. Smoky, leafy, steamy… homesickness almost brought me to my knees.
Earlier in the week, we visited a museum, and I learned something of the island's history. There is pain here — the profound pain of a colonial past that can never be undone. I'm uneasily aware of the privilege that allows me to vacation in a place that knows the ravages of exploitation.
Right now my children — fifteen and twelve years old — are swimming, snorkeling, and exploring the beach without me; they no longer need my hovering. In their faces and changing bodies I see at once the babies they were and the young adults they're too rapidly becoming. In a few short years they'll leave home; my joy is shot through with sadness.
Lent to Eastertide. Death to life. Sorrow to happiness. Why are these movements so hard? Maybe what I need to contemplate is the fact that Jesus never shed the marks of his pain, not even when he burst from the tomb. After all, mine is a religion of paradoxes — Christians live by dying, receive by giving, rule by serving. Our job is not to collapse these paradoxes, but to honor their complexities, and live fruitfully within them. Jesus' resurrected body — his victorious body — still retains its scars.
In Shadowlands, a 1993 British film about C.S Lewis' courtship and marriage, his wife Joy Gresham, suffering from cancer, tries to prepare him for her imminent death. When she invites Lewis to name and process the separation that's coming, he refuses, arguing that an acknowledgement of his future sorrow will ruin their present happiness. But she disagrees, and corrects his black-and-white thinking: "The pain then is part of the happiness now," she insists. "That's the deal."
Later, after his wife has died and Lewis is lost in mourning, he finally recognizes the gift of her wisdom. His sorrow is bottomless, but so — he realizes — are the beautiful memories of the life they shared. "The pain now is part of the happiness then," he says in the closing lines of the movie. "That's the deal."Image credits: (1) The Times.
