The Joys -- and Sorrows -- of Our "Easter Season"

We continue to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ during this Easter Season. It is a celebration which is eminently congruous with the journey of faith that we continue to undertake, adhering to our Risen Lord, and living as human beings in history with all the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of each day.

We understand that God's plan is mysterious. We pray, we offer, we try to embrace the sacrifices of daily life. What people often don't understand is how this deepens the sense of tenderness toward the world and other persons, toward the little things; how it makes for a greater awareness of the preciousness of life and all the gifts and the joys that God has given us in this world. [Painting: William Congdon, “The Risen Christ,” 1966]

We believe that the Mystery — God's love — is at the depths of everything, as the Creator of all things. God is the transcendent and (for that very reason) foundational Source, Sustenance, and Fulfillment of every "piece" of reality, of every apparently precarious fragment of truth, goodness, and beauty that draws our hearts from moment to moment. We meet everywhere hints of an undying goodness, a "reflected glory" that constitutes the inner reality of created things, but always as signs that move us "onward." We find nowhere to "rest," nothing that remains in the passage of time, nothing we can grasp and manipulate into a tool with which we might construct our own narrow satisfaction. Created things are gifts on our journey, awakening gratitude and joy and a mysterious longing that can "hurt" for reasons we do not comprehend.

We are made for God "alone." Who is this God? He is Love. He pours out Himself in love, and He has taken our humanity so that we might be conformed to His immeasurable glory — this God who is goodness and love, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, this Father who sends His Son into our history, to fulfill all things in His Spirit.

We wrestle with the passing-away of all things in this world, with their "limits" and with our own limits. And yet with Him nothing is lost, nothing! The human heart asks for everything. And the Father's love in Jesus Christ is the answer to our heart's plea. There is no "disappointment" in the embrace of His Love.

Resurrection. Our destiny is a transfigured life forever with the Triune God, and it is a fulfillment in which we shall find everything anew; the gifts of God and the promises they awaken in our hearts are destined to be fulfilled. God and His world are not lying to us as we journey toward this destiny. The joys are a promise that the present sorrows and struggles and sufferings are not in vain. Through everything, we are being changed and "formed" for what we cannot yet imagine. We live in hope. [Painting: William Congdon, “Moon Over Cascinazza,” 1971]

Resurrection. Then we shall love and be loved. There will be no more tears, no more separation, no more of that sense of division between joy and suffering which is the arduous pilgrimage of this life — a life in which the more deeply we possess something, the more deeply aware we are that the ultimate value and beauty of what we possess remains beyond us and beyond our power to grasp. We cry out for what we love in faith and hope, we beg for that "ultimate" that becomes more evident and more painfully absent in the measure that we really risk in loving and in allowing ourselves to be loved in this life. 

We find this especially in the experience of loss. Loss seems to contradict love, and even though we know it is part of God's plan, part of our journey; even though we know that it is shaping and preparing our hearts for that fulfillment God has promised us, it remains — in this life — a kind of darkness, an absence, a wound in the heart that is itself a sign. It is a sign that our destiny remains before us, that we have not yet attained happiness, that our life remains a state of begging before God. 

This "absence" and this begging are impressed upon our poor, weak, forgetful, sinful hearts as our hearts are broken and remade. This mysterious renewal can be accomplished even in the midst of experiences that must not frighten us — anger and frustration, helplessness, distress, the lament of "Why, O God?" Misery. Grief. 

We must not be discouraged. We must abandon ourselves to the One who knows our hearts and is greater than our hearts. We must let our hearts pray. We don't understand these groanings, but God does. Let the heart pray. "The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. And he who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the Spirit" (Romans 8:26-27). 

Resurrection.

Grief need not become despair. It is the Spirit moving our hearts to speak to God in ways that are beyond our thoughts and understanding. Grief is poured out. Grief is prayer. It does not forget that God is faithful to His promise. The Resurrection of Jesus and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit are at work in our hearts, even within the greatest sorrows we endure in the time of our Easter Season.