Right now, there isn’t a sentient person on the planet who doesn’t feel some acute anxiety. We’re facing a disease, and as indicated by the ER’s around the world, it’s a disease that doesn’t care if you have plans or responsibilities. We have lost so much, so quickly. We’re left trying to figure out how to live without the comfort of routine, or distraction of busyness. As my sister quipped with a meme on Facebook, “This is the Lentiest Lent I’ve ever Lented.” And it’s true. We only have who we are and who we’re with, and the basics of what must be done.
In Maryland and Virginia, we just received the stay at home order from the governors. My oldest son and I took a state approved exercise walk and started fantasizing about the explosion of joy that might take place when the rate of infection has stemmed. We created the beginnings of a playlist, and imagined the feast, the invitations, everything. We’d have every neighbor haul out their grill or put out a table with whatever food and drink they wanted, and we’d walk the neighborhood, feasting, meeting people face to face from what are unsafe distances, both physically and personally. We’d pet every dog and know everyone’s name. We’d no longer be comfortable with remaining firmly detached and removed from all around us. We’d want to have the scratchiness of relationships that require something of us and stretch us in the process.
The celebration would need to go on a while, to wipe away something of the long wait, the long anxious time of unknowing. There would be every kind of music, and every kind of game. There would be sports and silliness, photos would blow up the internet showing all the joys we could muster; water balloons, Frisbees, wiffle ball, a 5k for people who like such things, skateboarding and bicycles, and balloons, champagne and chocolate, ice cream, cookies and pies. We hit upon 50 days for the world to celebrate and then remembered, that’s what Easter is. It sounded wonderfully fun and lavish, even absurd and yet, we longed for it to be even a possibility. We celebrate 50 days of Easter to the 40 days of Lent so that we know in our hearts, however long the Lent of our lives, Easter is always more.
Right now, Easter feels like forever away, the same way it must have seemed to the apostles as they assembled in that upper room, as it must have been for Mary Magdalene as she walked to the tomb on what turned out to be the day of Christ’s resurrection. We are in the time of Christ’s passion up to the fourteenth station, waiting for the promise of Christ’s return, for Easter to burst forth as we will once this plague passes, into the world rejoicing, because our enemy, sin and death, has been defeated.
We still must hold to our fast from the ordinary. We still must restrict our movements and protect everyone by denying ourselves in these ways, but we’re to do so with a smile, remembering Lent happens, and is necessary in all our lives, now more than ever, but Easter is, and we are an Easter people. So be people of joy, even in the midst of all these restrictions and worries, because we know, this is not the end.
