I sat through last year’s Easter vigil service sandwiched between my husband, my one year old and my four-day-overdue belly. My husband and I joked that this service could be key to kick starting labor—the climactic energy of the celebration beckoning the baby to come join us. Instead, as is often the case in the last days of pregnancy, I felt the stillness of a baby who had finished being hemmed in the secret place where only his Creator could see. In no rush at all.
Any mother who has gone past her due date knows the feat it is to make it out of the home—to do almost anything at all—counting down the days and minutes until baby’s arrival. But nothing was going to keep me from attending the service that marks my favorite day in the Christian calendar. I knew this is what my soul needed after a long season of waiting. This was the culmination of a long season of Lent and a long nine months of leasing my body to this child.
The 40 weeks of pregnancy are not unlike the 40 days of the Lenten season. Although there is joy in carrying life, there is also sacrifice. Pain. Discomfort. Both a physical and spiritual stretching. Both are reaching towards the final end of new life and hope. This was my third year attending an Easter Vigil service but my first time doing so while carrying another little life inside. Because of this, my heart seems to feel the heights and depths of the service even more than usual. I feel the weightiness of sin and separation from God. I feel the longing for hope. This is the broken world that I am bringing my child into so the words in the service feel especially poignant.
In preparation for what’s known as “the great noise,” we chalked my bag full of all the noise makers we could fit: an old antique dinner bell, a steel door bell that had fallen off our apartment door, my one year old’s xylophone, my husband’s antique train whistle.
The service begins dark, quiet, looming, as if we’re still buried in the tomb with Jesus, sitting in the discomfort of not knowing what comes after the grave. We feel the ache the disciples must have felt after saying their goodbyes, after seeing Jesus’ limp body being taken down from the Cross. I wonder if there has ever been a heaviness, a quiet despair, like there was that day. Mary, mother of Jesus, grieving and Christ’s friends waiting for some sort of secret wisdom to know how to proceed. The scent of Mary’s anointing alabaster now mingled with the scent of sweat, blood and tears.
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The only light in the cathedral comes from the small candles we hold in front of us, lit from the main source of the Paschal candle. Christ is the light of the world (Jn 8:12). We proclaim the truth that though the world is wracked with darkness we will not fear, for we hold within our hands—our very souls— the light of Christ.
The service culminates with a loud exclamation that, “Christ has risen, alleluia!” The instruments are taken out and the otherwise quiet, serene cathedral booms with the jubilee of people who are, indeed, free. The somber tone that cast its shadow over the church the past forty weeks transforms suddenly into gladness. All of God’s redeemed join in one rambunctious cheer to praise the Resurrected One. Flags and fabric doves are raised up and clergy circle around each aisle of the church. The sounds of a hundred bells echo off every piece of wood and brick. A service that began in quiet grief ends in edenic gladness. For a moment, however brief, we get a small taste of heaven. I am always surprised at the emotion that grips me in this moment. Is it the fact that I am surrounded by God's people, all broken but being healed? Wounded, but filled with hope and all singing the same song? Is it that I don't praise like this enough? Do I forget how my story ends?
The ancient celts spoke of “thin places” where the veil between heaven and earth is slight;moments as if you could reach through the paper thin barrier to the other side and taste the marrow and aged wine at the wedding feast of the Lamb. This cathedral, here, tonight, on April 3, 2021, is a thin place. We are so close to the beating heart of God.
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I often feel numb to the spiritual realities at play around me. I think of Lewis’ famous quote: “...like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” I am master mud-pie maker. My desires are dull. Jaded. I am tired. After two years of babies back to back and sporadic sleep, I feel unable to feel the weightiness of it all. But during this service, for a brief moment, I am there with Mary and Salome at the empty tomb, running to tell the others and my heart swells with theirs, feeling the possibility that death and despair do not have the final word. Even just for a moment my senses are awakened and I remember that I was made for joy—abundant, childlike, tambourine joy. I catch a glimpse of the end (or just the beginning?). It’s like I’m at the marriage supper of the Lamb and we’ve all brought our wounds, our broken stories, our tired minds and frail hearts to the table to feast and be nourished by the restored communion. We are all so different and yet in that moment all I can feel is the similarity that marks the whole congregation. We are all so much the same. All different stories leading to the same triumphant end. All desperate to hear our names uttered by the mouth of Jesus. Desperate for a final place to call home.
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On Easter Sunday that year, the day after the vigil celebration, my niece Ruth Evangeline would make her entrance into the world. Her small, fragile body would be laid on the bed and an oxygen mask put upon her face as her mother and father watched attentively, holding their breath as they waited for hers. Hours after bringing their daughter into the world, my sister would be in the back of a car with Ruth headed to the NICU for immediate attention for complications associated with her Cystic Fibrosis. Just days after being born, Ruth would undergo major intestinal surgery. She would spend her first days on this earth—168 days to be exact—tethered to chords and lulled to sleep by monitors.
What does Easter mean in light of this? Where are the healed scars that I can trace my trembling hands over when I feel open, gaping wounds? Why can’t I hear the sound of the bells and the “alleluia’s” reverberating from every corner? What does Easter mean for my sister who lays in bed without her newborn baby next to her? What does Easter mean for every grieving parent?
This was the hardest Easter. This was the Easter of Ruth Evangeline. The gift we so eagerly received only to feel so far when she was finally given. This was the Easter where I wept with my sister over the exhaustion of this world and the frailty of the body—over the unbearable distance between mother and daughter. Wondering together if we trust God’s word that He does not give us more than we can bear. This was the Easter of sharing bowls of lovingly-prepped postpartum stew as my baby lay napping on the bed—not hers.
This was also the sweetest Easter. The Easter where friendships comfort took form in tattered quilts,quick visits and coffee dropped-off on the front porch; shared meals and shared grief and shared questions of why such a kind Shepherd allows such sorrow to enter. The birth of Ruth and the hours that proceeded felt like a thin place, too. A different tone than the Easter vigil service and yet the same Comforter was present. The promise of the Resurrection felt nearer and dearer than ever before.
I love Malcolm Guite's poem for Holy Saturday:
“He blesses every love that weeps and grieves
And makes our grief the pangs of a new birth.
The love that’s poured in silence at old graves,
Renewing flowers, tending the bare earth,
Is never lost. In him all love is found
And sown with him, a seed in the rich ground.”
So this is the great consolation. That our grief is but a seed. That we do not see the full picture yet. That we will one day harvest what is sown. And in the meantime, as we sow our tears, the Savior of the world, the Master Gardener, carries the plough next to us. We are not alone in this grief. There is friendship in our frailty. Jesus’ resurrection did not cancel the cross or make the pain insignificant, meaningless, forgotten. Nor do we find hope in denying the suffering, but in embracing it. We find the sweetest fellowship in the midst of it, because of it.
This Easter I remember the words of George MacDonald: “We know how much of the pleasures even of life we owe to the intermingled sorrows. Joy cannot unfold the deepest truths, although deepest truth must be deepest joy.” Just as we had to travel the road of Calvary with Jesus on Good Friday and through the darkness of Lent, so the joy of Easter cannot be unless we first name our sorrows. We cannot skip the darkness. Bitter and sweet are always intermingled.
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Author Beldon Lane writes: “Divine love is incessantly restless until it turns all woundedness into health, all deformity into beauty, all embarrassment into laughter. In biblical faith, brokenness is never celebrated as an end in itself.”
One day, my Ruth Evangeline will sing with lungs full of air and a body strengthened, healed, by her God. She will not need enzymes with her portion at the wedding feast of the Lamb. One day all mothers who have wept silent tears over the manifold troubles of this life will be comforted. We will turn around like Mary Magdeline and hear our names and we will know immediately the voice that speaks it. We will trace our fingers across His wounds and watch our open wounds heal before our eyes.
Allelujah!
