EASTER MONDAY, 2016
by John S. Gardner
The first Lent and first Easter since my parents’ deaths has been a time for reflection, a time of necessary busyness, welcome return to work, and sometimes enforced rest (“I am become like one who has no strength,” Ps. 88:4), a time to think and a time to wait. With an early Easter on the calendar, I had barely put away the Christmas lights before Ash Wednesday reminded me and all of us that we are dust and to dust shall return. A cold snow in February covered their graves, still outlined with lines of sod freshly lain in early winter that had not disappeared, despite the cemetery’s superb efforts at maintenance. Wreaths, from a wonderful organization – and my parents would have appreciated that they came from Maine – and from a wonderful friend of the family, graced the area where they rest among military comrades they had never known but with whom they shared the destiny of near time in death.
Grief is not linear – one of the most difficult lessons this very linear thinker has had to learn – but nevertheless bears reflection. As my parents’ lives recede into the past like a marker on a road, holidays and holy days punctuate the present with reminders of the past. Last Easter a shared meal at an assisted living facility; this, their rooms are occupied by others, with other families sharing the same concerns and anxieties as I did a short while ago.
How, then, to think in this season? “How shall I sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” – a land sometimes of grief and sorrow, not one of milk and honey. Can I forgive myself for the past? Or is all this merely another part of the human condition in a fallen world, for which I can more easily accept forgiveness? The line between mourning for others and mourning for oneself can be very thin indeed.
Pleasant memories arise from giving away or discarding old objects, clothes, and items from my childhood, providing a welcome measure of balance to the portrait of the last few years of their lives marked by infirmity. Jesus healed the sick and raised the dead. My parents were not truly cured in the physical sense but very much received, I believe, His grace and healing in other ways. But for the living, the cure of memory alone is insufficient. This is not what Easter is about, however much I remember decorating the tulip tree in Connecticut not yet bloomed or the search for chocolate eggs.
I walked through the events of Holy Week, remembering Jesus’ life, passion, and death and remembering as well how my parents encouraged my faith and devotion from a young age – the best gift they could have given. On Good Friday, how can I not think of death? A death in an advanced country with sophisticated health care cannot compare to the pain and brutality of ancient crucifixion – yet at the same time how can I not compare Jesus’ death to those of my parents and friends? Jesus was truly human and truly died. He shared our humanity even to the extent of death, and in this lies our hope (Philippians 3:10-11). But gratitude and theological reflection and the mere forms of worship are equally not enough if that faith is not lived out in the more difficult moments.
The hymn “Go to Dark Gethsemane” takes us through the last hours of Jesus’ life, from the “bitter hour” of loneliness in the garden to the false accusations at the trial and finally, to the Cross, where the singer is advised: “learn of Jesus Christ to die.” Both my parents learned those lessons, I believe, through suffering in their last years which they bore with great grace and fortitude, not in every minute of the struggle, of course, but throughout its course and most especially at its end. I am grateful for that. In the Eastern church in which my mother grew up, the liturgy includes the prayer “a Christian ending to our life, painless, blameless, peaceful, and a good defense before the fearful judgment seat of Christ, let us ask of the Lord/Lord have mercy.” In great measure, they each had that death, too, for which I am also grateful, and I believe they have that defense as well. Each resisted death for the right reasons – because life comes from God and is good– and shocked doctors and caregivers with both physical and inner strength, but, so far as I could read their minds and words, accepted it with peace when it came.
Still, that cannot be the end, otherwise Christianity would be little more than a feel-good, do-good version of Stoicism. No, it cannot end at the Cross; it must end at the empty tomb, with the Risen Christ greeting Mary Magdalene and visiting the Apostles, saying “Peace be with you” and giving them the Holy Spirit. Resurrection life – not this life, but still and more really life. That is the only point that makes sense of it all, that conquers grief, that “puts death to flight,” in the words of the Exultet hymn. And not because moving beyond grief is “that’s what they would have wanted” but because it is true and real and right. This is Easter.
John Stott wrote: “We live and die. He died and lives!” That must be our hope as well. Hope for my parents and friends and all those who have died, hope for those who mourn at this time and will in the future, hope for those of us who live in Christ.
My very best wishes for a blessed Easter to you all.
Alleluia! Christ is Risen! The Lord is risen indeed, alleluia!
John S. Gardner is a writer living in Alexandria, Virginia.