Eastertide

My first attempt at a Thought For The Week for Eastertide got the thumbs down. The problem was my own ignorance. Who knew that Eastertide was different from Easter? It may be that I’m the only reader of this newsletter to be so lexically challenged, but somehow I doubt it. So, for the benefit of fellow unenlightened ones, here is what I have learned.

The official end of Lent is the evening service on Maundy Thursday which commemorates the Last Supper (though, confusingly, in some traditions it continues till the vigil that begins on Saturday evening). Maundy Thursday is the start of the Easter Triduum, three days which end late on Easter Sunday. Eastertide is the fifty days from Easter Sunday to Pentecost, a celebration of resurrection and new life.

So say many online resources, though the Church of England website is not very helpful, since it has no specific information about either the Triduum or Eastertide; perhaps Anglicans are gradually altering their practice; perhaps in the best traditions of Anglicanism it remains vague so as to embrace as many variations in use as possible. My own error, and the variety of ways the days before and after Easter Sunday are interpreted, made me consider how my own experience of Easter has changed over the years. Like most children, my main focus at Easter – which back then was, so far as I was concerned, just a single Sunday in spring – was chocolate. Eggs or rabbits, it hardly mattered and in good years there would be a garden egg hunt as well. Sometimes hens eggs would be hardboiled and decorated. One year some clever adult blew the contents out of raw eggs so they dangled, painted and delicate from a small ‘tree’.

During my years of drifting and searching, Easter was always a single day, brightened by a few particularly good hymns – as was Palm Sunday. It wasn’t until becoming a part of St James’s, more than twenty years ago, that I began to participate in the whole sequence of services from Palm Sunday, through the Bethany meal on Tuesday, Maundy Thursday and, wonderfully, the three hours silence and contemplation with words and music of Good Friday, culminating in the Dawn Eucharist and the joyous celebration that is the Easter Day service. For many, I know, the vespers and overnight vigil on Holy Saturday is a high point, as Tchansia so movingly wrote in the previous Thought For The Week. Over time this great liturgical pageant has come to feel to me like a single act of worship, a slow journey of faith that encompasses every emotion and dramatic twist. A time to immerse myself in the extraordinary narrative and try to be open to whatever might be revealed.

Do I believe that everything happened just as the Gospels relate? That’s the wrong question. What I do know is that if I allow myself to inhabit the brutal, enduring, complicated, searing, vivid, troubling, luminous and inspiring narrative, I may just be fortunate enough to glimpse the transcendent reality that is beyond all stories and words, even if just for a fleeting moment. And that is enough.

Which leaves the question of how should we enter the season of Eastertide, this fifty days – nearly two months – that take us to the gifts of Pentecost. New life and resurrection joy. Right now, with such unspeakable horrors reported hourly on the news, and my own terrible sense of impotence, it feels easier – more appropriate even – to stay with the darkness and despair of the three hours at the foot of the cross. In some churches the seven days after Easter Sunday is called ‘Brightness Week’. Tell that to the millions being bombed and maimed and driven from their homes across the world. Celebrating resurrection joy can feel like an insult to their ongoing trauma. And to the pain of those in here at home, in this city, who are suffering hardship of whatever kind.

But that is exactly why it is so important. For me, the abiding message of the Easter story which I hold onto through Eastertide and beyond, is not that thanks to the resurrection we are all going to live happily ever after. Of course not. The enduring truth is that no matter how bleak, no matter how dark, no matter how much the forces of stupidity and hate seem to be gaining ground in our world, the light of love and hope can never be, will never be, extinguished. At the bleakest times of my own life I’ve always been aware of a tiny, fragile spark of light that never quite goes away. Yes, we grieve still for the heartbreak and destruction around us. But we know that even a single candle can transform the blackest night. We know that hope is an action, not an emotion. And in Eastertide we hold onto the certainty that whatever the horror, God’s love remains, steadfast.