Often we forget that Easter isn’t just a single day but a whole season. It lasts 50 days leading up to the celebration of Pentecost, another day of central importance in Christianity when we rejoice that God’s loving presence remains with us through the Holy Spirit after the life of Jesus.
We move through the rest of the year knowing that we’re never abandoned; that through joy and sorrow, loss and gain, we aren’t alone. Jesus is and remains Emmanuel (a word that means “God is with us”).
My wife loves to garden. and this spring, she’s been hard at work redesigning and planting, renewing and preserving the plants that color and enliven our home.
It’s such a vivid picture of the Easter season, and even our whole lives. With new life blooming around us and the earth beaming with signs of renewal, I’m reminded that Resurrection doesn’t mean simply protection; that salvation isn’t to be saved from, kept from, death or loss (think of Good Friday in Jesus’ own story). The earth’s blooming colors come through the cold, dark, winter, and only through that winter.
This week is a time I remember a deep grief in my own life – it’s a memorial. I’ll light a candle in the church, walk in the sun, listen to particular music that I always listen to at this time, and keep going.
And that grief that’s changed me, aged me, will meet a new day of spring again. Sometimes for long seasons, the soil lays dormant, sometimes there are no signs of life, but life sleeps deep in the roots, waiting for new birth.
All of us have experienced great loss in our lives, or if we haven’t, we will. Life is really a series of losses – each step, each breath, leaving behind the last one. But each one welcomes something new as well.
Each breath, each step, an opportunity for hope. and Christian hope isn’t about everything feeling wonderful all the time, or everything going our way, and it isn’t wishful thinking – “I hope it doesn’t rain today,” or “I hope I get that promotion.”
It’s a forward-looking faith. A leaning into another in trust, knowing that we live not only between our birth and death, but between death and new life; that though sometimes we may sit in the darkness for what seems like a lifetime, the light is shining somewhere, on someone, and it will someday greet us, too.
Hope doesn’t make our suffering more bearable. It isn’t a cheap salve to whitewash over our pain. But hope is alive in the midst of that pain because God’s love is rooted in vulnerability.
God in Jesus has entered that pain, loss, grief, even death, and touched it, embraced it, renewed it in mercy. Easter hope means God doesn’t just care about the nice, pretty bits of us, but reaches out to embrace the depths of our darkness as well.
Easter hope also means that we aren’t defined by those depths, they are not the truest things about us. We are loved into ourselves by a love that has gone through the most vulnerable points of our life and survived. More than that has welcomed them into a new, restored life.
Our grief and loss are a part of the Easter mystery, part of what Resurrection means in our lives. The winter might be in the past, but it’s still with us, still resting in the soil, somewhere in the roots.
And it still comes around, each year, each cycle of renewal, and each time so does our refuge and hope in the all-embracing love of God.
The Rev. Jarred Mercer is rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Newburyport.
