Are We There Yet?
Easter starts with a cross.
I can’t distinguish between the sufferings of the last four years. The grief I feel for the transitions, restrictions, illness, necessary hinderances, financial hardships, and delays of this period clumps together in a knot which rejects any effort of mine to separate out discrete solutions for any particular part.
Am I tired because my hormones have been a mess for three years or am I tired because of two interstate moves and a major remodel or am I tired because I jumped into a rigorous homeschooling program for which I had no training or natural aptitude or am I tired because my selfish desires are being burned out of me? The knot responds, “Yes,” and sits there, refusing to leave and refusing any action towards resolution.
It binds up every part of me, and I don’t respond with joy to any situation like I once did. My life seems less colorful. It’s hard to find me buried in this knot.
When I examine my conscience, the sin of acedia, loosely defined as grief about doing our duty, keeps coming up for me. This superlayer of grief in the midst of my actual pain glues this whole mess together. I can’t do anything about any strand of the knot because I don’t want anything to do with it. It’s exhausting to even think about it, and I’m already tired.
So, I did what any good Jesus-geek does. I researched. I read. I listened. I attended seminars. I discussed it with my spiritual director. Nothing budged my sense of this acedia stealing away my joy and keeping me from dealing with the knot.
Then, someone told me that acedia often shows up as flipping forward in a book to see how many pages are left. A teacher assigns you a chapter in a book and, instead of reading it, you flip through the chapter to count the pages and moan over the length.
As I listened to that description, I visualized how often, even while reading novels I chose myself, I count the pages left in a chapter or in the rest of the book. The entire time I’m reading, I’m thinking, “Only x number of pages left.” Acedia infected my pleasure reading with the same questions you hear from kids on a road trip, like “Are we there yet?” and “How much longer?”
Acedia is grief at the road trip which is life, and it slowly took all the joy out of my life.
So, for Lent, I gave up counting pages in the books I read. I stopped counting the pages in the next chapter. I didn’t allow myself to figure out how many pages were left in the book.
Even though I thought it would be simple, I failed several times. I flipped forward to find the end of the chapter and struggled to enjoy my reading without a production goal in mind. “I really am pathetically human,” I found myself chuckling again and again as I sat with the humility of my failure.
Besides these shared laughs with God over my littleness, looking back over Lent, I realized that the quantity of my reading declined without the desire for achievement constantly pushing me. (That’s an interesting thought: how the desire for achievement, to obtain trophies, can paradoxically be a kind of post-modern, mind-numbing acedia.) Without a page count in mind, I haven’t even picked up a book in the evening as often as usual. I’ve worked on other goals. Talked more to my children. Taken longer showers. Gone to bed earlier.
The quality of my reading, my own chewing over what I’ve read, and my conversations about reading have all increased in enjoyment. I’m deep diving into a few good books and loving all that I notice in those books as I slow down.
As the acedia lifts from this one place in my life, a new bud of joy emerges. The wood of the cross blossoms into new life.
Easter Sunday, for me, feels more like this new bud, delicate, fragile, and surprising, than the flower in full bloom. Easter Sunday reveals only in part. Easter Sunday awes us with revelations which we can’t entirely understand. Easter Sunday shows us the beginning.
This makes more sense to me than waking up on Easter Morning in FULL CELEBRATION MODE. After Lent, after Triduum, on Easter Sunday my joy is infant. Celebrating a miracle as it comes into the light, while I’m on my knees, raw and broken and grieving, seems like it’s more likely to scare the miracle away than to give it full space in my heart.
Christ does come full and entire on Easter. Death completely broken. Heaven totally open. And miracles do happen, every single day, which point out this truth in healings and reversals. People put down the bottle and never pick it up again. People go in for a scan of their cancer and doctors can find no trace of it. People go to their knees in the midst of a eucharistic procession and His Presence utterly transforms their entire lives.
But that’s not the usual miracles of an everyday life. Children grow up, continuing to breathe and learn and love. Rent keeps getting paid. The beginning days of freedom from a habitual sin blossom into years and decades of an entirely different life than the one which entrapped you.
Easter can dawn slowly over a lifetime. And I rarely know on Easter Morning the good work that Christ has been creating in me during the seasons before. I see the outline dimly. For me, this Easter morning, a bud of new joy hides among the books I love. Alleluia.
Easter isn’t just in the grand evangelical gesture, the wearing of Easter dresses, or the abundant display of the Easter dinner; though, of course, it very much is in those things. The foundation of all the usual ways of celebrating the season is joy. In the end, Easter hides in the joy of all our work.