The Hardest Holiday

Easter is often a time of disappointment for me.  It is easy to plunge myself – or rather, to let myself be absorbed – into the ineffable joy of the Paschal Mystery, especially if I am able to attend a liturgy which at least attempts to reflect the eternal glory of that momentous occasion.  But Easter, most notably the later days of Easter week, is sad because of my incapacity to communicate this joy.  Joy is deepened and broadened when shared; but this joy is, after all, ineffable.

This morning I thought about trying to teach my son, who is only a year old, something about Easter.  He is smart enough to learn names and places and customs attached to them, people and animals and what they do, but I realized that he is not old enough to understand Easter.  Why not?  Little children can understand Christmas to a degree; that a special little baby was born.  They can understand Halloween, that we dress up and act like other, special people.  But not Easter…

 My little child cannot understand Easter, not because it is terribly complex, but because he does not yet know enough about evil.  The joy and glory of Easter is only as apparent to us as the evil which Christ has overcome.  A one-year-old knows almost nothing about evil:  He may know hunger, discomfort, loneliness, and fear, but his experience only amounts to small samples of these things.  He does not know real pain, abandonment, anguish, or dread.  He does not know what it is like to have no home, no good friends, and no clear future.  He does not know what it is like to worry about feeding his family.  He does not know what it is like to look into the eyes of someone he loves, knowing beyond all doubt that this will be the last time.  Any child can feel love and gaiety and excitement, as they will, hopefully, in these coming days of Eastertide, but it will be a superficial gaiety compared to what the adult Christian should know.

That an adult has a greater capacity for joy than a child points to another, more important fact.  The reason that adults have a greater capacity for joy is precisely because they understand and have experienced more evil.  In regard to the Easter Mystery, which is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the joy which it demands has no limit.  This is because the Resurrection marks the limit of all evil:  Jesus Christ, Who is a flesh-and-blood human being, has set the precedent for all other human beings.  No matter what evil things happen to us, we have our own resurrection to look forward to, merited by Jesus Christ on Calvary and established in that moment which Easter continues to remember.

An epithet which I would like to see propagated (which perhaps would come second in weight only to “the Death-Slayer”) is “the Hero of Eternity.”  Our present culture understands the notion of ‘hero’ well and continues to pay homage to heroes living and dead, as well as creating an abundance of literature and popular mythology which centers on heroes.  Whatever heroes we honor, be they warriors or martyrs, we understand their heroism according to their deeds and accomplishments.  In another essay, I expounded the idea of Jesus Christ as the greatest hero of which can be thought, because of the greatness of His victory.  What I did not realize at the time, however, was the infinity of that victory.  This comes to light against the darkness of evil, because without evil there can be no hero.

We are reminded of the famous line from the Exsultet, remembering Adam’s sin, “O Happy Fault, which merited for me so great and glorious a Redeemer!”  Our dark and evil history becomes a cause for joy and consolation in the light of Christ’s redemption.  But this truth runs as deep as we dare to look.  Many of us honor veterans, if not for what they were called on to do, at least for the horrors they were made to endure:  We know that we cannot fully appreciate their sacrifice because our empathy only goes as far as our imagination.  The same holds true for police men:  We would rather not know what they have to see on a regular basis, even for our sake.  Every Good Friday, though, we are forced to imagine the suffering and death of Christ.  For most of us, it is at worst mildly uncomfortable.  We know we cannot fully appreciate what Christ endured.  But what about what Christ has transformed?  We are reminded that His passion and death were not arbitrary, and not even regretful, but that there was something about that episode which changed the meaning of evil.  Before we were redeemed by Christ, we deserved everything we got:  That is, because of our despicable nature, because of our sin, we could not even begin to repay what we owed to God nor endure enough hell to buy our way out of it.  After Christ’s redemptive suffering, every evil we endure is a bonus; something to add to Christ’s suffering.  Evil now means something. 

And neither can it be the end.  If there is no depth to man’s capacity for evil, then Christ’s Goodness is beyond any depth.  There can never be enough evil to undo what Jesus Christ did.  But it is more than this:  A child cannot know the joy and hope of the Resurrection because he does not know or fear death.  But as we grow older and more weary, so grows our joy.  The more fear and death there is in one’s life, the more cause one has for joy and hope.  Every evil that can be imagined becomes fuel for the unquenchable fire of God's Love:  The more we have to worry about, the more that bothers us, the more that evokes our anger and indignation, the more cause we have to be dizzy with excitement.  The greater our slavery and subjection, the greater our salvation.  This terrible world is not merely a place to practice patient endurance, it is a counterpose; a dark backdrop to eternity, which will shine all the brighter on our darkened eyes.