BREAKING OPEN THE ORDINARY

By Sandy Prather

“I teach my sighs to lengthen into songs.” Theodore Roethke

It almost feels inappropriate, these stirrings of joy within my heart. I know only too well that Easter light has not yet triumphed in the world. From the global to the personal, it is clear that darkness still exists. Despite our proclamation that Christ has conquered death, wars continue to rage and people still die. Poverty and homelessness did not disappear magically with the lighting of the Easter fire. Discrimination, violence and oppression did not cease with the singing of the Exsultat. Illnesses still shatter lives and broken hearts and dreams still tear families apart. My beloved church remains engulfed by dark clouds of scandal and abuse and people of faith are disheartened and disillusioned. One friend, contemplating the state of affairs, remarked, “It feels like we haven’t come out of the tomb. Easter hasn’t arrived.”

And yet, and yet . . . when I throw open my window in the morning and the bright blue sky beckons, the fresh warm spring air fills my lungs and the bird songs delight my ears, it is indeed joy that I feel. In the midst of the chaos and confusion of the world, there are glimpses of grace, intimations of resurrection and Easter joy arises, unbidden and unquenchable.

This is, undoubtedly, as it should be. Joy, true joy, should be the hallmark of the Christian. Yet often it is not. “Where do you want to spend eternity?” Mark Twain was asked. “Heaven for the climate,” he replied, “and hell for the company.” Gloomy, dour, dutiful and resentful, Christians tend to be, in Richard Rohr’s telling phrase, more guilt-based than joy-encountered.

This might be so because, unfortunate as it is, we seem to be more comfortable approaching God though our sin rather than through God’s redemption. The Christian framing story of Fall, Remorse, Redemption and Salvation too often gets stuck on fall and remorse. Reflecting what we feel is a necessary humility, our primary focus becomes our unworthiness. “We are worms before God,” we cry and we grovel in the dust.

The truth is, it takes a greater humility to open one’s self to the gifts of redemption and salvation than to focus on one’s unworthiness. The Easter message that Christ has both redeemed and saved the world and all that is in it comes as pure gift and grace and it takes a humble heart to accept that. We stand, dumbstruck before the enormity of the gift, unearned and unmerited as it, unable to comprehend it, let alone allow it to enter our hearts and transform us.

This, as Dominican Timothy Radcliffe points out, is one of the reasons why Mary Magdalene has such problems recognizing Jesus in the garden. It is not only Jesus she has to see — she has to see a whole new world. Her eyes and her sanity are in question when the One whom she knows to be dead stands before her calling her name. Her understanding of the accepted order of things, the normal way of the world, is thrown upside down.

What she, and we, are invited to see is that the kingdom Christ announced is now definitively here. Despite appearances, death and sin ARE conquered, and even here, even now, God is redeeming what is dead and writing straight with crooked, human lines. Seeing with Easter eyes is to see that God’s kingdom is indeed the deeper reality, sourcing and underpinning our everyday world.

Herein lies the source of our Christian joy. Joy is not about naiveté or the denial of sin and darkness in the world. It is not about ignoring pain. Nor is it the same as “being happy.” When William Barclay says, “A gloomy Christian is a contradiction in terms,” he doesn’t mean we have to be running around with rainbows on our socks and dotting i’s with happy faces.

But happiness is a feeling that comes and goes as all feelings do. It can be influenced by such things as the weather or the amount of money in our pocket. Emotions are transient, responding to the circumstances of the moment and that’s OK, but it’s not what we’re talking about.

Rather, joy, in the deepest sense of the word, in the theological sense, is rooted in God. Described as the capacity of the soul/heart/spirit to be grasped by something outside itself, it is a faith-filled intuition that glimpses Easter truth beneath the surface of everyday reality.

Such joy comes to us in every conceivable experience of life: music, drama, art, nature, or the delight of physical activity. We know joy in moments of insight, forgiveness or creativity. The experiences of love, sex and childbirth can open us to joy. Joy cannot be contained or controlled, manufactured or summoned. Beyond human understanding, there is the element of the mystical in joy. Free, unrestrained and unsummoned, it is truly of God and should not be denied.

The tragedy, though, is that we do deny joy. Henry Ward Beecher points out, “There are joys which long to be ours. God sends 10,000 truths which come about us like birds seeking inlet, but we are shut up to them and so they bring us nothing, but sit and sing awhile upon the roof and then fly away.” What we focus on determines what we miss. We can be so preoccupied by the darkness that still haunts our world, real and serious as it is, that we cannot see with Easter eyes.

“I teach my sighs to lengthen into songs,” Theodore Roethke writes. Even as we sigh with the sorrows of a world not yet fully redeemed, we are invited to sing our Easter songs of joy.

Prather, BEd, MTh, teaches and facilitates in the areas of faith and spirituality and is the director at Star of the North Retreat Centre in St. Albert, Alta. She and her husband Bob are blessed with four children and 10 grandchildren.