A Season For Fullness

Perhaps the oldest greeting/response of the Church comes from the wondrous news of Easter. The greeting, in Greek, is Christós anésti (Χριστὸςἀνέστη) meaning ‘Christ is Risen!’ The response is Alethós anésti (Ἀληθῶς ἀνέστη) meaning ‘Truly (He) is Risen!’

The use of this greeting and response has been traditional during Easter for centuries.

The Easter season lasts for 50 days, but the first eight of those days are the Easter octave. The seven days following Easter Sunday are considered “little Easters” that override other feast days and Friday austerities.

72 Years of Easters

This year marked my 72nd Easter, though I have no memory of the first four or five. Even so, I had easily absorbed the Christmas message at a very young age. As mentioned in previous essays, at three years of age my imaginary friends were the Baby Jesus along with Crocodile (from Peter Pan). Apparently I would refuse to get in or out of the car unless someone held the door for my friends.

But there are no family tales about the toddler me and Easter. I do remember dying eggs when I was about five or six, but oddly enough, I don’t remember chocolate bunnies much before I was around eight or nine.

I take this to mean that Easter was generally more religious in nature than Christmas in my family of origin. Of course children play a large part in turning Christmas into visits from Santa Clause and presents under the tree. Easter, however, is not – or at least was not in my childhood – subjected to hijacking by the “have fun and get stuff” dynamic that colored Christmas as far back as I can remember.

This lack of dilution carried over into my adulthood.

After a typical late adolescent, self-imposed exile from Christianity, it was the coming of Lent, combined with a trauma that reawakened considerable existential anxiety, that pulled me back into active faith. I started by attending a Sunday evening Mass while keeping an extremely low profile. By the time Holy Week arrived that year, however, I was becoming more and more dependent on weekly Eucharist.

A Well-Timed Renewal Series

One reason for this increase was a visit to our parish by a pair of monks who presented a week-long series of evening talks. Sometimes it seemed to me that the talks had been designed to clearly articulate issues that were blocking my full re-entry to Christian life. But they also provided answers and ways to handle those very issues.

I went from creeping into the back pews to sitting near the front of the nave. I also found myself getting involved in preparing for the parish’s first Agape Feast after Sundown on Easter Eve.

At the time I thought I was having an unusually blessed run-up to Easter. But over the years that followed, I found that this particular Lent was extraordinarily blessed for many of the parishioners. Many parishioners, from long time stalwarts to recent newcomers, were returning in fear and trembling.

That was over 50 years ago, and I now understand that it was a classic example of the Holy Spirit blowing where He wills.

The Wind Blows Where it Wills

“Do not be amazed that I told you, ‘You must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it wills, and you can hear the sound it makes, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:7-8).

Jesus said this when the Pharisee Nicodemus visited him secretly at night. But Nicodemus seems not to have understood the answers to his questions. This is because the answers were so different than what he expected that he was unable to hear them clearly enough to understand what Jesus was saying. Nicodemus was incapable of understanding what he was being told because it just did not fit into his preconceptions. As the Psalmist warned in Psalm 115, he had ears but could not hear.

I have come to understand that the Parish’s plan, back in 1974, came less from the deliberations of the parish leadership than from a strong, irresistible movement of the Holy Spirit.

The week-long study/renewal event was a part of an effort to involve the Parish in a Lenten-long preparation for Easter. The Holy Saturday vigil service (the community’s first) followed the first Agape feast after night had fallen.

But it was the Holy Spirit who moved in different ways in different people to bring about a holy Lent culminating in one of the most joyous and powerful Easters that I have ever witnessed. I was not the only person transformed that season. In the years since I have seen that Lent echoed inside the lives of those people I shared it with back then.

Fleeing to God

In his 1890 poem The Hound Of Heaven Francis Thompson tells the story of someone who fled from God while pursuing peace of soul, even while God pursues him until he surrenders to the realization that there is neither replacement for (or escape from) God. The poem concludes:

Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He Whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.

The word “dravest” meaning “to drive away.”

But what happened in that West Texas parish in 1974 was not a community of people who fled God. Instead, the community was somehow called into an obedient seeking and surrender to a deeper relationship with God.

Somehow a collection of very different types of people from the parish all found a tighter and deeper relationship with each other and with Jesus that year. People like me, still in college and not really integrated into parish life (at that point), and elder parishioners of stature inside the community found a deeper meaning in Lent. People who had been members for some time but whose connection was more social than spiritual also felt the call of the Holy Spirit.

In John 3:21 the great evangelist tells us Jesus said, “But whoever lives the truth comes to the light, so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God.” In this particular season of fullness, a group of people were drawn into closer connection with God, and consequently with each other.
Yes, the programs for that Lent were indeed planned. But those plans were inspired by more than the ambitions of the parish leadership.

And if there were any doubt, the greetings and responses of these people that Easter were clarion clear and unambiguous: Christ is Risen! The Lord is Risen indeed!

Thanks be to God!