March Threads :: Little Easters

Remembering the joy that lives within us all in the middle of Lent

Feb 27, 2024

Lent brings us through 40 days of confronting our own humanity. We struggle with the biggest questions and wonder about what really matters. We give things up. We take things on. We challenge ourselves to understand something about ourselves and God that doesn’t feel at all clear at this particular moment.

And yet, every Sunday during this season like every other sabbath day on the calendar, we rest. We pause from all of this hardship and praise. We rejoice anyway. As it is said, that every Sunday is meant to be a little Easter.

boy sitting on bench while holding a book — Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

“Fasting, is set aside and prayers are said standing, as a sign of the Resurrection, which is also why the Alleluia is sung on every Sunday.“
Saint Augustine

Every Sunday — even in Lent or maybe especially in Lent — there should be joy. There should be delight beyond all that anguishes and frustrates us but this isn’t some push toward happiness. We should be cautious of such efforts because as the Archbishop of Canterbury preached on Easter Sunday in 2011, “the deepest happiness is something that has crept up on us when we weren’t looking. We can look back and say, Yes, I was happy then – and we can’t reproduce it. It seems that, just as we can’t find fulfilment in just loving ourselves, so we can’t just generate happiness for ourselves. It comes from outside, from relationships, environment, the unexpected stimulus of beauty – but not from any programme that we can identify.”

Happiness is not what Easter is really all about anyway. If the gospel accounts reveal anything, it is that that joy came as “something of a shock.” It was the shock of it that surprised the disciples enough to shake them of their anxieties and fears enough to celebrate. It doesn’t erase the pain or hurt. It does not wipe away every year. Those things may still be there as

Christine Vaughan Davies

witnesses to beautifully in her invitation to Double the Joy. In his sermon, Rowan Williams urges us beyond the fluffy, fleeting possibility of mere happiness to realizing that “joy is about discovering that the world is more than you ever suspected, and so that you yourself are more than you suspected. The joy of the resurrection has a unique place in Christian faith and imagination because this event breaks open the shell of the world we thought we knew and projects us into the new and mysterious realm in which victorious mercy and inexhaustible love make the rules.”

This is the invitation I offer you this month. Find a tiny little glimpse of Easter by making room for more joy. As the archbishop encourages, you might find that this sacred task hast you doing a bit more cleaning. There are fears to dust away. There are doubts to cleanse or terrors that really need to be to mopped up. You might not feel that you have the ability to do anything to really make a difference but you can scrub down below that surface to recreate a foundation for joy.

Making room for joy could also be choosing to practice it and letting it surprise you by putting yourself in the midst of its possibility. Joy comes to us all in different ways but you might find that some of these might allow you to experience a little Easter on Sundays or every day this month.

This is not a complete list so I hope you’ll share in the comments the ways that you choose to practice joy this month. I hope and pray you surprised by how much joy lives within you. May you find more joy than you thought possible celebrating little Easters everywhere.

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