We may live in a Good Friday world, but we are Easter people
I have an Easter memory from years ago. I was living in Washington, D.C., and that year was a low point in my life. My older sister had recently died, and both of my brothers were seriously ill; my best friend was leaving town, and on top of that I was questioning my work.
In my journal that April I wrote, “Am I depressed?” When I read those pages now I laugh and shake my head. “Depressed?” That I even had to ask. In that long year, I thought I’d never laugh again, just as I thought I’d never again feel love, the joy of easy friendship or the satisfaction of good work.
I went to church that Easter out of both habit and desperation. I had grown up in a church-going family. It was what we did. And so, to honor the family that I was losing, I went.
I chose a big downtown church for Easter services — one with hundreds in the congregation — not daring to visit a smaller church, where I might have to speak to people or be embarrassed by my own tears. I wanted the paradoxical safety and anonymity of being in a crowd.
The minister that Easter Sunday said many things I don’t remember, but one sentence has stayed with me all these years. He said, “We live in a Good Friday world.”
That I understood. A Good Friday world is a world full of suffering, questioning, unfairness, trouble, mistakes, hurts, losses and grief. That was certainly confirmation of my life that day.
“But,” he continued,
“We are Easter people.” Those words stopped me cold. I was stunned to be reminded that painful morning that there was something other than what I was feeling.
My life was not instantly transformed; his words did not change the course of my brothers’ illness, nor give me answers to my questions. But the idea of being “Easter people” gave me a pause in my grief and the teeniest hope that there really did exist something other than pain.
Today all of the things that hurt so much back then have changed. As my brothers died, friends came forward to help. I began to write and publish. Months later I moved to upstate New York and a new life began with new love, new friends, new work and yes, of course, new problems.
What strikes me now is that this believing in “Easter” in the midst of “Good Friday” is as much about being an American as it is about being Christian. Americans are, by character, a people of reinvention. There is an extra layer of intention that we bring to “new life” that isn’t true even in other predominantly Christian cultures. As Americans, we are future-oriented, we look forward not back, and we are, for the most part, a culture of optimistic, hopeful people.
Our American value of reinvention shows itself in our politics and our policies, in our laws and in our myths. Even in our entertainment. We believe in treatment and rehabilitation. We invest in cures and self-improvement. We celebrate ambition and promotion. Sometimes we carry it too far, with too much changing of partners and plastic surgery, but at the core is our belief that we can make ourselves over.
The gift from that Easter service many years ago was the reminder that we are, by religion or culture, a people who believe in possibility. When our hearts are shattered, we are sometimes shocked to discover that there is joy as well as pain inside.
Out of the ashes of our mistakes, from our defeats and even our despair, we rise again in better lives.