It Matters: The Beautiful Day is Coming

And Then There’s Sunday

“Each spring flowers bloom and butterflies emerge from their cocoons and weather warms and grows sweet and nights shorten and days lengthen and the sun washes us in its golden light, and Jesus is killed. Each year He is nailed to rough-hewn tree, arms spread wide to welcome and hold every transgression that ever was or is or has been or will be. Each year there is blood and violence and crucifixion: pierced side, punctured hands, bruised ribs, stabbed feet, torn scalp in the name of great, unfathomable love. There comes a Friday, draped in black. A Saturday, gray and weeping.

And then there is Sunday, adorned in white.”

The above passage is an excerpt from a prose piece I wrote for Easter. It was meant to be one of many art pieces submitted to be printed on invitations for my church’s Easter services — but of course we, like many other churches and temples and mosques the last several weeks, held services online. I’m grateful for technology, for smart tvs, phones, laptops and tablets that allow us to see our pastors and priests and rabbis in high-def from our own homes. I blatantly disagree with the obtusely defiant churches who insist on having services in person during a pandemic because they feel the social distancing measures and lockdowns put in place to keep us safe are actually an attack on their faith and religious freedom (just to be clear: THEY ARE NOT.). I know these changes are important and necessary, and I’m grateful to see so many people actually taking the necessary though sometimes uncomfortable, inconvenient steps to keep others safe.

Still, I can’t deny that Easter broke my heart this year.

Here in California, at least, Easter was cold, gray, and rainy. I got dressed up to sit on the couch. My mother made a great meal that my family and I ate together in a melancholy silence. We didn’t get to gather at my grandmother’s house this year and I didn’t see my cousins or their children. I didn’t get to see Easter lilies lining the steps of my church or the great crosses draped in white and purple linens. These absences didn’t ruin the day—it’s clear that a celebration doesn’t lose worth just because the act of celebrating is different. But it did impress upon me how different life has become in just a matter of weeks and make the vague looming future that much more uncertain. It’s been just over a month since “Safer At Home” has been in place, and to no one’s surprise the order has been extended another 30 days. I, and I’m sure many others, are expecting it to be extended even beyond May 15, and whatever this summer is going to look like, I know a sense of lack and isolation will permeate it.

Already we see reports swirling where health experts and governors are looking into the far future predicting concerts and conferences and other large public gatherings may have to be postponed until 2021 or even 2022. Right now, there’s no telling what the new school year will look like. What upcoming weddings will be like. What we will do with our dead now that we’re unable to properly lay them to rest. Social distancing, the fun new phrase that will likely never leave our collective psyche, may have to continue “on and off” far longer than any of us were expecting when it was first uttered and explained. Normalcy feels like the door at the end of a long hallway in a horror film—you know the one, where the person is running towards it but it only moves farther and farther away? And true to those scenes in some of the creepiest films, the person eventually wakes up in a cold sweat, heart racing from chasing after something that was always out of reach. But we aren’t waking up from this—at least not in a “it was all a dream!’ way (no matter how much we wish that were true). And, though my musings have probably sounded pretty dire up to this point, I don’t actually think normalcy is as far out of reach as it feels.

So, where does this all leave us?

For me, it takes me back to the trinity of Easter: a Friday draped in black, a Saturday, gray and weeping, and then Sunday, adorned in white.

Maybe you can see where I’m going with this: I think it might be too early to say the world has entirely left the devastation and death of Friday, and I’m sure we haven’t yet reached the jubilation of Sunday, and there is still far too much flux to call this moment the quiet grieving of Saturday. But, we know that every trial has a beginning, middle, and end—a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Every hardship starts and stops, even if the stopping is not how we envisioned or anticipated it to be.

At least for right now, we are stuck in a type of liminal space where we are trying and the world is scary and everything feels awful, but Sunday is coming. We don’t know how long it will be before we see this Sunday or what it will look like when it gets here, but it’s coming, growing closer with every cured patient, every medical breakthrough, every act of kindness between neighbors, nations, colleagues, and friends.

Perhaps this, the month of April in the year 2020, sits between the end of a dark Friday night and the dawn of a silent Saturday morning where, yes, we are reeling from what and who we’ve lost, but we are also on the cusp of healing and verdant celebration. Perhaps the world on the other side of this pandemic is closer than we think, offering us space to restructure ourselves, our perspectives, the way we live.

We can only hope.