Becoming Easter

It has been a joyous Easter season so far on many levels. I have felt confirmed and renewed by the liturgies, the spring weather has been pleasing, I am happy to be home after long travels abroad, and a very dear friend is entering the Church next Sunday and I have the honor of being his sponsor. Many great blessings are converging for me at the moment.

Lent did its work on me too, simultaneously convicting me of my own sinfulness and leaving me acutely aware of the general brokenness of the world while also longing for a metanoia, a renewing and rebirth in Christ. A couple of simple, small things happened in last night that vividly brought to my awareness this collective brokenness and need for redemption.

As I was leaving a restaurant with some friends and casually crossing the street to my car, some stranger in a passing vehicle yelled at us hatefully for crossing too slowly. Then, as I drove home, a passenger in the car ahead of me casually tossed a beer can out the window, littering the beautiful country roadside.

These things combine to leave me with a slightly sick feeling, struck by how selfish and unfeeling people can be. And these are tiny, insignificant slights compared to the real injustices and cruelties that are unleashed in the world every day. Above all, I am left with a powerful sense of my own self-centeredness. The judgment I feel toward others is quickly turned inward as I contemplate the thousands of little ways I also show disrespect and a lack of caring. The violence, intolerance, and apathy of the world is reflected in my own tendency toward all these things.

The world is broken, and I am convicted by this brokenness with a great desire to do something in response. Of course, the only place I can effect any kind of healing is within my own heart, and even then only by divine grace.

So this week I'm meditating on the Paschal Mystery as it applies to my own heart, a heart that is broken like all the rest, and how I can let the joy and peace and compassion and understanding and tolerance and acceptance and reckless love of Easter become my gift of healing back to myself and to the world. This is no easy meditation, but I'll continue to sit with it and see what happens. It is the only response to a broken world. It is the testament of Easter.