Easter Sunday
Christus resurrexit!
Do you remember celebrating Easter as a child?
As someone who grew up in a Polish Catholic family, I remember dyeing eggs at my grandparents’ house, going to church on Holy Saturday to bless the food, seeing the altar at Mass covered in flowers, twirling in my Easter dress, the baskets of babka and rye bread on the table, the love my mother poured into making my Easter basket every year.
But as I got older and gained more life experience, as well as a deeper understanding of my faith, my focus switched from celebrating the miracle of the Resurrection to thinking, “Oh thank God, Lent is over. Now I can have [blank] again.” Lent became my focus. Penance became my focus. The darkness and evil in the world around me became my focus. And I lost my Easter joy.
It’s easy to remember celebrating Christmas as a child. After all, it’s a feast about shouting loud from the rooftops that God humbled himself to take on human likeness, not as a fully grown conquering hero, but as a tiny, poor child. But would we even be celebrating Christmas if there were no Easter?
The solemnity and pageantry of the Easter Triduum is beautiful, a time to rend our hearts even more at the incredible sacrifice and tragedy of God dying a brutal death, though he was innocent, for the sake of his people. And no, taking joy in one Sunday Mass won’t solve all the problems of the world. However, if we are going to fully enter into the sorrow of the Triduum, we must also fully enter into the joy of Easter Sunday.
One of the most radical things about Christians is joy. Joy doesn’t mean we run away or ignore the sorrow of Good Friday, but that we know the story doesn’t end there. Joy doesn’t mean that we stuff down our negative emotions, but that we have hope in the midst of our suffering. Joy isn’t something we can fake, but it is a gift of the Holy Spirit that is readily available to us if we ask.
This Easter, let us run with the joy of Peter and the other disciple toward the empty grave to strengthen our own faith that Jesus is risen indeed. And then let us run with the joy of Mary Magdalene to tell others all about it.
“We are an Easter people, and alleluia is our song!” - Pope St. John Paul II
Vicky Wolak Freeman is a writer and copy editor based in Atlanta and the communications manager for the Catholic Artist Connection. You can find out more about her here.