Easter?

I’m looking back at the poems and service outlines from Lent and Easter zoom services in 2020. We were about a month into the pandemic and it felt like the life had been sucked out of living. The news was full of death and our lives shrunk to the size of our living spaces.

While our context has changed, there are new and pressing concerns about due process, emerging concentration camps, challenges to civil rights, the removal of DEI offices, information, and history, the over-regulation of education, ignoring the need for peer-reviewed information in making public health policy, and the list goes on. Just everything seems to be falling apart right now.

Reading what I wrote five years ago, the themes of grief, loss, and fear are the same, even as the situation is different. I was deep in a place of lament, trying to name all that had changed and every source of pain so that these feelings would not get buried and fester.

I’m not really feeling resurrection vibes at the moment. Easter has not arrived for me yet, but my prayers from that time still resonate for me today.

Dear God,
The cost of Lent was too high this year
We wandered in a wilderness we were not prepared for
Lost people we were not prepared to lose
Experienced new kinds of grief
And we are not yet out of the desert.

Easter is here and we are still here in the thick of it.
We were promised some kind of resurrection.
We are all Mary stuck at the empty tomb.
We have come to mourn our executed friend,
Filled with loss and love and sadness and fear,
Confused at what is happening now.
If there is a resurrection going on somewhere, God
We do not see it is happening here.

Help us to sit in this awful not knowing
Be with us in our fear and grief
Help us to resist easy answers to difficult questions
To trust that there is a next
To find strength to make the next better than the now
Amen.