So What Does Easter Mean to Me???

"You'll understand when you're older"

We've all heard the phrase from our parents growing up. It is usually accompanied by a teenage eye roll and a spoken or unspoken (depending on the recipient) eye roll. For my own self, at least, these words came to ring true once I had the wisdom and maturity to accept them, begrudgingly or not, months or years after they were said.

After many Lents and just as many Easters, these words are ringing again in my ears. I wasn't quite sure why they popped into my head, only that their arrival was strangely coincidental with the start of the Easter season, that most joyous of time periods that follows the most grave of liturgical seasons.

Between mimosas and general congeniality, I was struck with the contrast between Lent, in which mortification and self-denial is preached and promulgated, and Easter, the greatest liturgical season, marked by joy and (most often) indulgence. After forty days of discipline, it seems a bit out of character for the Church to mark the culmination of sorrowful sacrifice with joyful and accepted indulgence. I realized I was thinking about it all wrong.

For me, Lent makes a lot of sense. I've written a bit in the past about how I view self-discipline and willpower as paramount to making the human person who he or she is meant to be. I fail in this regard daily, but at least intellectually I recognize the value in forming oneself to be extraordinary. We all have that capability, and I believe we all recognize it in small ways almost daily. Going to work when you don't feel like it, not eating that second brownie, biting your tongue when you are jumping to retort...These are all extraordinary things that are amazing acts of will, be they in the smallest choices. 

After an entire period of time cultivating that extraordinary mindset, why then does Easter foster, well, the ordinary? After all, anyone can eat candy and drink mimosas, surrounded by a general happy landscape, whether you are a Christian that lived Lent or not. Easter is much more popular than Lent.

What I finally realized is that Easter isn't a season of indulgence that rewards and reverses the work done in the ascetic weeks of Lent. It isn't a step backward after the two steps forward of the last forty days; it is the fulfillment of those forty days.

The resurrection of Jesus is the fulfillment of His entire life. Without it, Christianity is worthless. In the same way, on a practical level for each and every Christian, Easter is the fulfillment of the entirety of what you did in Lent. Easter isn't about eating chocolate again if you've given that up, but about gaining the habit of strength of will to moderately indulge. It isn't about no longer praying a daily rosary, but of recognizing the beauty of that prayer by the repetition of it.

Easter does not make whatever lenten commitment you made no longer relevant, but it ratifies that commitment and incorporates it into your daily life. It is not a reversion to the mean, a recalculation to the path on which you were before Lent. It is a fulfillment and renewal of the change of path you chose for yourself. 

In this view, that Easter is the fulfillment and strengthening of your choices during Lent, your choices and sacrifices have meaning, just as the resurrection provides the fulfillment of the Passion. This comes across liturgically: on Easter Sunday, instead of the normal "Lord have mercy" sequence, Catholics renew their baptismal promises, fulfilling every year the choice that was once made for them with their own will and voice.

The reality of Easter, then, is a joyful embrace of and renewal of the parts of your life you decided to alter in the preceding days. Lent is the period where the Church says "You'll understand when you're older"... Easter is when you have grown in wisdom and maturity enough to take the training wheels off and fulfill that understanding going forward.

~Worley