Easter Week, and the Great Fifty Days

(Isn't this a great picture of the Lord and the children?  I can't find an artist attribution anywhere.  If this is your picture, I apologize!  Please either send me your name so I can credit you or ask me to take it down, and I will.)

I like the picture that I've headed the post with because 1) He looks Jewish and 2) He looks 30, instead of 50, like in some older European depictions and 3) the kids look like they're laughing, instead of constipatedly holy and 4) He's laughing.  (C.S. Lewis quotes an author I can't remember who says that we're never told, in the Gospels, that He laughed.  But as Lewis points out, it's difficult to read the Gospels and not conclude, and tremble in the conclusion, that He smiled.)

In the church year, we've entered into what's called The Great Fifty Days, the time between Easter and Pentecost.  This is the time when the risen Christ was with His disciples, appearing to them periodically, before His ascension (we have a Sunday to commemorate that), and then from the time He ascended until He sent the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.  Liturgically speaking, the whole thing is one big Feast.

This probably has less meaning for most Protestants, who don't usually fast seriously during Lent.  Perhaps one of these years I won't be nursing or pregnant during Lent and I can undertake a mealtime fast; this year I should, probably, have fasted from something else--like the computer, maybe, or coffee.  But I didn't; every year a baby step.

Especially is Easter Week a feast--that's why Easter baskets exist, actually, they're filled with candy and other things that you are typically supposed to avoid during Lent.  (In the olden days they'd have component ingredients in them, things like eggs, butter, and sugar.)

We tend to forget about Easter after Easter Sunday, but I encourage you to spend the whole week thinking about Christ's Resurrection, and celebrating it.  And if that means eating the ears of a few chocolate bunnies, well...

See, the Lord likes feasts.  He instituted several under the Old Covanent, in perfect rhythm with fasts.  Fasting serves to point out where we are too attached to something that isn't God--whether that be soda, television, or food itself--and to force us to seek the Lord instead of our distractions.  Feasting is the expression of our astonishment at the abundance of every kind found in God.  To feast every day blunts its point, and to fast every day blunts its point, but when we alternate feasting and fasting on God's rhythm, we learn something important about him and about ourselves.

We're rhythmic creatures--we get tired, go to sleep, and wake up refreshed, only to do it again.  We eat, get hungry, and eat again.  And we live in a rhythmic world--we have spring, summer, fall, and winter, every year.  The sun comes up, then it goes down.   We tend to be surprised by the rhythm in our emotions and abilities (I have a good writing friend who periodically writes to me, worried, because he is hitting a dry spell in his writing inspiration), but we shouldn't be.  After all, our souls and spirits are tied to bodies, and our bodies definitely have peaks and valleys.

This is one reason, out of practicality, to attend to your body the way you'd tend your car.  It's more difficult to be cheerful and loving when you're hungry, underslept, and vitamin-depleted.  On the other hand, it's entirely possible to be well-fed, overslept, and still vicious, selfish, and lazy.  In the U.S. we are probably not in danger of too much acesticism; much more likely we to need to discipline ourselves to go to bed (and get up) at a decent time and to eat our vegetables.  This is also, incidentally, an excellent reason to, if you find it helpful, use prayers you can read out loud (or at least pray out loud), so you can engage your ears and mouth in prayer.  Our souls are tied to bodies.  God made us that way.  So as much as we can engage our bodies in our devotion, we will find it helpful.

(By the way, in case anyone wonders, bodies are good.  God invented them.  We're not gnostics here.)

But disciplining our spirits to pray when we don't feel like it, and to worship God even when He doesn't give us a sweet emotional experience, has a surprising payoff.  Sometimes He gives us an experience of overpowering sweetness.  The equivalent, if you like, of a feast after a fast.

So this week, let your body do what your spirit sometimes does-- enjoy the Feast of the Lord.

Cheers,

Breanna