Yesterday wrapped up the end of Holy Week—Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Resurrection Sunday. A week of church services and liturgy and ritual and stories. This week Christians worldwide celebrated and remembered the central tenets of our faith, and yet, even though it’s a momentous week, it always sneaks up on me. I had all these plans for crafts and songs and story-time activities with my kids—things I had saved on Instagram and resources I downloaded to tell the Easter story in an age appropriate way, but I only got through one or two things. Maybe it’s because Easter is a shifting holiday—it never falls on the same date, like Christmas. Maybe because it’s slightly less secularized than Christmas—sure, a lot of people dye and hunt Easter eggs and give their kids baskets of trinkets and candy, but there isn’t an entire season devoted to its arrival. Still, even when I fail to plan, I can’t miss Easter entirely. I see signs of it everywhere. Earth bursting forth in its own resurrection. Daffodils and irises and day-lilies rising from the ground, opening up their rainbow of blossoms, where weeks before the soil lay bare and dead to the naked eye.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about wanting to have more focus. I was haphazardly reading at night, and I felt fragmented, my mind pulled in different directions by the concerns of books, by the content on my phone, by my kids’ appointments and schedules, and by the general needs of a family. I mused about reading only one book a month, and while I haven’t kept that boundary, I have started focusing my reading each month. In March, I read about spiritual rhythms, and now that it’s April, I’m focusing on books that have something to do with nature and the environment. My list includes World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments by Aimee Nezhukumatathil; Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet by George Monbiot; and The World as We Knew It: Dispatches from a Changing Climate, a collection of essays edited by Amy Brady and Tajja Isen. I chose this theme because Earth Day is this month, but it has also been fitting to think about the planet in light of the Easter season as well.
I appreciated a recent post by Meredith Miller acknowledging that it may seem trivial to be hyper-focused on Easter when the world seems to be on fire, especially if you only think of Easter in terms of colorful eggs and pastel bunnies. But that’s not what Christians are celebrating. When the world is on fire, as Meredith so beautifully states, the Resurrection is our hope. Just in the past two weeks, we’ve heard of another shooting, more dead children and grieving families, as well as the racially motivated expulsion of two young Black men from political office whose only crime seems to have been protesting our nation’s gun laws. (There could be other things going on that I’m not even aware of—I’ve tried to distance myself from constant news.) When so much brokenness still exists, it’s valid to wonder why Christians hope in Jesus. That’s the beauty and tension we hold at Easter: we believe in the mystery of Jesus’ bodily resurrection, where He shows us, in His body made whole, what is possible. We hope in the promise that one day all things will be made new.
Being outside in nature is always the place I go when I need to remind myself of truth—of my own smallness, of the blink of a life, of the possibility of a mystery greater than I understand. What I find in nature is resurrection modeled in creation itself. Caterpillars that entomb themselves and then emerge from their chrysalis as butterflies. Acorns planted in the ground waiting to burst forth into tiny oak trees. Perennial bulbs that lay dormant, buried in the dirt over winter, that live to flower again in the spring. Barren trees that sprout new buds—their leaves unfurl, bringing an oasis of green that stretches across the horizon. The world is full of wonder, as ordered and intricate as lace. We can give name to it through science, but much of nature remains a mystery to us. A mystery that speaks of its Creator, if we are willing to listen.
May you find stillness today, on this first day of Eastertide, and may you see signs of life all around, inviting you to rejoice.
With hope,
Jenica
Ordinary Joy
Words of Jubilee
Beautiful words from Lauren Winner’s book Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis:
“Some days I am not sure if my faith is riddled with doubt, or whether, graciously, my doubt is riddled with faith. And yet I continue to live in a world the way a religious person lives in the world; I keep living in a world that I know to be enchanted, and not left alone. I doubt; I am uncertain; I am restless, prone to wander. And yet glimmers of holy keep interrupting my gaze.”
A Few Good Things
My friend Mary McCampbell wrote an excellent piece covering the Tennessee Three, if you would like to read more about it.
Here’s a few fun ideas from Family Scripts for getting outside as the weather warms.
Check out Kayla Craig’s newest podcast episode on Resurrection & Renewal from Liturgies for Parents.
If you would like to support this publication, you can use the link below. Special thanks to my mother-in-law for watching the kids this week so that this newsletter could get published. As always, I am ever grateful for your readership. Feel free to share this post if you find it encouraging.
I love this post--and I so resonate with the need to ground myself in “the blink of a life, of the possibility of a mystery greater than I understand.” Thank you. ❤️