Easter is an impossible story written for everyone who has ever felt the sting of death and wishes for something more.
Easter is a story for anyone who loves life so much that they pray for more life to follow.
Easter is a story for people who can envision a loving divinity that will not be conquered by evil.
It’s a story of love that never dies;
of immovable objects that get tossed aside;
of happy endings in a tragic world;
of miracles;
of faith rewarded and vision restored and hope justified.
-Patrick O’Neill
We are turning the corner into the season in which our winter’s perseverance ideally has the kind of payoff Patrick O’Neill describes. Whatever your religious or spiritual tradition, an easy payoff often arrives through nature’s signs of spring: new life all around. I hear relief from my neighbors in the northeastern and upper midwestern United States; they are talking of crocuses peeking through melting snow and delighting in the warmth of the sun.
In my part of the western US, there is the unsettling knowledge that winter as we’ve previously known it never came. A 50+ year old Ponderosa pine was recently uprooted in our yard from the damn wind. The weather is fire watch weather and I’m hoping that my slash-burning neighbors remember how interconnected we are.
So many things that we hoped would connect us have had the opposite effect. Cami Téllez, a founder of Devotion (an AI influencer marketing agency), tells New York Times journalist Lauren Jackson, “Historically, devotion was directed toward religion, civic institutions, and local communities. But over the past century, cultural shifts — the decline of in-person social capital, the rise of mass media and television, and now social media — have rewired where people find belonging.”
I’m at the mercy of the weather and my neighbors, who may not even feel a sense of obligation to me or anyone else anymore. So what happens when we don’t get a payoff when we need it, or the payoff that we think we need? We persevere.
What is Spiritually Healthy Perseverance?
I typically think of perseverance as a head-down, feet-shuffling exercise: don’t look ahead, keep moving, and get through it. There will be better times. I have tenderness for how human that image is, but I don’t think it’s as spiritually healthy as I strive to be for such a long road as this.
A great deal of the problem is the ignorance that comes from being head-down. When we are facing difficulty it can feel better to steel our inner resolve, keep our eyes on our own paper, and try to not let this (whatever it is) change us. There’s also an impulse I feel to want to ignore the interruptions to my real life, which I am doggedly marching towards, when the interruptions are my real life.
However, I have a paradoxical prayer I’ve been experimenting with when I want to grit and buckle down and get small: God let this change and shape me. Help me learn to grow bigger than this. Help me to be more free, more generous, more open-hearted and loving.
I’m working with this prayer because I think we need to be informed and even changed by our tough circumstances to create the future world and selves in which we want to live. I think this requires two strategies: one for the everyday and one for the big picture.
Joy is Now
On the everyday level, it’s accepting that you’ll never be “through it” so Joy is Now. It’s resisting productivity and optimization culture because it lies that you can get to the good stuff when you’re “done.” It’s realizing that the only people that don’t have a to-do list and laundry are dead people. It’s finishing something and asking “What’s next?” instead of dreading that anything is next. (Sidenote – if you are dreading every next task, this is helpful information and a career or lifestyle change may be in order, if possible. Dreading each next case was important information for me as a lawyer).
Hope, Faith, and Love
On the grander scale, 20th century American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s words help me get big:
Nothing worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing that is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing that we can do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.
These words encourage me not just to lift my head up and look around (Joy is Now) but to look ahead with my companions and together envision what isn’t even there yet (Hope, Faith, and Love). These words encourage me to see from the inside out.
So – where do you find yourself as spring unfolds? We just returned from a 2,000 mile road trip and I’ve been listening to my favorite spring song. I’ve also been working with clients to experiment with being everywhere all at once by having them find a happy childhood picture of themselves and then meditating on the ways they are the same person as that sweet little kid. It can be a time-traveling exercise that makes you feel caterpillar, cocoon, and butterfly at the same time. Write me and tell me if you do this, or about anything.
