Easter comes and goes too quickly. After Lent’s long weeks and all the services of Holy Week, Easter feels as short as an Ottawa springtime.
What if we could take more time and think of Easter not as a Sunday but as a season? Lent is a season of quiet preparation. For six weeks, we’re encouraged to find a practice, perhaps read a new book, pray more broadly and walk more slowly and humbly through the days of Christ’s temptations and his path to Jerusalem. Lent fits well into our late winter days when the light is growing but not yet warm. But what about Easter? What if it could last 50 days?
There are many traditions that mark Eastertide, a span of seven weeks between Easter and Pentecost. Tide is an old fashioned word for time, but I like how it suggests a coming and going, perhaps a pulling away and then the returning flood.
What if we could hold onto the dazzling good news of the resurrection, turn it in our hands and watch it catch the light? What would that look like in daily life? What new places in our lives might be illuminated if we could examine what it really meant to know that death was defeated? What new things might we do?
If Lent is about fasting, perhaps Eastertide might be about feasting.
In his book The Church in the Power of the Spirit, Jurgen Moltmann describes Jesus’ life as “a festal life.” It is life at a crowded table—not a table where we sit to escape from suffering and ignore the world outside, but a table where outcasts are included, where there is enough for all, and good wine flows when we only expected functional plonk. That’s grace, isn’t it? Healing happens when we know that Christ not only gives abundantly, but provides a feast that death itself cannot terminate.
Through Christ, our lives are the ongoing Easter feast. But it’s all too easy to let it slip past with our rush towards warmth, spring and regular life after Lent’s lentil soup.
So here’s my suggestion for Eastertide: Let’s eat chocolate.
Not the kids’ big-eared bunnies or all-too-gooey crème eggs or even the caramel ones, but good chocolate. Dark or milk as you like, and just one small square everyday between Easter and Pentecost. Don’t pop it in your mouth and reach for it mid-email. Take a moment. Taste. We could do this joyfully. Not as indulgence or for greed, or with any thought of fear or guilt, but as a new way of tasting the good each day. It would be a deliberate and slow practise to help the truth of the good news to seep into our hearts.
There is a wonderful sacramental moment in the recent BBC adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Pierre Bezukhov has been captured by Napoleon’s army. Hungry and hopeless as Moscow burns, Pierre sits despondent in prison. Another prisoner shares a small crust of bread with him, and when Pierre takes the bread and too quickly begins to eat it, the other prisoner stops him, saying that he will never taste it that way. He pulls out a twist of paper where he keeps his small supple of salt and sprinkles it on Pierre’s bread to bring out the flavour. It’s a small act, but a profound one, and Pierre remembers it. Later, when he is free and sits at home with a laden table before him, he takes a moment to slice a potato and sprinkle it with a little salt, then to eat slowly, savouring the moment and acknowledging the gift.
I describe this moment as sacramental because in this careful act, the grace and goodness of God is celebrated. It is simple and ordinary—like water, like bread, like wine—but here love is made tangible.
Chocolate may not feel like the logical next step, but perhaps it could be a surprising symbol for the goodness we receive. Our hearts need sweetness as much as all those tight April buds need light and clean water to blossom. So let’s stretch Easter this year, shall we? Let’s eat chocolate and let’s find new ways to celebrate our sweet Easter freedom.
