Somehow Easter feels different this year.
I'm not one of those twice-a-year church people who visit a faith house on Easter and Christmas. Nor do I walk the Stations of the Cross or observe the Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday Triduum of my youth.
In bygone days, the season was a mix of obligation and the chance to see nicely dressed, well-groomed family and friends. I like to think that I was reared in a way that made me appreciate the meaning and purpose of the observances. Having drifted into young adulthood and established a life of my own, the rituals aren't as important to me now as they once were.
For Christian believers, Easter — or Resurrection Sunday — is the holiest weekend of the year. Easter Sunday itself is a single day, but there's a build-up of sorts. It's a season, though not quite like that leading up to Christmas Eve, when many commercial establishments close early so employees can get home to get ready for the big holiday.
I've lived enough other places to know that lots of people don't even know there's a thing called the Triduum.
Being back home in Louisiana the last few years, Easter is more prominent in my life. Family and friends make sure I know what's going on.
My Easter interest this year is focused on one of the primary tenets of the season: better lives over death, and promise over pain.
Individually and collectively, we've endured a lot the last three years. More than 6.8 million people worldwide died of COVID-19. More than 1.1 million of those we lost lived in the United States. We counted more than 18,800 of those souls as family, friends and neighbors here in Louisiana. Only heart disease and cancer took more lives in that time.
For comparison, there were about 116,000 U.S. miliary deaths in World War I and some 405,000 in World War II.
So much death.
Thank goodness more than 10,000 babies are born in our nation each day.
With so much violence in homes, neighborhoods and schools, I pray that most of these little ones — including my grandsons, grand nieces and grand nephews — grow up learning about such tragedies from family stories and history books rather than personal experiences. Life offers so many opportunities for happiness and joy, giggles and laughs, congratulations and celebrations.
Our nation's history doesn't mirror those of homogenous countries because this country is small D democratic, generally tolerant of peaceful dissent, and so diverse. We've had a checkered history, though. Past generations made and enforced many highly questionable and morally wrong decisions — some of them akin to what many of us believe happened to Jesus Christ two millennia ago.
After a short, young life of a little more than three decades, Jesus was arrested in Gethsemane, essentially charged and convicted of speaking truth to Roman power. He was sentenced to die by crucifixion — the empire's most gruesome punishment.
I once harbored such ill will toward people convicted of doing horrible things that I favored the death penalty in some cases. With recent investigative advances, including the use of DNA, enough innocent people have had their convictions overturned that I can no longer see the death penalty as an appropriate — let alone necessary — societal response to the taking of someone's life.
I can only wonder what our lives might be like if Pontius Pilate had ignored the wishes of the roaring crowd and instead sentenced Jesus to life in prison. Or what if Pilate had freed him to continue his ministry?
There was no Holy Thursday, Good Friday or Easter Sunday before that fateful weekend. Jesus lived his entire life as a Jew. He celebrated Passover the night before his death. He changed the world, but because no media existed to record what happened, those who were there handed down the story as they saw, heard or believed it — and the most agreed-upon versions became the New Testament.
Just as many have for centuries, we can all look beyond Jesus' passion and death — toward a sunrise that brings the hope of a new and better life.
Though I cannot and will not ignore suffering, death, or hateful actions, I look forward to fewer days of pain — and more days of hope and joy.
