Grieving on Easter
TW: Abuse
This year, Easter was hard.
As a lifelong Christian, I was conditioned to grieve the gruesome death of Jesus on Good Friday (while feeling sufficient guilt for the fact that my sin caused his death), then to make a 180-degree turn and celebrate his miraculous resurrection on Sunday morning. “He is risen! Hallelujah!”
Yet on this Easter Sunday, as I reflect on some past Easter-adjacent traumas, along with my recent deconstruction, I find myself grieving.
Grief is a strange thing. It has no timetable, and can be triggered by holidays that at one time brought us joy. The mind tries to forget past traumas, but the body remembers. I have felt physically ill today, and spent most of the day asleep. Decidedly NOT the joy-filled Easter I had envisioned for our family this year.
(Thankfully, I had the foresight to prepare Easter dinner and Easter baskets the day before, so it wasn’t a complete wash, but not at all what I had planned.)
Easter-adjacent traumas
There was Easter weekend in 1984, when my parents naïvely allowed a p3doph!le to spend the weekend in our home. A weekend of terror, culminating in sitting next to my abuser in church on Easter morning as we “celebrated” the resurrection together. When he finally left our home, I promptly mailed him a letter telling him how uncomfortable he made me, and that I never wanted to see or hear from him again… and incredibly, I never did. More incredibly, when I attempted to tell my father that I was abused and had sent the letter, he admonished me for being “a little harsh, don’t you think?”
There was Easter weekend in 1995, when I directed a relatively large-scale Easter musical drama for the Evangelical church where I served on staff as the worship leader. For me it was the high point of the liturgical year as well as my budding career as a church musician. A few days later, I received the news that our pastor had been engaging in an extramarital affair with a parishioner… partly facilitated by carrying on while a large portion of the other congregants were participating in musical rehearsals. “Hallelujah! Jesus is alive!” was the death knell of my brief church music career.
There was Easter 2021. As my fellow Christians were celebrating the resurrection of Christ, I was reeling from a breast cancer diagnosis and exploring options for double mastectomy surgery and subsequent treatment.
Deconstructing Easter
Then there are the inevitable questions raised by the deconstruction process. Is the lifelong narrative I was taught — that Christ suffered and died as a substitutionary atonement for my sins, to save me from the wrath of his Father — even accurate? If so, what are the implications of believing in a God who allegedly created us in his image and loves us all unconditionally, yet simultaneously hates our sin enough to allow us to suffer eternal conscious fiery torment unless we accept that he poured out his wrath onto his only Son in our place? What kind of father does that?? I have to admit that the portrait the Church has painted of our Heavenly Father sounds more like an abusive father than a loving one to me.
If that narrative is NOT accurate, then what does the Easter story mean? Some say that Jesus was not crucified because of God’s wrath against our sinfulness, but as a consequence of speaking truth to power (both religious and political). That God became Man to show us that he empathizes with our humanity, to show us a better way to live, and to illustrate that new life is possible, figuratively and literally.
Shutting down
This weekend, my body told my mind, “Okay, that’s enough overthinking for now. It’s time to rest.”
My questions remain largely unanswered, and yet I remain hopeful that resurrection in some way, shape or form is possible for me. If nothing else, tomorrow is another day for a new beginning.
