Easter: The Sacredness of a Good Feast
Photo by Vadim Sadovski on Unsplash
Some years ago, I spent a month from Lent through Easter in an Anglican monastery in England. Lent had already started when I entered the monastery, and the pictures and icons on the walls of the chapel were covered with black cloth. There were no “Alleluia’s” in the liturgy, and our meals were very simple – no butter for our bread, no meat or sugar – and even more silence than normal was held. It was an all consuming Lent, serious and heavy. I followed the chapel bells to breakfast and to prayers and to feeding the chickens and lunch and more prayers, and I thought about serious and heavy things, and it felt very holy.
At sunset on Holy Saturday, we gathered for Easter Vigil, a liturgical service that begins in darkness on the evening of Holy Saturday and bursts into light at midnight on Easter morning. We gathered around a barrel bonfire outside, flames coming up to the edge of the metal rim. After the first Scripture reading, the small collection of monk and nuns and I filed into the chapel. The chapel was so dark, and only single candle was lit, but I could see faint outlines of bouquets of flowers on the walls. Things are about to be different. But not yet. Wait a little longer.
During an Easter Vigil, the priest reads a dozen very long Scripture passages from fall to redemption, and modern services usually cut the liturgy down from its traditional length for the time constraints of their parishioners. These monks had no time constraints. We read it all. Time got hazy. Nothing existed except this tiny chapel and the huge story of God’s faithfulness rolling over us, Genesis, Exodus, Ezekiel, Romans, Gospels. We read and read and my feet felt wobbly and then – midnight.
All the bells rang. I didn’t even know there were that many bells in the whole monastery. Everything rang. All the lights went on, and everything I had just seen the outlines of – flowers and icons and statues – burst into view. Incense flooded the room. Music flooded the room. He is risen! He is risen indeed, alleluia!
The exact moment from repentance to resurrection was explosive. It is finished, it is over, it is time to feast, the Light is here, it has overcome the whole world. Now we celebrate.
The next day we had Easter feast. There was steak and Cadbury eggs and wine. We talked and talked and talked and laughed and everyone had a thousand things to say and a hundred funny stories. Everyone ate too much steak and drank too much wine and I ate too many Cadbury eggs. Silliness reigned.
And then, to my surprise, the monks kept feasting after Easter Sunday. The Easter seasons stayed celebratory. The mood of the monastery lifted, food got more decadent, silence was held more loosely. I felt Easter as a whole season of celebration for the first time.
That Easter feast season at the monastery didn’t just change how I experienced Easter. It changed how I experienced Lent, too. Lent felt like it had been for a purpose, not just suffering for the sake of suffering. Now Lent wasn’t just a long slog towards a single day of theological importance. Lent leads towards something. Lent culminates in redemption, a redemption even longer and more all-consuming than the serious, heavy work that came before.
Lent culminates in a feast.
It is quite a shock to learn that Easter is not just a day, but an entire season of feasting in the liturgical year. Not only that, it’s fifty full days, ten days longer than our Lenten penitence. We carefully read through Lenten devotionals and give up things for forty days, but then rush through Easter as if it’s one day, and never take time to think about what fifty days of feasting could look like for our so-tired souls.
Modern Western Christians are terrible at feasting.
I talked with a mentor once about how to mark seasons of flourishing and happiness as “spiritual.” She was skeptical if such a thing was even possible, and whether delight could ever be as spiritual as sorrow. Joy is good, she said. But it isn’t as meaningful as suffering. C.S. Lewis says something similar, that “God whispers in our joys but shouts in our pain.” This idea is pervasive – God is more tangible during suffering, and meaning is in the valleys and never on the mountaintops. Celebration doesn’t create wisdom and it doesn’t cultivate virtues and it certainly does not bring us as close to God, ourselves, or others as suffering does. Echoes of the Puritan roots of white evangelicalism tell us that only pain and hard work can be holy.
The tradition of the church, though, as well as the witness of Scripture, emphasizes the holiness of a season of celebration, just as much as the holiness of a season of repentance. The church marks the importance of both “fasts” (periods of repentance and self-denial) and “feasts” (periods of celebration and joy), and doesn’t give one more weight than the other. They exist together, equally spiritual moments in time. Neither is more essential and neither brings us closer to God.
Fasting and feasting exist together, a liturgical ecosystem that can’t be separated without all the other parts weakening. We fast so that we can feast. We feast so that we can fast. When we hurry past feasting because it isn’t “spiritually weighty,” our fasting and repentance will get self-important, penitential for the sake of performance, and stripped of humility and gratitude and community – all virtues that are developed and shaped by celebration.
And the very first time Jesus breaks into the mundane with the magic of a miracle is not to do something productive or salvific – it is to bring wine to a wedding, and prolong a feast so it didn’t end prematurely.
Maybe Jesus knows we’re always looking for an excuse to end our feasting prematurely.
What a time to talk about feasting, though. We are all so, so tired.
Dostoevsky laments that we aren’t holy because we don’t have enough time, that God gives us only 24 hours in a day, which is “not enough time to sleep, let alone repent!” and our exhausted bodies feel that. Seasons of repentance are hard enough. Sometimes it feels like a season of feasting is even harder. Both of those things require energy and focus, and as we continue to emerge from a pandemic, all times feels blurred and sometimes all that feels possible is surviving. Even if celebration is not frivolous, even if joy is not spiritually meaningless – how are we supposed to even want to celebrate when our hearts are so heavy, and our bodies are so tired?
The last thing we ought to do is make “feasting” another Should, another spiritual rule to check off. And the very last we should do is put on a fake smile, lay out a forced feast, and try to toxic positivity our way into celebration.
But sometimes, if we carve out a tiny space for joy, a tiny space where we are permitted to play, a tiny space where we let ourselves enjoy the taste and touch and smell of ordinary things -- without trying to force happiness to appear, or pretend it’s here when it’s not – sometimes, small pieces of joy can find us.
Just carving out a very small space can be enough.
“Laughter is carbonated holiness,” Anne Lamott says. May that holiness find its way into your life this Easter season – in moments you’re hunting for it, and surprising us in moments we never thought feasting was possible.
