This last Easter season was a sober time for our community.  There were a number of local tragedies, national losses, personal laments.  What we were feeling in the wake of a cancer diagnosis we were seeing on the faces of those we share our lives with.  At first I thought we were projecting a bit.  But then I started hearing peoples’ stories.

However…there was a new vigor to Easter this year because of the griefs we were carrying as a people.  Easter has always been meant to be a celebration.  For those of us who follow Jesus around, it is the day we remember that he was resurrected from the dead, that what the religious institution and political power brokers had meant as a signal of defeat—Jesus, dead on a cross—the One who creates and sustains life for all turned to victory.

Death doesn’t have the last word.  Our endings are fertile for new beginnings.  Our griefs are headed toward celebrations.

And so…Easter.  There was a palpable sense of joy, a beautiful aura of hope, a magnified spirit of renewal in the spaces we shared together.  In fact, each Sunday for the follower of Jesus is meant to house this, each Sunday a reflection and remembrance of Easter Sunday, Resurrection Sunday.

Celebration of hope and victory, peace and restoration is meant to be our rhythm.  Not as a denial of grief, but rather an important part of it.

It won’t do to postpone our celebrations until we are without grief.

Because it seems many of us are always cycling through grief of one sort or another.  The soldier with PTSD.  The mother who miscarried.  The therapist that needs therapy.  The spiritual leader that has lost sight of the light.  The woman who looks like she has it all together, but has been having trouble getting out of bed in the morning.  The man who still hasn’t shared about his abuse.

There is this constant refrain among historians that it is the powerful that get to tell our history.  Which mostly has been true.  But there is a profound exception: the Hebrew Scriptures were written by a people that found themselves enslaved, exiled, oppressed by foreign powers for all of about a couple hundred years of their history.  First the Egyptians, then the Assyrians, followed by the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks…and then the Romans, with their legions and their crosses.

Constantly on the underside of power.  Constantly in a state of or reminded of their grief.  For the Hebrews, it kept cycling.

It was this people that believed the One True God had not given up on them, actually loved them even though their circumstances seemed to speak something different.  The liturgy of celebration served to remind them.

The Hebrew Scriptures invite the people to stop once a week to remember and celebrate their relationship with the divine.  Several times a year the Scriptures outline and implore the people to take a week to throw a giant party for the community.  Several times a year.  For a week the wine and music, the stories and food, would flow.

This, to a people who otherwise had little to celebrate.

Our family has tried to practice this in a number of ways.  Planning a hike on a weekend.  Eating with those we have shared our lives with.  Turning the stereo up in the kitchen and having a dance party.  (In fact, during our recent season of grief, we invested in a larger stereo.  It was a sacred expenditure.)

Recently, someone in my office shared with me the constant beat of stress, anxiety, fatigue, and conflict in his life.  All I could think to say was, “Sometimes you have to blow up a few balloons.”

Sometimes you have to blow up a few balloons.  

Turn up the music.  Roll out the food.  And then go for it.

Because if the cycle of grief isn’t accompanied by the rhythm of joy, it can only be a downward spiral.