Psalm 30 is by no means in its entirety one of my favorites. On the contrary, if it did not contain one line that for me sums up the whole of life in lovely poetry it would be monumentally unmemorable. That line is "Weeping endures for a night, but joy cometh in the morning. That, in eleven words, is the story of Easter, the lesson of springtime, the sum of our living.
During the time that I was in Divinity School and for some years at the beginning of my career in ministry I lived in New England. Despite the fact that as I remember it I never got wholly warm it had its compensations. The one that I regret and sometimes even long for is the coming of spring. It starts in February with some of the bare trees taking on the pinkish hue of their new buds. Then, lifting courageous heads through the gray and rotting snow, are the crocuses, gay spots of purple and gold. And then, one day, on the horizon against the sky, you see a mist of pale green - the willow's first tentative leaves. Winter always seemed so terribly long, and even after the willows began to green there was more to come in cold and even snow. I always argued that the reason the Gregorian calendar took its days from February to add to July and August was that February, even without them, was by far the longest month of the year. But the lifting of the heart, the triumphant joy of springtime always came- always late, always almost despaired of, but a yearly gift.
Spring comes to Florida, too, of course, and if you know what to look for it is easily re-cognizable. The cypresses regrow their needles, the live oak exchanges its old leaves which have become dark and brittle for ones of a lighter, brighter green, the jacaranda will soon be in bloom, but looking for the signs of spring here is almost an intellectual exercise, and for those who do not love the Florida summers as I do, thinking them our best kept secret, it brings no special pleasure. We have had nothing to endure. To visit for a few days, to see the crocuses and the misty green of willows, wouldn't be the same. The winter must be passed to savor the joy of spring.
Winter, of course, even in the north, even in New England, even in Minnesota or Alberta, is not the peril that it once was. Human beings have almost entirely triumphed over the danger and want that winter used to bring in its train. Although there are always every year still some casualties to the cold or the ice, we have developed technologies to keep ourselves warm and well fed. There are many who look forward to the coziness and the winter sports. Nevertheless, the joy comes, the sense of resurrection and renewal, of new life rising out of the death of the old, of a living hope. Joy comes in the morning.
Many religions have the story of the resurrection of a god, always occurring at the time when the earth's renewal tells the same story. Some of them are clearly related to nature's reawakening as in the story of Persephone who is released from Hades each year to visit her mother, Ceres, who, in her joy, blesses the land with fertile growth. Others are more subtle as in the Easter story which shares only the joy of a life renewed from death in the resurrection of Jesus. I have often wondered how it came about that the English word for this most Christian of celebrations is derived from that of an Anglo-Saxon goddess, Oestre. I recently read that when that same great pope, Gregory, sent St. Augustine to England (not the St. Augustine of The Confessions but another one) he instructed him to treat the indigenous religion with respect, not tearing down the temples but converting them to the new faith and filling them with its symbols. The saint took him at his word and even adopted the spring goddess's name for the celebration of the resurrection. I presume he winked at, perhaps even encouraged, the continuing traditions of the fertility symbols that still grace our observance - the eggs and rabbits and flowers.
There has been a lot of speculation among those who want a scientific explanation for the resurrection that is celebrated on Easter. Thirty years or so ago a book that got a lot of attention at the time, The Passover Plot, suggested quite seriously the rather amusing theory that it had all been a conspiracy. Jesus' supporters had arranged for him to be crucified on a Friday so that he would have to be taken down from the cross early before he had quite died in order to set up the story that he had risen from the dead. The author also speculated, however, that the plot had gone wrong since Jesus disappeared so quickly afterwards, so that the damage done probably incapacitated or killed him. Others have suggested another conspiracy, that his body had been quietly removed and hidden so that the story of his having risen could be given currency. Many simply dismiss it as having no basis in fact at all, but simply being the product of wishful thinking. The Last Temptation of Christ, one of the worst movies I have ever seen, was redeemed by the last scene In which Paul, preaching the crucified and risen Christ, was confronted by Jesus who had refused to accept his sacrifice and said that it hadn't happened that way, and Paul said, "No, but that's the way it should have happened."
One of my favorite stories, so you have probably heard it before, though had it been videotaped I would prefer that none of you run for president for fear Fox News should get hold of it, is the time I went to a class at the Baptist Theological Seminary in New Orleans to explain Unitarian Universalism to them. Toward the end of the session I was asked to tell them what I believed about the facts of the resurrection. I had been pretty clear and candid, and I am sure that they knew precisely what I thought about the objective facts, but the questioner wanted to hear me say it out loud. I did try not to - to wiggle out of it. I talked about the importance of the story to them, its meaning, its assurance that Jesus, though he had died was alive again to them, and that that assurance was far more important than what I believed were the objective facts. However, they continued to press, and I let my annoyance take over. I said, "Well, Elvis has been seen in a lot of supermarkets lately." There was, as you can imagine, a concerted gasp that could be heard down the hall, and I was never invited back.
And yet, though my response was not polite, it is, in some ways precisely what I think about what the questioner was asking me about, the objective facts of that overwhelming event of the Christian story. No two of the gospels have the same account of the experience of the disciples in their encounters with Jesus after he had risen. I have myself experienced seeing or hearing those who were beloved after their death. It is, however, only real to me as that those who are loved never wholly die to those who loved them. It is real as memory and love are real. There was, though, in this event, something more. The death of Jesus was to his followers the final disaster. After it nothing could be the same. Yet, though weeping endured for a night, joy came in the morning - a joy that can only come after the ultimate disaster, as there can be no spring if there is no winter; no Easter without Good Friday.
This is a kind of heartbreak different from ordinary loss and sadness, an event that is transforming for good or ill. One of the few books written with its setting in Florida is The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. It is the story of a boy on a poor dirt farm in rural northeast Florida who found a fawn and made a pet of it. His father strongly disapproved, warning him that when the fawn grew it would become destructive to his crops, and they were barely able to survive as it was. Sure enough, the father's words were prophetic. By the time the fawn was a yearling deer it could not be controlled and did damage again and again. At last the boy's father shot it. He felt, he knew, he had no option. The boy, horrified, feeling betrayed, hurt beyond imagining, ran away. He stayed away for a few days, and when he returned - he did return - he was no longer a boy. He understood and accepted the necessity of what his father had done. He became a useful, worthwhile adult, but the child he had been was no longer living. The book ends with a poetic, idyllic paragraph describing the boy and his fawn walking together always in the pine forest behind the farm. The joy, if it can come, after that kind of sorrow, the heartbreak that destroys all that went before, bears no relation to simple happiness. It has a depth and power, a wisdom of the spirit, that is in itself transforming.
All that does not mean that I am any fan of suffering. I am only too well aware that it can destroy permanently, leaving no joy behind. It can warp and it can kill. However, if you can get to the other side, the morning after the night of weeping, the springtime, the resurrection, there will be a deep and abiding joy.
I do not mean that the other side of heartbreak is happiness. It may be that happiness cannot be attained even in the morning. People these days seem to have the odd idea that they are entitled to happiness. Even the Declaration of Independence only states that we have the right of its pursuit, but it has always seemed to me that pursuing happiness is one of the guaranteed ways to fail to find it. There was an interesting article in Newsweek a few weeks ago about the tendency of people to think that if they are sad it is an illness that needs to be treated. Clinical depression, of course, is an illness, often a chronic one, and it can and should be treated with psychoactive drugs. Its symptoms bear little relationship to what is going on in the lives of those who suffer from it, and neither a change of circumstances nor, really, psychological counseling will have much effect on it. What will affect it will be a change in the chemistry of the body, since that is its cause. Sadness, on the other hand, is a normal response to events of pain or loss, and to try to do away with it by denial or by calling it depression and taking pills for it so we can be happy I think keeps us from attaining our full humanity. It is through our own pain and loss that we learn compassion.
Erhardt Seminars Training, est, was a major human potential movement back in the seventies. It has gone through several transformations since then and moderated much of what it did that brought it into some disrepute. It even changed its name to try to lose some of the baggage that it was carrying from those days. The last I heard it was called The Forum. One thing that they have not changed, however, is their guarantee of happiness if you follow their program to the letter. I was given their name as a prospective participant one time, and when the membership coordinator called me and I told her that I wasn't interested she said that surely I would be interested when she told me that they could promise me that if I participated I would be permanently happy. She could not believe that I could be unmoved by such a lure as that, and indeed at the time I was not in a very happy place in my life, but I was unmoved. I do not wish to be cut off from the full range of human emotion, to refuse to be sad when sad things happen, to reject and deny the pain of grief or even heartbreak.
It is the human condition and to try to escape it is to refuse to grow to full humanity. Just as with all but the most lucky of us I have had my dark nights of the soul. There have been times when I have wept not only for one night but night after night, when I have even feared that I might not survive the heartbreak that I was experiencing. And perhaps I did not. It has seemed to me that the change in my own selfhood after such an experience could be likened to a kind of death as the person I had been no longer existed, as the boy in The Yearling no longer existed except in memory.
The joy of Easter, of spring, of the morning after a night of weeping has nothing to do with happiness. It is a joy that we can know only after suffering, informed with wisdom, compassion and hope, understanding that crocuses will bloom again and love endures against all loss.