continuing the celebration...

Easter was on Sunday, but we just got around to unburying our "hallelujah ribbons" today.  We brought them out on this gorgeous afternoon to add to Easter parade going on in our backyard with all the Spanish bluebells and azaleas in bloom. 

I am so thankful that Easter is not just one day... 

and that it is a whole season for us to keep the celebration going! 

That’s why I need more than just Easter Day. If Easter were only a single day, I would never have time to let its incredible reality settle over me, settle into me.  I would trudge through my life with a disconnect between what I say I believe about resurrection and how I live (or fail to live) my life in light of it. Thanks be to God, our forebears in faith had people in mind like me when they decided we simply cannot celebrate Easter in a single day, or even in a single week.  No, they decided, we need fifty days, seven Sundays, to even begin to plumb the depths of this event.  They knew, as we too often do not, that the riches of this most important event in all of history cannot be exhausted in a single day. 

In contemporary America, Protestant Christians, like drugstore card racks, all too often move on to Mother’s Day as soon as Easter Day has passed.  But we do so at our peril.  We risk relegating the most important event in all history to a single day, something we celebrate with a church full of lilies, some great music, and a sermon about that first Easter before we clear out the lilies after the services, disband the Easter choir and, for all practical purposes, forget about the resurrection for another year.

We need the season of Easter, the Great Fifty Days, to live with the mystery of the resurrection for a while, to let the magnitude of it dawn on us, dawn in us.

The purpose of the season of Easter, it seems to me, is to give us the time we need to absorb the reality that Christ is risen. Such a radical re-visioning of the world a world without consequences- requires time.  We need time so that our eyes might learn to see the risen Christ , our hearts to belive that He is risen indeed.

- Kimberlee Conway Ireton The Circle of Seasons