What’s Next?
I was out on Twitter Easter Sunday afternoon. Sharon and I had participated in the morning in a beautiful, though un-normal, worship service online. Our pastor, the Reverend O’Grady, preached a heart-felt sermon, our reduced choir sang with beauty and power, Lisa Edwards and Peter Green played a magnificent piano and organ duet Postlude. There was a lot on our hearts as we came to our screens that morning, a lot of fear, anxiety, uncertainty, boredom, loneliness. We came to this unusual altar with deep yearning. And then, even from our isolation, we shouted out: Christ is risen, he is risen, indeed! And we meant it.
Yes, and then, later that day I turned to Twitter, checking in to see what might be happening. I was amazed, frankly stunned, that “Christ is risen” was flying all over the wires. I know it is purely anecdotal, but it felt like some new wave of spiritual awakening, born out of need, was sweeping the world. I know I am always a closet revivalist, but could it be possible that Twitter was signaling a groundswell?
I’ve been thinking a lot about what happens next? Peggy Noonan in her WSJ column on that Saturday was asking these kinds of questions: “There’s been a lot of pondering going on about deeper meanings and higher purposes. Is all this some kind of wake-up call? What is asked of us? Do we need to change, personally? Should our country change and in what ways? What should we learn from this?”
“We have all been humbled,” Noonan concludes, “as a nation of institutions and of individuals.” Noonan reports from social psychologist Jonathan Haidt: “This is a time for us to reflect,” he declares, a time we may be able to “choose a better story.”
That’s it? That’s what I want to imagine right now: What would a better story look like? And what if that new story was shaped by Easter? Noonan and Haidt didn’t go there, but that’s my question: What if “what’s next” could actually be seen through the lens of Easter?
Dale M. Coulter, from First Things online, suggests there is some evidence that the flowering of monastic mysticism in the mid-fourteenth century was in large measure caused by the ravages of the Black Death. People turned inward, dramatically. They turned earnestly to God for comfort, healing, solace. People turned to prayer, laying the groundwork for the deepest tradition of prayer ever to occur in the Christian church.
We too have been brought to our knees by a plague. But that may be the best place to examine who we have become, personally, and what kind of a society we have built. Surely we recognize now we are not in control of everything, powerful though the tools of science and rational thought may be. Surely we have come to see that our exceedingly self-centered, individualistic society does not satisfy the deepest longings of what it means to be human. Surely we have come to see that the intense hatred we witness daily is not the way to build flourishing communities.
What if we turned to a new story radically rewritten by the risen Christ? His story knows suffering through and through, and yet, he offers new life that conquers death and injustice and hatred and self-centeredness. His story could bring us together as never before.
What if we were able to shape our new story around the story that broke from the grave on Easter morning, a story of love and mercy, self-giving and gratitude, a story ultimately of joy instead of sorrow? That would be a better story, wouldn’t it? I want to imagine, that maybe, just maybe, Twitter was signaling something utterly new among the people, that yes, Christ is risen, he is risen, indeed. Maybe we could come out of this terrible scourge, announcing, and living, a better story.