Chocolate-Covered Comfort

I was the first one awake in my household last Easter morning. With resurrection enthusiasm, I had decided to fix breakfast for the rest of the family. It was cold in our basement kitchen. The rain was pouring down outside. Through a grated window, I watched a rat scuttle through some garbage in the alley. My spirits, like the garbage outside, were dampened. It was not my idea of a joyous Easter morning. I remembered other Easters, all the same. Hershey, Pennsylvania. Most of the town, including my family, gathered each Easter in pre-dawn twilight in the town's large rose garden. A chorus of brass instruments welcomed the sun as it peeked above the horizon, casting a path of orange brilliance across the garden's pond and bringing to full hue its acres of flowers. We sang hymns, smiled, and commented each year how beautiful it was. Back at home we stuffed ourselves on our hometown's candy (proud, as citizens of "Chocolatetown, USA," to be conspirators in the perpetuation of Easter joy and myths about large rabbits).

Ann was my best friend then. I saw her again, after several years, about a week after last Easter. As a nurse, she spent Easter eve with a young girl who had been in a coma for three days, believed to be dying. Ann prayed and stayed by her side and comforted the family through the night. At about four o'clock Easter morning the girl awoke. It was a joyful awakening that brought a flood of tears from everyone at the bedside, a special sort of resurrection.

As Ann related the story to me with emotion she concluded, "I learned this year that Easter isn't a sunrise in the Hershey Rose Garden."

What we were both beginning to understand was the deep connection between pain and joy, and the failure of our past to make that connection, or even mention it.

We were taught to fill ourselves with happiness, to surround ourselves with beauty and comfort. We filled our time with pursuits of joy, isolating and insulating our lives from suffering.

If the society around us fed us on security and applauded our appetite, our church reinforced it. There was something too sweet and too neat about the cubes of Wonder Bread and small, individual cups of grape juice that we were asked to feed on at the Lord's Supper. We never had to touch anybody or be uprooted from our comfortable pews. Everything was passed on silver platters right under our noses, and our biggest fear was of dropping 40 cups of grape juice into the lap of the parishioner sitting next to us.

"Christ Jesus ... though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant ..." (Philippians 2:5-7). In church we read briefly over this passage, just as we did all the passages about dying to ourselves, taking up a cross, putting our security solely in God, bearing one another's suffering, and making our lives a sacrifice acceptable to God. We placed those passages in the neat boxes already outlined by our lives and lifestyle, and made them comfortable.

What we never suspected was that by filling up our lives with so many "good things," we didn't have much room left over for God. And we never guessed that maybe our power was in pouring ourselves out, rather than in filling ourselves up. We never dared believe that pouring prayers and suffering love into a lifeless young girl could bring new life.

I shed a few tears last Easter morning. I wished for them to wash away the garbage and the rats, cleanse the ugliness, melt the hard edges of injustice and pain in the city. I wanted the promise of a rose garden.

I shed tears because some days it's just plain hard, and the risks seem too great. God calls us to empty ourselves of our pride, our agendas for success, the greed for comforts to which we always believed we were entitled. God calls us to model ourselves after a man who lived without material security, whose strength the world defined as powerlessness.

To live faithfully we will often feel broken and empty, as the world's outcasts, the downtrodden, and the wounded plea for our help in Christ's name. Perhaps only then can we be driven to our knees with the words "Fill me, Lord" on our lips and in our hearts. When our own strength is gone, then we begin to understand our complete dependence on God and his strength.

These days when our bread is broken at the Lord's table it is ragged, and our wine is a touch bitter. In every taste is the pain of crucifixion, the brokenness of a community of individuals who are trying to pour out their lives for each other, for a hurting neighborhood, and for a groaning world. And in each taste too is the joy of healing, the strength of reconciliation, and the hope of resurrection.

Some days I desire to return to the innocence of my past. But I know too much now about suffering and injustice. I understand too well that God calls us to proclaim a kingdom of peace, reconciliation, and justice, and that the proclamation calls for sacrifice and servanthood. Above all, it calls for emptiness before God, an emptiness that can only be maintained in a continual pouring out of our love, our compassion, and our lives for each other. An emptiness that allows us to continually come to God to be filled with deeper, stronger currents of his love and strength.

Let us remember that the ultimate sign of joy on Easter morning was emptiness; that an empty tomb was a tomb filled with hope.

Joyce Hollyday was editorial assistant at Sojourners when this article appeared.