Eastering

The season Christians call Lent has begun. I have a problem with it (What? Only one?) I can’t fit my personal, human experience into the church’s calendar. Lent is supposed to be a preparation for Easter. So it tends to encourage a looking forward to Easter forgetting that everything we do happens after that mysterious event which Christians have labelled the Resurrection. Easter didn’t happen two thousand years ago (a mere historical event): it is happening, now, timelessly in us. The final stanza of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem The Wreck of the Deutschland, contains the following line:
“Let him Easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us,”
I like that: Easter as a verb, an activity happening now.

What comes next in this blog is going to sound like a massive digression but – patience, dear reader – the connection with Easter will emerge.

The brain is an astonishing storage system. It’s all up here in my head: that row I had with my mother/father 20, 30, 50 years ago; the way I snubbed that poor woman last week. And it’s not just a bare record of the facts: it’s the accompanying feelings. Post traumatic stress syndrome is not something which happens only to soldiers home from Afghanistan. There are a fortunate few human beings who have never had any really unpleasant experiences but most of us have not been so lucky. Most of us have stored away in our brains some unpleasant experience which can wake up and trip us up at any unexpected time. It’s no wonder the ancient Christian prayer speaks of ‘your adversary the devil,’ who goes about ‘like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.’ Lions sometimes come roaring out of our sub-conscious and swallow us up. Some people have to spend a lot of their time and most of their energy dealing with wild beasts of one sort or another.

Lent is supposed to be a time for dealing with lions but, like I said, mine don’t wait meekly until the appropriate slot on the Christian calendar. Now, here’s the good news: Easter doesn’t wait either (this year for example, until April 24th). Easter isn’t an historical event, it’s a process, going on now. Just as coping with lions can become so much a part of someone’s ‘normal’ living, so can Eastering. We’re talking about states of being – processes. The brain is not only a brilliant storage system, it is also infinitely plastic, adaptable. The neural pathways leading to lions dens can be by-passed (slowly, slowly, with persistence and patience) so that Eastering becomes more and more the dominant mode of our being. The lions are still there but even they can become part of the Eastering process: one roar and we are reminded (yes! Re-minded!) to find the vast, vibrant, expectant stillness of the Easter garden within us: both an absence and a presence. The practice of meditation is part of that process. In the stillness of our centred prayer, even when nothing seems to be happening and it all feels pointless, new pathways are being gently trodden out: new ways to the depths of who we truly are. We are Eastering people. That truth about us trumps all the lion aces our brains hold. Happy Easter – Now! Today!