Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter
people and hallelujah is our song. – Pope John Paul II
Is it just me, or does the church have difficulty expressing
joy? I ask because I’ve begun to
associate the celebration of Easter directly to the notion and experience of
joy. Easter is the epitome of the
unexpected, joyful plot twist in the story.
It’s in essence the source of Tolkien’s notion of “eucatastrophe”, the
joy of the unexpected, unforeseen happy ending.
Given the stakes at play in Jesus’ life and death, the Divine killed by
humanity, and the apparent failure and defeat of the Father, unadulterated,
astonished, overwhelming joy seems to be the only appropriate response to the
resurrection. Victory was literally
wrenched from the sure, clenched jaws of defeat. I get choked up when I spend time meditating
on it. The reason I bring it up is
because I don’t recognize that joy in our liturgy. Our worship tends to accommodate prayer,
confession, adoration, and praise pretty well.
But we seem to have a difficult time accommodating Easter joy. I will confess to contributing to this
joylessness.
I have the opportunity in my church to put together and
arrange the worship songs once a month.
A few years ago my Sunday fell on Easter. I was excited about this. Easter is the Christian “main event”, and I
was going to get to contribute to the Easter experience. I flubbed it completely. It’s that year that I understood the joy of
Easter for the first time, because my choices contrasted so starkly with the
rest of the service. I remember 2 of the
songs I picked, “Here I Am to Worship”, and an arrangement of “When I Survey”,
both of which are Good Friday songs.
They deal with the death of Jesus, not his resurrection. They’re both somber and introspective. I would submit that neither is joyful. Those responsible for this year’s Easter
service did a much better job. They
chose “Jesus Messiah”, “Glorious Day”, and “Mighty to Save”. All three carry the content of Easter much
better than my choices had; however upon playing them Easter morning I realized
though the content may have been “right”, the music didn’t embody the joy of
Easter. Now this is no slight to those
who put the worship set together. I
might suggest that there choices were limited by our own liturgical limitation
in relation to joy. It seems to me we don’t
write it well, and so it isn’t available to be drawn on.
This begs the question of why, which I suppose would be the
point of this particular blog. Why this
difficulty? I’d be interested to get
input in this regard. I’ll confess that
up until that Easter experience a few years ago I had an excruciatingly hard
time with joy. After that experience I
came to recognize it when it appears in my life and it’s become an important
part of my faith experience. Playing
drums has helped. As I’ve said in a
previous blog, I experience joy most completely when I’m playing. From there I’ve been able to recognize it
when it appears in my life (it feels like playing drums). At any rate, any ideas for why our liturgical
joy is often incomplete?
