Easter Sunday

Good Friday is hard to explain to kids. It’s hard enough for me to understand for myself how and why we creatures slew our Creator. After who He made us to be, how could we have made such monsters of ourselves? I take that confusion and try to explain it to my little ones and always feel unsatisfied.

But Easter is simple.

Easter is literally a different story. “He is alive!” What must have seemed most unexplainable to the shell-shocked friends of the crucified Rabbi seems so delightfully easy for me to explain to my children. He was dead, but God raised him from the dead. Even Melía, my Princess of Why, doesn’t need to inquire about the reasons for that. Of course God raised His Son! Of course Jesus is alive!

Lent is a soul-search, a fast, a repenting. Good Friday mourns the death of God, an impossibility marking the deepest, darkest point in the history of human evil. These are things to be pondered, observed, remembered.

But Easter is to be celebrated.

In the “Bright Sadness” of Lent the body or mind may rest from some pleasure, while the heart rests from the delusion of self-sufficiency. This rest creates space for reflection on what took Jesus to the cross, including my part in the crime. This is well and good.

But after forty days of facing my own complex cries of “Crucify him!” the simple joy of saying “He is risen!” is warm sunshine on a shivering soul.

And maybe, at three and four, that’s what the simple souls under my care need most.