I am relieved that Lent and Holy Week and Easter are over. I hope that over time the grief I feel throughout the season will ease. This year felt different from last year but just as hard. I didn't cry as much. but I also distracted myself more, and, having moved across the country, there were not as many direct reminders of our last season with Oliver. I was so very thankful for everyone who prayed for us and checked in on me throughout the last weeks. Even if I didn't reply to you, thank you for remembering us and Oliver.
Like happened last year, on the day before Easter, I came across an idea in my reading that helped me through the day. In Kierkegaard's Works of Love, he posits that "Christian consolation... is the consolation of the eternal, it is older than all temporal joy. As soon as consolation comes, it comes with the head-start of the eternal and swallows up, as it were, pain, for pain and the loss of joy are momentary-- even if the moment were a year- and the momentary is drowned in the eternal. Neither is Christian consolation a substitute compensation for lost joy, since it is joy itself."
It gave me the feeling and image of a great gush of joy flowing over a hard cliff of pain. The image is comforting to me- the pain is not ignored, but both validated and put it its place by its juxtaposition against the powerful ever-flowing rush of God's promise of eternity. Comfort in eternal joy continuously covers, drowns, and erodes the pain. As eternal joy comes from God, it is older than any temporal joy or pain and will outlast any temporal joy or pain. It is of such a different character that, unlike other temporal joys we may seek to replace joys that we have lost, it actually has the power to console. Beatrice is a delightful source of joy for us (except when she keeps us up at night or bites me while nursing), but she does not replace my longing for my son, nor would another son fulfill that longing either. She is a very sweet child and has brought us comfort and many smiles when we needed it, but the consolation she offers is limited and the bite of Oliver's death is still sharp. But to think of God's love and joy pursuing us from before and after from the depths of eternity gives direction to my longing. Not just for my son, but for my son whole and healed, for my son in eternal joy and perfection, for eternal joy itself, from which my desire for perfection and peace originate.
And there is joy in this too: that this longing is not in vain, because the eternal has been given to us, in spite of our unworthiness. Not only given to us, but given to us with a desire that we might accept it, like a banquet invitation from our dearest friend, because we are loved.
My Easters will be always filled with mixed emotion and painful memories, but hopefully too a that deep consolation that only eternal joy can provide.
