BEN :Easter Sunday, a feast day more accurately entitled . . . .

Easter Sunday, a feast day more accurately entitled, The Sunday of the Resurrection, has marked the beginning of our Great 50 Days — the days between the empty tomb and the almost indescribable experience of Pentecost and of the institution of the Church itself.

The Great 50 Days sounds more like an invitation-only golf tournament to me. A game where only a select number of the greatest men and women who have ever held a metal stick in hopes of swinging it at just the right angle to hit a ridiculously small, pitted ball sitting atop an overgrown toothpick toward an impossibly small hole far away, a hole in the ground that offers nothing more than a chance to advance to the next hole only to do it all over again. ( Perhaps one day I will understand the depth and breadth of this activity some call a sport. We who run miles every day, for no apparent reason have something to say on such matters. )

Nevertheless, the Great 50 Days is one of the things I love most about the Easter season. While American Evangelical Protestant Christianity seals this season into a one day segment, easy for storage until the following year, those who have cared for and participated in the path of the ancients know that the Easter we have just observed is only the beginning of some seven weeks of reflection on the life and death and life of Jesus — a reflection that can now be seen through the lens of the resurrected Christ.

Whatever happened during Lent seems inconsequential next to the what was given to us when the empty tomb became the center of Christianity and Jesus became the Christ. This miracle of all miracles sets the tone for a life that does not end, in the same way that the rising and setting of the sun sets the frame for a life into which we have been given.

Life becomes death, only to become life again.

There is enough tension between the confidence of life and the chaos of dying and the misery of returning to dust and the mystery of rising again to keep us clinging to our prayer, clinging in the hope that we might make our way through this life even as we wait for our own resurrection, the miracle that will take us to the life that does not end.

Alleluia — Christ is Risen.
The Lord is Risen indeed. Alleluia.