Many parents of young children get tired of hearing “they grow up so fast,” or worse, “treasure every moment”—those sentimental comments from well-meaning folks piling fuel onto the fires of parental anxiety. I know I hated hearing those things in the early years of our family. Maybe I’m just not a very nice person.
But this sentimentality has a certain truthfulness that takes on a harder edge as we all get older, which is less about savoring the moment—something almost always easier to say for someone on the outside viewing it from the lens of their own nostalgia—and more about remembering innocence from the standpoint of experience. There just are some things that are hard to appreciate until they’re lost.
This basic lesson is one way of thinking of human history after the Fall. I often think that Joni Mitchell singing “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” in 1970, whatever her exact intention at the time, contained a kind of accidental prophetic summary of that era, one of many eras in which humanity seemed content to throw aside its own nature and vocation. Since Adam we have been longing to return to Eden, longing to find our way back to Paradise, to immortality, to Communion. We remember this calling in our bones, and at times it will seem that civilization is moving in the direction of remembrance and restoration, only to achieve a yet more dramatic collapse. That longing that we have, to go back to childhood, to relive the happy days of our youth, or to relieve the happy days of our children’s youth, is much more than the idle discontent of age; it is a symptom of the human condition, which is locked in the cycle of its own failures.
Just last week, at Palm Sunday, we lived out that cycle in microcosm: waving the palm branches in praise at one moment, calling for the Lord’s unjust execution the next. By tradition, those palms are burned to make ashes for a future Lent, and so the cycle continues, not just ritually and liturgically, but in history, in relationships, in the human soul. We are stuck.
This is why, as Pope Benedict points out in a homily from 2010, the ongoing medical quest for immortality is doomed. All our science is focused on the prevention of suffering and death. Would it be good if we achieved that goal? No, he insists: we would only grow more old and more miserable, closed off from youth and innovation, stuck yet more permanently in the cycle of failure. “The true cure for death must be different,” the Holy Father says. “It cannot lead simply to an indefinite prolongation of this current life.”
In rising from the dead, our Lord Jesus Christ doesn’t just show us back to the Garden as if nothing had changed. Innocence cannot simply be restored. But something new is born: a humanity somehow both restored and changed, elevated, glorified, united with the light and life of God. This isn’t putting a bandage on the gaping wound of sin and death. It is allowing the whole organism to die so that it can be reconstituted.
This is hard because it seems to deny the longing to not die, to go back to what we have lost. Easter joy can come across as hollow if we think of the Resurrection as just the possibility of continuing this life as it is. But this is something better: the ability to move forward, not back, through the corruption and death of this life’s cross to the new day of resurrection.
Once again I have to quote Pope Benedict, who, in another Easter homily (from 2009), points to the “alleluia” as one of the great signs of the Resurrection. “When a person experiences great joy, he cannot keep it to himself. He has to express it, to pass it on. But what happens when a person is touched by the light of the resurrection, and thus comes into contact with Life itself, with Truth and Love? He cannot merely speak about it. Speech is no longer adequate. He has to sing.” Often writers of the tradition speak of the alleluia as a kind of heavenly song, extending beyond the syllabic limitations of ordinary human language to the wordless jubilation of the angels and saints.
But the Holy Father then recalls the crossing of the Red Sea, that great metaphor for baptism. He notes how we sing Moses’ great song of triumph, the Cantemus Domino, while still in the darkness of the Easter Vigil:
While, strictly speaking, she ought to be sinking, the Church sings the song of thanksgiving of the saved. She is standing on history’s waters of death and yet she has already risen. Singing, she grasps at the Lord’s hand, which holds her above the waters. And she knows that she is thereby raised outside the force of gravity of death and evil — a force from which otherwise there would be no way of escape — raised and drawn into the new gravitational force of God, of truth and of love.
At present, the Church and all of us are still between the two gravitational fields. But once Christ is risen, the gravitational pull of love is stronger than that of hatred; the force of gravity of life is stronger than that of death. . . .
Perhaps this is actually the situation of the Church in every age. . . . It always seems as if she ought to be sinking, and yet she is always already saved.
Here Israel at the Red Sea is a type of the Church, but the image also recalls St. Peter attempting to walk on water, sinking with lack of faith, calling out for the Lord’s hand.
Easter is that hand. Perhaps we are no longer like innocent children who can grab their father’s hand with absolute simple confidence. We rightly lament that loss, but we cannot go back in time. How wonderful, then, that the Lord has walked with us in time and history so that he can, in that resurrected humanity, reach out to us, whatever our age, or our maturity, or our strength, to pull us from the waters of this world toward the light of his eternity!