Living a different kind of time during Holy Week and Easter

Easter in America is fast becoming a hidden feast. I’ve already noted that, unlike Christmas, secular America manages to let Easter pass mostly unnoticed. If you limit yourself to the secular cultural milieu, you might hear something about Easter bunnies and Easter eggs, though even their prominence—compared to my childhood in the 1960s—is markedly reduced. Case-in-point: as a kid, I remember plenty of ads for Easter egg coloring kits. Kids were supposed to have fun decorating Easter eggs. I don’t see much of that today. The only eggs promoted are chocolate eggs for you to buy and eat: consuming over doing.

The invisibility of Easter

The marginalization of Easter may very well be due to its religious nature. Christmas can be secularly tamed. Santa Claus can replace Jesus, gifts can become central, velleities about “peace on earth” can become the “message.” A grown-up Jesus bursting out of the tomb is harder to co-opt by other images: the “Easter Bunny” is just no competition beside the Paschal Lamb of God. Compared to Christmas’s focus on gifts broadly understood, chocolate rabbits and painted eggs are far too niche: there’s no variant “adult market” big enough to replace them once one outgrows the Easter Bunny.

The message of Easter also isn’t so readily secularized. Christmas can be turned into “universal peace” but any potential universalizable message about Easter—like the conquest of death—only works if one makes the faith commitment. That’s why those with faith commitments can push back on the invisibility of Easter.

But we live in a culture where faith commitments are driven off the public square. So, without an ersatz substitute, Easter finds no cultural resonance, especially in an increasingly “diverse” society where Christianity’s influence is circumscribed. Happily for secular America, Easter—unlike Christmas—always falls on a Sunday, allowing it to be subsumed into and ignored as part of just another “weekend.” With Good Friday almost universally a workday and even schools pretending “Easter break” is actually “spring holiday,” the invisibility of Easter is relatively complete.

Talking recently with a young person, however, I learned to my dismay just how “complete” that invisibility may be. This young person was raised in a Catholic home, one that at least tried to signal the importance of faith. Yet, asked how his schedule might change on a particular day, he replied, “Nobody celebrates Easter.”

For him, the domestic observance of Easter apparently was just some folkloric add-on that no longer seemed to matter in the “real (i.e., secular) world.”

The impoverishment of secular time

That started me thinking. We Catholics—especially the kinds of people that read this website—are perhaps lulled into illusions about our surroundings. The fact is that not a lot of people—including a lot of our fellow Catholics—may very well not see the time through a liturgical lens.

Yet one has to say: how impoverished is time through a purely secular lens!

Consider the calendar we as Americans all “share” together. (This exercise is equally relevant, mutatis mutandis, in many places outside the United States). What do we really celebrate as Americans? The Fourth of July. Halloween. Thanksgiving. Christmas/New Year.

We celebrate the Fourth, though various historical “revisionists” have alienated large numbers of Americans from their heritage, resulting in Independence Day being mostly about watching some fireworks and eating hotdogs and hamburgers. The meaning of what happened on and around July 4, 1776 is far more contested.

Halloween has become something of a cultural ritual, including somewhat sexualized adult versions, with some focus on eating candy. Thanksgiving is the glutton’s summit, focused on a meal with ritual foods and some comments about being “thankful” though, as Joe Biden’s proclamation last year indicated, we know not to whom nor want to mention that Name. A generally non-Christian Christmas (talk about oxymoron!), as noted above, can be slid into place in lieu of the real McCoy.

Other than that, our civil calendar is pretty bare, especially in the first half of the year. We have a spate of federal holidays largely unobserved except in terms of sales and/or political speeches aimed at advancing current political agendas on the backs of historical civil rights events. Flag Day, in June, now sees Old Glory competing with a plethora of other banners in that month. Memorial and Veterans Day still elicit some feelings of duty towards those who have fallen, though it does not seem unfair suggesting that obligation feels ever more anemic. In any event, Memorial and Labor Days as such seem primarily to have become preserves of particular groups and the politicians who want to deliver speeches to them while, for most Americans, they have devolved into bookends to mark the start and end of summer. It is not unfair to say a sense of shared celebration of all these days is attenuated, replaced by privatized meanings largely derived from the free time they provide in one’s schedule.

Catholics looking at this secular calendar should see and feel it as kind of “flat.” It’s flat because it’s so temporal: the daily rhythm of things occasionally punctuated by a “day off.” Peggy Lee captured its mundane ennui in her 1969 hit, “Is That All There Is?”

Americans try to resist it by creating the secular equivalent of “seasons.” Consumerism alone does not account for why Halloween gear shows up right after “back to school sales” and Christmas stuff in October. Could it also be a perverse effort to inculcate some “celebration” into the drab run of the present, the recurrent cycle, that permeates the civil calendar? And, in a society whose elite gatekeepers assert that religion cannot be a prominent part of social life—making that claim even in the name of “democracy” (against a majority of believing citizenry)—where else is civil celebration to occur?

There’s truth to Shania Twain’s observation that “our religion is to go and blow it all//so we’re shoppin’ every Sunday at the mall.” Ka-ching!

Living the liturgical year

We Catholics don’t need to succumb to that flatness, to what Jacques Maritain once called the “minotaur of the immanent” devouring every sense of something beyond the here and now. We have something bigger. It’s called the liturgical year. And we need to live it.

We need to live it not just because Vatican II called on Catholics to acquire a liturgical dimension to their spirituality. We need to live it not just because it gives sense to the progression of Sundays some of us at least still keep. We need to recover the liturgical year for our sanity. Because it addresses a human need that the merely human civil calendar cannot supply.

Man has a need for the transcendent. St. Augustine captured that when he observed “our hearts are restless.” They are restless, but the merely immanent does not fill that appetite. The use of our history for today’s political agendas leaves us cynical. The daily flow of the “news” which suggests that, but for the details, there is nihil novi sub soli. It leads to Peggy Lee asking, “is that all there is?” Or to what, at first glance, seems to be cynical Qoheleth declaiming, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!” You live seventy years—maybe eighty for those who are strong—but “life is hard and then you die.”

Except that Qoheleth was not a cynic and, in the end, has the faith to see beyond the banal present. But that is an act of faith, something our gatekeeper elites want a priori to exclude from our common life.

So, we keep it in our community. But when a Catholic youth can observe, “Nobody celebrates Easter,” is it true that even we keep it?

The liturgical year “fills in” what is lacking in the civil year. First of all, it fills in the thirst for the Transcendent over the all-consuming immanent. The problem is: lots of people are thirsty, but they don’t know—or don’t believe—what can slake that thirst.

The liturgical year, built around “seasons”—Eastertide, Lent, Advent, even Ordinary Time—provides unified meaning to a meaningless succession of days. It provides a “hope” for a goal—Easter or Christmas, for example—that the relentless march of otherwise undifferentiated days does not.

The elevation of time in the reality of Christ

Most importantly, the liturgical year—if it is something you live rather than just know—elevates time beyond both just the historical and the immanent. One can, of course, just know the liturgical year, but then that makes what it commemorates as dead as its civil year equivalents: things we think about, not events in which we share and share in.

The liturgical year does not just celebrate events that are dead and gone, things that happened. The liturgical year is not for empty commemorations of events long past, the priestly equivalent of politicians’ speeches. The liturgical year, and the sacraments accompanying it, make us participants in those deeds and thus elevate us beyond the immanent to the Transcendent. We do not celebrate Easter, for example, because God did something nice for Jesus some two thousand years ago. We celebrate Easter because what Jesus achieved—the conquest of death—is something of which we can and want to be part.

Once upon a time, when civil and sacred calendars better coincided, even cultures were more coherent. When people look at a country like Poland and wonder how it is that religion plays the prominent role in people’s lives it does in contrast to many other European countries, they don’t realize part of the reason is that there is not the radical schizophrenia between “public culture” and the “faith culture.” The “what matters” of the Transcendent is not shunted off to the sphere of the private. Yes, I know that’s changing, but that is unlikely to produce anything good. It is likely to provide the Western Man whose life on Sunday and the rest of the week is dissonant. Cognitive dissonance usually leads to schizophrenia, not the “healthy outcome” we should be seeking.

If we treat the liturgical calendar as just a religious version of the civil calendar—a recollection of past events long gone—it is likely to have as sterile an effect as that civil calendar in terms of atomized individuals who share no common meaning. If we reduce it to that, the civil calendar gains an advantage: at least it gives you Sundays off.

But it doesn’t speak to deeper needs.

Living the liturgical year—recognizing it is not just a commemoration of things past but a celebration of what is going on in my life—lifts us beyond the ennui of a succession of days, each rather not different from its predecessor or successor. It raises us to the notion that not just our theology knows but our visceral human sense feels: that time has a purpose and goal. That time is not just an endless, repetitive cycle but that it is history, with a telos. It is an end set in the Empty Tomb on the first Easter Sunday and working its way through human history—like yeast, one soul at a time—until the emptying of every tomb on the Last Day. And we are called not just to be part of that, but to advance it.

There’s no time of year where the sense that time has a purpose and goal is truer than Eastertide. And no better time to start living the liturgical year. Because no Catholic should say—or feel: “nobody celebrates Easter.”