The art of celebrating the Easter season

Easter is the feast of all feasts, and its fifty-day season stands atop the liturgical year as its climax. While we might recognize this reality, the Easter season can seem like a letdown. While the goal of Lent appears to be clear-cut — fight against sin, do penance, increase prayer and give alms—what about Easter?

What are we supposed to do for fifty days?

If Lent is meant to clear away obstacles to receiving God’s grace, Easter should be the time for entering into it. It begins by renewing our baptismal promises, indicating that we are making a new start. Lent enabled us to renounce sin, and now we are reaffirming our desire to live out our faith. Easter is the time of rebirth, which we received originally at our Baptism and is now laid out to us to reclaim. Lent offered us the opportunity to realize how far we have strayed from these promises, and after changing course through repentance, we can now find ourselves back on track.

Just as Lent is ordered toward the celebration of Easter as its goal, so the Easter season itself contains a similar orientation toward Pentecost. If we renew our baptismal promises, we can now reclaim the grace of Confirmation by opening ourselves to the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. In fact, Jesus reveals the gift of the Spirit as the great gift opened to us through the work of the Cross and Resurrection: “I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you” (Jn 16:7).

We entered into Jesus’s Passion during Lent, and now it is time to receive the benefit, the helper who will enable us to live with Jesus’ own life within us. The Easter season, from this perspective, can be seen as a time to open our hearts to receive this gift anew on Pentecost.

When Jesus appeared to the disciples during the forty days between the Resurrection and the Ascension, we find one striking commonality—he eats with them! At the Last Supper, Jesus said he would not eat or drink again until the coming of the Kingdom (Lk 22:18), and after the Resurrection, he fulfilled this promise, expressing the peace and communion of his kingdom through a feast. Of course, we enter into the new covenant with Jesus when we eat and drink with him at the Mass, which opens up the Heavenly Kingdom to us, but we also express the Resurrection when we partake “of food with glad and generous hearts, praising God” (Acts 2:46-47). As a celebratory season, Easter is a time for festive meals, which express the joy of faith through tangible and communal means.

Festivity, the extension of the celebration of faith into the world, no longer comes naturally to us in a secular culture. The modern world confines the praise of God within a church and recognizes only explicitly religious means to express it. It seems counterintuitive to praise God with eating, drinking, singing, and dancing, as these are generally viewed as “worldly” things. The Easter season celebrates a new creation, one which touches all things as we prepare for a new Heaven and a new earth in the Wedding Feast of the Lamb.

Festivity, therefore, forms an essential part of the Easter season as we learn to glorify God with our bodies and entire lives, putting things back together that have been separated by sin. The fifty days give us an extended opportunity to show that the world is truly different after the Resurrection. Inviting family, friends, neighbors, and fellow parishioners to feasts throughout the season offers a witness to the reality of the Resurrection and the new life that flows from it, making all things new.

The communal celebration of festivity can take other forms as well. Traditionally, Easter was a time to make or purchase new clothes for Mass to express how we have put on Christ through our Baptism. The Easter season calls us to wear our Sunday best for worship as a sign that we come to Mass to enter into Christ’s own life, partaking in the divine nature. It’s also a time for walks or hikes through nature, which offers a natural sign of the Resurrection through the renewed life budding around us.

Father Francis X. Weiser explains that this walk has its origin in an Easter parade whose purpose was “to announce and to bring Easter blessings and Easter joy from the altar of God to the whole world around us” (Religious Customs in the Family, 83). Wearing one’s Easter best, along with a cross and flowers, gave tangible expression to the newness of the Resurrection in a way that blended perfectly with the natural signs of spring.

Easter can take on just as much, if not more, significance than Lent. Truly, the two should be just as inseparable as the Cross and Resurrection themselves. Just as we’re used to giving something up for Lent, we can consider adding something during Easter that gives expression to the newness of life we have received, a new habit or practice that enables the Spirit to dwell in our lives and guide us into the fullness of life.