Easter Creativity
In Lent, our fast cleared out new space in our lives and helped us re-examine our relationship with enjoyments and dependencies we tend to take for granted. Now, it is Easter, and we can go back to enjoying those things we left behind—we must celebrate, after all!—but in some cases, we find ourselves facing a conundrum when the TV habits, or social media scrolling, or regularity of chocolate-eating, or whatever-it-might-be, are again fair game. Namely: do we want to go back to those things? Do we still enjoy them? And if so, in what way do we want to go back to them?
By choosing to create distance from these things through our fast, we learned to look at them in a new way. We distanced ourselves from dependency on them, and in doing so introduced a new creative tension into our lives.
Once upon a time, I ate a dark chocolate peanut butter cup as a little pick me up a few times a day, without any thought, and I took for granted that it tasted good and made me a little happier than I was before I ate it. But then . . . Lent happened. And now, in Easter, I find myself confused by conflicting desires. I want to stuff my face with dark chocolate peanut butter cups again. They are such beautiful little morsels! But now, suddenly, they taste . . . too sweet, and eating more than one of them every couple of days feels like too much. So I gaze longingly at them and wonder what to do.
This year, I know I am finding this moment a bit bewildering. If I don’t want to eat dark chocolate peanut butter cups again, who am I? What gives me joy if not that? And if I don’t enjoy the chocolate, or the TV, or the social media as much as I once did, how am I supposed to celebrate Easter?
I have an inkling that celebration in the wake of these changed tastes has something to do with creativity. By allowing our fast to reframe our relationship with our old dependencies, we have become caught in a sort of tension. There is a dissonance that occurs when I find I no longer enjoy something the way I once did. I have changed. I am no longer the same person. I must get oriented to this new self, and as I do that I am faced with a seemingly mundane but significant choice: do I just keep eating chocolate, reacclimate myself to it, go back to the same habits I once had, even though I’m not sure I enjoy it anymore? Or, do I see in this new, bewildering emptiness an opportunity to reimagine my relationship with chocolate, to ask new questions about how I delight, and how my capacity for delight might be re-created and strengthened?
In his book Art + Faith, Makoto Fujimura points out that the Gospel is interested in new creation, in ushering in abundant new life. As Fujimura writes: “the consummation of God’s plan as it unfolds in the Bible is not a utilitarian restoration but an imaginative New Creation. When we read the entire arc of the Good News, we realize that the focus of God is on creating.” He continues: “God does not just mend, repair, and restore; God renews and regenerates, transcending our expectations of even what we desire, beyond what we dare to ask or imagine.” In other words, having given us His life, Jesus invites us to more than sustaining basic moral functioning or the fulfillment of predictable desires. The life of Christ is meant to usher us into a way of being that is marked by generative abundance. This abundance fills and overbrims our cup, spilling over into acts of goodness, truth, and beauty that, on the surface, might seem unnecessary.
As we become more like Christ, we are called to emulate this abundance and become channels of Christ’s love to the world. This begins with Easter: with Christ’s resurrection; with the emptiness of the Empty Tomb; with the radical change that occurs to His body when He is raised; with the way the vocations of His followers are utterly reimagined, reinvigorated, and transformed. Think of St. Mary Magdalene, whose faithfulness at the Tomb—her perseverant search for Christ, her courage to wait and weep—became her call to be the first evangelist. Think of St. Peter, whose impetuous passion for Christ is transformed into the strength that makes him the rock of the church.
At Easter, Christ gives us His life and calls us to be transformed after His likeness. He redeems our emptiness, takes the bits and pieces of our lives that we don’t know what to do with and stitches them into new and beautiful creations. This leads us into New Creation, invites us to imagine and realize abundance we cannot conceive of on our own. It requires participation in a powerful creativity—a creativity we can only partake in through participation in Christ’s life. We must be patient to receive it from our Maker, who makes us more like Himself as we receive His resurrected life into our lives.
In Easter, let’s pause before we jump back into our “old ways.” Let’s listen to the silence again, and find a new brightness within it. Let’s be patient with the cognitive dissonance we are facing in the wake of our fast, and not try to numb it. As we learn to listen to the Word’s creative voice in our lives, He inducts us into Easter. He re-creates our lives after His likeness, and invites us to pursue a reimagined, re-created delight as we participate in New Creation.