Light and Life Amid Loss

April 1, 2024

As the Church unites in Alleluias every Easter, we invite Jesus to pierce the darkness with joy and hope

By Amy Welborn

April 1, 2024

Noli me tangere (detail), 1305, by Giotto / Photo © Electa / Bridgeman Images

During Lent, we don’t shy from death. Walking with Jesus to Calvary, the death to self, death to sin. Lent is lived in a context of death, always.

In 2009, my Lent was marked by yet another kind of death: the mortal, earthly kind. Just a few weeks before Ash Wednesday that year, my 50-year-old husband dropped to the ground after a few minutes on a gym treadmill. The woman who was on the machine next to him later shared with me what she’d witnessed. She was sure he had died immediately.

So that was Lent, me with two young sons, aged 7 and 4, in a city we’d moved to only a few months before. There was no problem focusing on God, letting go of earthly attachments, living in a sober, subdued mode; no problem doing a whole lot of prayer. A lot.

But then what? The easiest, most organic-feeling Lent turned, ironically, into the most challenging Easter. I vividly remember standing in Mass at the Easter Vigil Mass that year and singing Alleluia that first time. Yes, I sang with everyone else, but I was dutiful more than anything else, for it struck me as strange and hard in that moment. I was forced to ask myself: Do I really believe this?

‘A SURGE OF THE HEART’

It’s a question worth posing to ourselves regularly as we pray, sing and proclaim. Do I really believe “Our” Father and not just mine? Do I really believe that heaven and earth are full of God’s glory? Am I really heartily sorry?

I’m not suggesting that we should only utter the words when we perfectly understand them and wholeheartedly accept them. I’m looking at it from the other side: How can saying the words help me believe?

There are many kinds of prayer. We pray in quiet solitude. We pray with others. We pray for others. We say words, sing, gesture. We meditate on Scripture. We ponder God’s presence in his creation. All of it, as St. Thérèse of Lisieux says, is “a surge of the heart; it is a simple look turned toward heaven, it is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy.”

The most ancient manner of articulating the surges of our hearts is through the words and the forms that have been passed down to us, which are even divine gifts — the Psalms, Jesus’ own words, the prayers of our tradition, the words and structures of the liturgy. Words like Alleluia.

St. Paul says in his Letter to the Romans that we do not know how to pray as we ought. He doesn’t mean that we need a class in prayer, but more that we don’t know what it is we should be praying for, what we truly need. Our self-understanding is limited, especially in the cosmic context. Ask Job what God had to say to him about that.

But, Paul says, the Spirit comes to help us in our wrong-headedness. And since the Spirit dwells in the Church and has guided it over the centuries, one of the ways the Spirit helps us pray is through the prayer of that same Church.

I may not feel like I need to be forgiven or much less to forgive others, but in praying the Lord’s Prayer, my rebellious self is guided in the right direction. I may feel hopeless, but praying Psalm 23 recenters me in ways that my solipsistic rambling can’t begin to do. I may feel alone in the universe, but getting myself to Mass and gathering in communion with others, with the Lord and with those in heaven reminds me, most decidedly, that I am not.

And so, we gather each year by the flickering light of the Paschal candle, returning to the word that we’ve left behind for the past several weeks, and we sing: Alleluia!

In the crowd packing a church at the Easter Vigil, the crowds raising their voices around the world, where do their Alleluias come from?

For every person — every single one — the joy exists, grows, is fought for in the context of loss. Not just the loss that is the death of someone we love or the inevitability of our own death. Alleluias are sung by those who have lost their marriages, who live alienated from family members; by those who have lost a sense of purpose or meaning, who are struggling with matters of faith and doubt. The Alleluia resounds from a Body whose members have lost their youth, their health, their jobs, their dreams.

In the midst of all of that loss, the Spirit teaches us to pray. Alleluia.

CALLED BY NAME

We can see our own loss-framed Easter moments in the first Easter, in the hearts of the women gathered at the tomb.

Luke tells us that Jesus had healed Mary Magdalene of a profound possession. Possessed by seven demons — the number seven always signifies completeness in Scripture — poor Mary was completely engulfed in darkness. Then Jesus entered her life and drove out the darkness; what could she do but follow him?

And there she was at the tomb, still following. There to perform her religious duty, mourning, deep in loss and now shock, for she’d seen that the tomb was empty. Where is Jesus?

Wait. A man is there, and he asks her why she’s weeping. She tells him. And then what does he say? Her name: Mary.

He lives! He conquers darkness, death and loss in each of our lives, now and forever, and calls us — shocks us, even — into light and life. Not abstractly, not impersonally, but calling us by name.

And so while each of us singing Alleluia on Easter lives in a world of loss, we’ve also been called by name — baptized, in communion through the Eucharist, wholly one now, not just because of our shared humanity, and not even because of the common human experience of loss, but because Jesus lives. Even in the mystery of the suffering that is life on earth, he brings us light and life.

He conquers darkness, death and loss in each of our lives, now and forever, and calls us — shocks us, even — into light and life. Not abstractly, not impersonally, but calling us by name.

We may not feel it. We may still be confused, sad and even angry, and we will certainly struggle, but the cycle of the liturgy — the prayer given to us — that every year takes us through this rhythm of death and life, darkness and light, forces us to get beyond our own limitations and hear the good news, sometimes despite ourselves.

None of us come to that Alleluia moment completely unprepared, though, do we? For God has been working in our lives, hinting, whispering.

For me, the first hint that Alleluia might be possible revealed itself at my husband’s casket. I had dreaded the moment. I had not seen his body since the hospital, and even then, I could not bear to get close.

So I approached his open casket, shaking. It was impossible that just a few days before he had been alive and now he was gone from our lives forever. To see his lifeless body? Terrifying, ridiculous, even outrageous.

I arrived, and at last looked. What I saw was familiar, but strange, for something was missing — simply: him. At that moment, that very moment, I heard a voice, a memory, a recollection of words I had heard so many times before — the words of Jesus to Mary Magdalene: Why do you seek the living among the dead?

It was shock, but of a different kind now. In the non-recognition, there was a new recognition — of an old familiar truth I’d heard and written about and even taught and, in my limitations, had resisted.

Yes, the tomb is empty. Alleluia.

*****

AMY WELBORN is a freelance writer based in Birmingham, Ala., and author of numerous books on Catholic faith and spirituality for children, youth and adults.

Archbishop William Lori celebrates Mass in the Church of the Gesù in Rome on Oct. 23, 2024.

Light and Life Amid Loss

‘A SURGE OF THE HEART’

CALLED BY NAME

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