A Wall, a Window, a Door...and Whooping Joy

I’ve been thinking about walls and windows and doors lately. 

No, we’re not building a house.  I’ve seen a number of people “hit the wall” recently, in various ways (and I seem to do it myself all too often).  We’ve also had some precious times with grandchildren this winter . . . I love driving up to the house in New Hampshire and seeing eager little faces watching out the window for us to come. And oh yes: we’re getting ready for a trip to Ireland soon to see our family there.  I just can’t wait to walk through the door into their house and be engulfed by hugs and smiles and tangles of bodies in the joy of happy reunion.

Also, it’s Easter week as I write this.  In the past 10 days or so, there have been too many funerals: A much-too-young husband and father cruelly snatched from his family by a car crash on slippery roads.  A much-too-young mother slipping away after a long courageous battle with cancer.  Our daughter-in-law’s grandfather.

I keep thinking of author Peter Marshall’s unforgettable proclamation that because of Easter, death is no longer a wall, but a door. 

And I am, of course, reading Walter Wangerin’s Reliving the Passion again.  He writes of the paradox of the window of heaven being opened to us even as the heavens were, for a few horrific moments, closed against Jesus on the cross, becoming a door into heaven for us: “a doorway made out of nails and wood, a crossing, a cross” (p. 134).

Wangerin also writes of joy, of part of the purpose of Lent being that we prepare for joy.  Against the backdrop of all these funerals, against the backdrop of my own life, amidst a world of walls, his words ring truer than ever this year:

“The difference between shallow happiness and a deep, sustaining joy is sorrow.  Happiness lives where sorrow is not.  When sorrow arrives, happiness dies.  It can’t stand pain.  Joy, on the other hand, rises from sorrow and therefore can withstand all grief.  Joy, by the grace of God, is the transfiguring of suffering into endurance and of endurance into character, and of character into hope—and the hope that has become our joy does not (as happiness must for those who depend on it) disappoint us.”   (p. 31)

This is the joy we celebrate at Easter.  A joy birthed out of the Hope and Triumph of our resurrected Lord.  A durable, stubborn joy for all seasons.  Not only the endless winter we’ve had (and still have!) in the Northeast.  But a joy that sustains us even in our grief. Wangerin, again:

“Grief, while you are grieving, lasts forever.  But under God, forever is a day.  Weeping, darling Magdalene, may last the night.  But joy cometh with the sunrise—and then your mourning shall be dancing, and gladness shall be the robe around you. Wait.  Wait.”  (p. 138)

“Whooping joy,” Wangerin called it, describing the exhilaration he felt as a young child when his pastor father read the climax of the Easter story.  Because of the window and the door, because of the triumph of the Resurrection,  I wish you “whooping joy” this Easter—and far beyond.