Good morning, friends, and welcome to the second week of Eastertide! The party continues! Are you ready? For more feasting and celebration? For another week of leaning into joy? …Or does it begin to feel complicated—this season—when your soul is aware not only of each day’s joy, but also its sorrow? We touched on this a bit last week, but this week we are going to be paying attention to the complications of joy—and of a season bent on it. Augustine said we “should be an Alleluia from head to foot.” Alleluias walking around, traipsing through this world as little embodied celebrations of who God is and what God has done. But, again, that’s complicated, isn’t it? We do embody joy (in this season and other times!), but we also live into a complexity of human experience; and living into joy ends up not being as simple as it first seems. How do you celebrate when someone you love is in pain? When you are simultaneously aware of the atrocities of war and sickness and death in the world? How do you throw a party when you yourself are in pain or simply exhausted? What is it to lean into Easter joy *then*? What might God be inviting you into *this* Easter season, in all it may contain? Spend some time this week to hold that question—to pose it to God, who holds the both/and of joy and sorrow always. Lean in to joy. Be that walking alleluia. But don’t deny everything else in the process, putting away the feelings and experiences that don’t seem to “fit” with celebration. Let it all be. (And lean in, still, to joy.)

Posted by Jamie Bonilla at 2022-04-25 14:03:22 UTC