In the world’s broad field of battle, in the bivouac of life, be not like dumb driven cattle! Be a hero in the strife! Trust no future, however pleasant! Let the dead past bury its dead! Act, – act in the living present! Heart within, and God overhead!
These are a couple of lines from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous poem, A Psalm of Life. I think these lines capture well what our attitude towards the world and life ought to be in light of Easter. We ought to be hopeful, but not pollyannish. Easter is an immeasurable source of hope, but we must remember that it was not possible without Good Friday. And, therefore, while hope must always remain in our hearts, we must steel ourselves for the struggles to come in this “bivouac of life.”
Suffering is not Gone, but Bearable
“For the love of God is this, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome, for whoever is begotten by God conquers the world” (1 Jn 5:1-6). We must be careful here to not take the wrong message from this passage from the Second Sunday of Easter. It may be very natural to read “And his commandments are not burdensome” as saying that it is easy to follow God’s commandments. One only needs to read about Christ’s suffering in the agony of the garden to be disabused of that notion. I don’t think someone who is sweating blood and praying for “this chalice” to be passed from him is someone who is having an easy go of things.
Rather, what this passage means, I argue, is that you will not find yourself being swayed by the transient, popular notions of the day. You will not be driven like cattle, as Longfellow puts it. Your actions and thoughts will be anchored in what you believe is good and true and in accord with God’s commandments. You will not force this conviction on anyone, but you will not allow yourself to be unmoored merely because the world thinks it would be better if you were.
Just as Christ told His disciples that they must “take up your cross (Mat 16:24)” to follow Him. It is not easy to carry the cross, but it is not burdensome because we will not be overcome by it or succumb to its weight. The death on the cross while difficult and gruesome does not have the final word.
Act in the Living Present
The commission we receive from Easter then is not merely a celebration of the resurrection. Though it certainly does involve that. However, we do not properly celebrate the resurrection unless we are living out its call. Our action plan should be more or less known from our Lenten preparation. As I said previously, Lent should serve as a Damascus experience for us. Just as St. Paul knew what he needed to do after that encounter, so too should we after Lent.
The point is not to then give up on our strictures or disciplines as a reward for engaging in them in the first place. They are there to remind us that the joy of Easter does not mean we now get to have it easy. It means that now pain and suffering will not stop us nor have the final word. We will have the strength to help each other through this “broad field of battle” and in so doing be “heroes in the strife.”
If, perhaps, we did not have quite as reflective, penitential, fruitful a Lent as we might have hoped. There is always today, tomorrow, and all of the other days to engage in the necessary self-reflection and discipline to find out where we can improve ourselves and where we are being called to work in this life. I would like to close then with the final stanza from Wadsworth’s poem:
“Let us, then, be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait.”
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