There's got to be a morning after

I awakened early yesterday, Easter morning -- about a half hour before the sunrise service was scheduled -- to hear wind and rain pounding at the window. I offered up a brief prayer for all those who were planning to worship outside in the rain and crawled back into bed.

Rising at the same time again this morning, because as we move into spring the sun is lighting the room earlier and earlier in the morning, I could see that today we would be getting the sunrise that would have made yesterday's services magical. Oh, well!

And so now, here I am, back at my computer, and it's time to write another post. What do you say, after Easter Sunday? What more can there be after that day has passed? Looking over my images, I chose this one, which I'd worked on a few days earlier, and as I gazed into it, wondering what to say, I heard playing in my head a song I hadn't thought of in years. Do you remember the Poseidon Adventure -- the movie about the cruise ship going bottoms up in a storm? I looked up the lyrics to its theme song, and they seemed surprisingly appropriate for today:

There's got to be a morning after
If we can hold on thru the night
We have a chance to find the sunshine
Let's keep on looking for the light.

Oh can't you see the morning after?
It's waiting right outside the storm
Why don't we cross the bridge together
And find the place that's safe and warm.

It's not too late, we should be giving
Only with love can we climb
It's not too late, not while we're living
Let's put our hands out in time.

There's got to be a morning after
We're moving closer to the shore
I know we'll be there by tomorrow
And we'll escape the darkness
We won't be searching anymore.

This song -- which I remember hating at the time, because it was so hokey -- is really, like Easter, about hope. And however you may feel about all the theological brou-ha-ha that surrounds the Resurrected Jesus (and I'm not sure I'll ever be completely comfortable with that, myself -- I prefer to steep myself in his words, not his story), the subject for the season is really about hope.

The problem with Easter is that there's got to be a morning after, what Jack Kornfeld so cleverly titled "After the Ecstasy, the Laundry." The problem with Easter is that you come to the day after -- today -- and it's all about business as usual, and going back to work, or school, and despite the lovely sunrise the weather now is just as gray and wet as it was yesterday. Has anything really changed?

I'm not sure it has. Just because I "got" -- however briefly -- that finding Jesus is more about stepping into the empty tomb than it is about reading books; that faith is about seeing Jesus in the eyes of those around us and learning to love -- doesn't necessarily mean I'm living my life any differently today than I did three days ago. But that doesn't mean I'm not willing to try. And it does mean, I hope, that the awareness of who I want to be and where I am determined to go may be planted just a little deeper.

John O'Donohue, in his book "To Bless the Space Between" talks about "the shoreline of the invisible." I guess the hope of Easter is that, however slowly it occurs, I may be moving closer to that shore.