The Best Holiday of the Year

The Boston Globe 

Easter has so many things going for it. Not just the resurrection and the promise of eternal life, though that's hard to beat. Death not an end, but a beginning? We don't die, we evolve? Who doesn't want to believe this? "Jesus Christ is risen today, Alleluia."

All on its own, this promise, this certainty that we are not merely mortal bodies but immortal souls, is reason to celebrate.

Add spring (lucky us in the Northern Hemisphere) with its sunlight and daffodils and little girls in pretty dresses and lilies and jelly beans, and how can Easter not be the best holiday of the year?

Christmas may have twinkling lights and dazzle. But it's Easter that dazzles me.

Back in the day, when I was a little kid and 40 days of deprivation — I always gave up candy and going to the movies — preceded the glory that was Easter Sunday, Easter more than bedazzled. How could it not? I loved candy. And the movies. And after 40 days of neither, Easter morning trumped Christmas morning hands down.

Except for one little glitch. Back then, to receive Holy Communion, which you did or people would assume you had committed a grievous sin, a person had to fast from midnight on. This meant not a thing could pass your lips, not a cough drop, not an aspirin, not even water. Only after Communion were you allowed to swallow.

After Communion at my house meant Easter afternoon, not Easter morning, because my parents always went to 11:30 Mass, the latest Mass there was. It may as well have been Easter Monday, it felt so late. All my friends who went to church at 7:30 or 9:30 were home devouring their Peeps and Fanny Farmer butter-cream-filled Easter eggs while I was still in my pajamas starving and sniffing chocolate.

I did that. Every Lent I kept a box of chocolate-covered marshmallow Easter eggs (they came in an egg-shaped carton) in my room under my bed, and when I really wanted candy, I'd run upstairs, open the box, and inhale. My best friend, Rosemary, who was Protestant and didn't have to give up anything, said this was disgusting.

Maybe it was, but at the end of Lent? When the fast was over? That familiar whiff of chocolate followed by that first unimaginably mouth-watering bite? Not even Hilliard's penuche with nuts or Ghirardelli's dark chocolate with orange filling came close to the sweet taste of those slightly stale, incomparably delicious marshmallow eggs.

It seems silly now. All of it. Fasting from midnight. Candy under the bed. Not seeing a movie for weeks. What was the point?

That's what Rosemary used to ask me. Why did I get ashes on my forehead on Ash Wednesday? Why couldn't I eat meat on Friday? Why was I not allowed to talk between the hours of noon and 3 on Good Friday? Why did I have to go to confession every Saturday? And why, oh why, did I have to give up candy and movies for almost two months?

I don't remember what I told her. Because my mother said? Because Father Finn said? What, really, was the point?

I see now that God was the point. Not eating candy got me to thinking about why I wasn't eating candy and that got me to thinking about God. Same thing with confession. "I am heartily sorry for having offended thee." Had I offended thee? I wondered. Not eating hot dogs on a Friday night when everyone else was eating hot dogs? There was God again.

Most people don't give up things during Lent anymore. They take on things instead. My friend Anne took on writing letters this Lent, pen and paper letters, one a day to distant friends. Not only did this put her in touch with people who were out of her everyday sphere, it was also a daily prompt that put her in touch with God.

"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience," French philosopher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote 100 years ago. We are eternal. Death is only a doorway. This is Easter's promise. And this is Easter's joy.