Among the many spiritual struggles of the conscientious adult Catholic (I speak facetiously, but the statement is true) is the ingrained tendency to prefer Christmas to Easter.  Easter is, of course, the greater feast; the Church has long proclaimed it so.  But Christmas frequently feels like the happier—or at least, recalling the terminological distinction of an earlier post—the merrier time.  Part of this must be due to childhood associations.  Christmas is a children’s holiday: both the birth of a child and the receiving of gifts are things in which children uniquely delight.  Nonetheless, especially in seeing children enjoy Christmas, it is not difficult for many adults to see Christmas with childlike eyes, and to love it as children do.

Easter is different.  The Easter Bunny, even in households where he is fervently believed in, is never so beloved as Santa Claus; and all children except the very smallest know that candy is inferior to toy trains and picture books, not to mention whatever electronic gizmo is currently high on the advertiser’s list of Things It Is Desirable That the Public Should Buy.  Besides, Christmas offers children an experience to which many can relate: the birth of a child.  Probably there are siblings, cousins, or siblings of friends whose births children can remember; if not that, at the very least the child knows more or less the story of his own birth, for his parents have told it to him.  The birth of Jesus is, if miraculous and strange, within the realm of partial comprehension.  But the resurrection of Jesus, presupposing as it does his death, is strange new matter for the young.  Even for adults, Death may feel uncannily unfamiliar.  And it is hard to celebrate the reversal of something whose terrors we do not fully appreciate.

One possible response to these reversed emotions, which make Christmas the preferred holiday and Easter a mere afterthought, is to consider the matter from the viewpoint of spiritual maturity.  If we were spiritually mature people; if we had a better, harder, more manful Lent; if we spent the appropriate amount of time meditating on the Passion and Death of Our Lord—then we might begin to appreciate Easter.

All of that is true.  But there is another way to address the emotional preference for Christmas, a spiritual shortcut if you will, which is to attack the problem through the deficient imagination.  It is the imagery of Christmas, after all, that appeals so strongly to human nature: the baby, the manger, the animals, the shepherds; more distantly, all of those less overtly religious sights and smells and sounds, the secular iconography of the season.  We gloss over the painful and distasteful aspects of Christmas (“born at midnight, in piercing cold,” says the traditional novena) in favor of its jollity; and if that helps us to contemplate the birth of Christ, so be it.

There is less distasteful in the Resurrection, but also less to appeal to the senses.  No baby here, but a grown man; no animals around the tomb—nothing, indeed, in the tomb itself except for the folded napkin and the shroud.  We kiss the feet of baby Jesus at Christmas and the feet of the Crucified on Good Friday; now, at Easter, we hear Christ tell Mary Magdalene, Noli mi tangere, “Do not touch me.”  The event is somehow ineffable.  It is the final proof of Christ’s Godhead, as the previous events showed his humanity.

Yet the liturgy gives us some crumbs, and more than crumbs, on which to start an imaginary feast.  Fire, water, and wax are blessed, and the Exultet (in lucky parishes) chanted.  In the darkness of the Easter Vigil the earth is bidden “Be glad … as glory floods her, ablaze with light from her eternal King,” while “the lightening of his glory” arrays the universal Church and the parish church shakes with joy “filled with the mighty voices of the peoples.”  Adam’s debt is recalled, and “the feasts of Passover, in which is slain the Lamb, the one true Lamb, whose Blood anoints the doorposts of believers”; for

This is the night, when once you led our forebears, Israel’s children, from slavery in Egypt and made them pass dry-shod through the Red Sea.

This is the night that with a pillar of fire banished the darkness of sin.

This is the night that even now throughout the world, sets Christian believers apart from worldly vices and from the gloom of sin, leading them to grace and joining them to his holy ones.

This is the night when Christ broke the prison-bars of death and rose victorious from the underworld.

The tropes of the Exultet are of darkness becoming light, slaves becoming sons, a wedding of heaven and earth, as the fragrance of the beeswax candle ascends and

Mingle[s] with the lights of heaven.  May this flame be found still burning by the Morning Star: the one Morning Star who never sets, Christ your Son, who, coming back from death’s domain, has shed his peaceful light on humanity, and lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen.

And there the Exultet ends, on the great trope of Easter: Christ as King.  No, more than that: Christ as King by right of conquest, he who “broke the prison bars of death and rose victorious from the underworld.”

That is, or ought to be, an image filled with as much soul-stirring joy as anything Christmas has to offer: Christ as the leader of a seemingly-doomed rearguard action that astonishingly vanquishes the powers of darkness.  And if Christ as imperator doesn’t quite “do it” for most of us, that may be because we in the modern age have lost our belief in the possibility of a just and noble war.  We no longer have military heroes, in fact or fiction, who are allowed to be flawless; even our fantasies are filled with mediocre human beings like ourselves.  But it is that sort of flawless hero we need to imagine; it is to that sort of imagery that our imaginations need to cleave in order to love Easter in the way that we love Christmas.

What this means in terms of practical exercise will vary from person to person. Perhaps it means reading The Lord of the Rings again, or Henry V, or Beowulf—whatever imaginative work is both near and dear to you, and comes close to presenting the kind of heroism which Easter records.  Perhaps it means listening attentively to the Exultet, or to something like this.  Perhaps meditating on the frescoes of the Sistine chapel.  Whatever kind of legwork is required, the end should be the same: to know feelingly the glory of these latter forty days: the glory, not of prayer and fasting (though those have a glory of their own), but of the wedding feast.