I’ve been reading a C.S. Lewis devotional book during Lent. As always with his work, I have been blessed and challenged and coaxed to think harder and deeper. This passage last week grabbed my imagination and my reason and made both take notice:
“I have been told of a very small and very devout boy who was heard murmuring to himself on Easter morning a poem of his own composition which began, ‘Chocolate eggs and Jesus risen.’ This seems to me, for his age, both admirable poetry and admirable piety. But, of course, the time will soon come when such a child can no longer effortlessly and spontaneously enjoy that unity. He will become able to distinguish the spiritual from the ritual and festal aspect of Easter; chocolate eggs will no longer be sacramental. And once he has distinguished, he must put one or the other first. If he puts the spiritual first, he can still taste something of Easter in the chocolate eggs; if he puts the eggs first, they will soon be no more than any other sweetmeat. They have taken on an independent, and therefore a withering, life.”
From “Reflections on the Psalms”
As someone who routinely gives up sweets for Lent, Easter and chocolate have become as connected for me as they were for Lewis’s young poet. The deliciousness of sugary treats, amplified by long abstinence, adds sensory experience to my Easter worship every year. I don’t think that poses the problem for me that Lewis articulates in the passage – I am absolutely sure that I need the risen Lord more than I need See’s Butterscotch Squares – but it does suggest another possibility, one that Lewis only hints at here. That possibility is simply this: is gratitude inevitably correlative with an experience of lack? Put another way, was the child poet’s enjoyment of the eggs and his association of them with the risen Christ facilitated by the long, chocolate-less season of Lent that he had just lived?
Everyone knows that a “spoiled child” is one who has too many of his wants and wishes effortlessly met, with the result that nothing actually satisfies or pleases him. In “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (the ultimate tale of Spoiled Children Run Amuck as well as a handy example for our chocolate-based meditation), Veruca Salt’s timeless ballad – “I want it NOW” – musically outlines an apologetics of ingratitude / total self-gratification:
I want a golden goose! Gooses! Geeses!
I want my geese to lay gold eggs for easter.
At least a hundred a day.
And by the way…
I want the world-
I want the whole world!
I want to lock it all up in my pocket
It’s my bar of chocolate
Give it to me now…
Don’t care how,
I want it now!
Veruca gets everything she wants as soon as she wants it… which means that she is trapped in an endless cycle of wanting. Her lack of pleasure in the wonders of the Chocolate Factory contrasts starkly with protagonist Charlie’s wide-eyed wonder and joy. Charlie’s material deprivation and routine self-sacrifice have prepared him to feel exquisite delight; Veruca’s wealth and privilege have utterly cheated her of that capacity. Charlie’s gratitude is rooted in Charlie’s lack; Veruca’s ingratitude is rooted in her excess. For Charlie, “thank you” is reflexive. For Veruca, “thank you” is ridiculous.
Looking beyond chocolate and spoiled children, think about your own life and your own gratitude. When are you most grateful for the gift of health? Immediately following a period of sickness or injury. When are you most grateful for the gift of sunshine? Not in the middle of August in Texas but rather when it’s been raining or sleeting or just overcast for a long spell. When are you most grateful for the taste of water? When you are truly thirsty. When you are most grateful for the sight of a beloved person? When you have been separated, suffered each other’s absence, and then are reunited.
Easter worship is particularly powerful and particularly redolent with gratitude because it comes on the heels of the only two days in the year in which Christians contemplate the absence of Christ.
Good Friday’s violence is surpassed in horror only by Easter Saturday’s silence. Christ dead. Christ in the tomb. Separation from the Savior – even only imagined – is emotionally devastating. For Christ to have died and stayed dead is surely the very worst thing that could ever have happened – and Easter Saturday is lived in the horrifying shadow of its possibility.
Pondering the idea of Christ entombed forever, trying to empathize with those first disciples for whom it was a 72-hour reality – Easter Saturday constitutes the ultimate spiritual lack. A literal voiding of health – of light – of thirst-quenching water – of the Beloved’s presence.
And then, Easter! The Lord RISEN!
Eternal health – the Light of the world – the water of Life – the Beloved restored to us – forever and ever!
All that seemed to be lost, found – and amplified – and made permanent!
Of course Easter is the most grateful celebration of the year.
One more thought: the Easter celebration, the glory and glee, are in themselves portents of that ultimate celebration yet to be… that worship which will focus on the risen Christ but be enacted by all those risen saints whose deaths, finally, are as null and void as Jesus’s.
What will that be like – when we experience Heaven, for which we have been longing so acutely from age to age?
How will we contain the gratitude then, as every lack is supplied with overflowing abundance, every tear is wiped away, and every reunion ever longed-for joyfully established?
There will be joy beyond our capacity to imagine, surely.
And Light such as our eyes now could not even withstand.
And holiness. And peace.
And… in my opinion… there will be chocolate, too.
