April 27, 2025
Seeing Spring and Easter
In my mid-20s, I spent a year studying at the University of San Francisco. I had just been ordained a priest and was finishing a graduate degree in theology. Easter Sunday that year was a particularly gorgeous, sunny, spring day, but it didn’t find me in a sunny mood. I was a long way from home, away from my family and my community, homesick, and alone. Almost all the friends I had made during that year of studies, other graduate students in theology, were gone, celebrating Easter with their families. I was homesick and alone and, beyond that, I nursed the congenital heartaches and obsessions of the young and restless. My mood was far from spring and Easter.
I went for a walk that afternoon and the spring air, the sun, and the fact that it was Easter did little to cheer me up, if anything they helped catalyze a deeper sense of aloneness. But there are different ways of waking up. As Leonard Cohen says, there’s a crack in everything and that’s where the light gets in. I needed a little awakening and eventually it was provided. At the entrance of a park, I saw a blind beggar sitting with a cardboard sign in front of him that read: It’s springtime and I am blind! The irony wasn’t lost on me. I was as blind as he was! For what I was seeing it might as well have been Good Friday and raining and cold. That day, sunshine, spring, and Easter were wasted on me.
It was a moment of grace and I have recalled that encounter many times since, though it didn’t alter my mood at the time. I continued my walk, restless as before, and eventually went home for dinner. During that year of studies, I was a live-in chaplain at a convent that had a youth hostel attached to it and the rule of the house was that the chaplain was to eat by himself in his own private dining room. So, even though that wasn’t exactly what a doctor would have ordered for a restless and homesick young man, I ate dinner alone that Easter Sunday evening.
But the resurrection did still arrive for me on that Easter Sunday, albeit a bit late in the day. Two other graduate students and I had made plans to meet on the ocean at nightfall, light a fire, and celebrate our own version of the Easter vigil. So, just before dark, I caught a bus to the ocean and met my friends (a nun and priest). We lit a large bonfire (still legal in those days), sat around it for several hours, and ended up confessing to each other that we’d each had a miserable Easter. That fire did for us what the blessing of the fire the evening before at the Easter vigil hadn’t done. It broke the spell of restlessness and self-absorption which had us blind to everything outside ourselves. As we watched the fire and talked of everything and nothing, my mood began to shift, my restlessness quieted, the heaviness lifted. I began to sense spring and Easter.
In John’s account of the resurrection, he tells the story of how on the morning of the first Easter the Beloved Disciple runs to the tomb where Jesus has been buried and peers into it. He sees it is empty and that all that remains are the clothes, neatly folded, within which Jesus’ body had been wrapped. But since he is a disciple who sees with the eyes of love, he understands what this means; he grasps the reality of resurrection and knows that Jesus has risen. He sees spring. He understands with his eyes.
Hugo of St. Victor once famously said: Love is the eye. When we see with love we not only see straight and clearly, we also see depth and meaning. The reverse is also true. It is for a good reason that after Jesus rose from the dead some could see him and others could not. Love is the eye. Those searching for life through the eyes of love, like Mary of Magdala searching for Jesus in the garden on Easter Sunday morning, see spring and the resurrection. Any other kind of eye, and we’re blind in springtime.
When I took my walk that Easter afternoon all those years ago in San Francisco, I wasn’t exactly Mary of Magdala looking for Jesus in a garden, nor the Beloved Disciple fired by love running off to look into the tomb of Jesus. In my youthful restlessness I was mostly looking for myself, and meeting mostly my anxious self. And that’s a blindness.
When we are caught inside ourselves, we’re blind, blind to both spring and the resurrection. I learned that lesson, not in a church or a classroom but on a lonely, restless Easter Sunday in San Francisco when I ran into a blind beggar and then went home and ate an Easter dinner alone.
Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is a theologian, teacher, and award-winning author.
He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com.
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