My Easter Eucatastrophe

When Easter Breaks Open Your Life

I am full of Easter.

It feels as though every Easter I have ever known has been gathered into this one—retold, deepened, and made more real within my own life.

What J. R. R. Tolkien called eucatastrophe, the sudden turning where everything changes, feels less like a moment in a story and more like the quiet, persistent way God works within a life, drawing it into His own.

Not replacing it, but taking it up and expanding it.

Lent for me wasn’t merely observed this year, but inhabited through prayer, devotion, and reflection. Then Holy Week pulled me in further: from Palm Sunday into the Triduum, into those three days where time appears to slow and everything centres on the Passion.

I gave myself to it more fully than I ever have, immersed again in the suffering of Christ. Even re-watching The Passion of the Christ, not as a film, but as a Visio Divina.

All of this sits within a longer work God has been doing in me. Several years ago, through the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, I spent months praying daily through the life of Chris. Not merely to understand it, but to enter it, experience and be formed by it.

And over time, I began to see that it was not simply his story I was tracing, but my own life being drawn into his, to be retold with him. I discovered recapitulation and participation in Christ, one of the oldest understandings of salvation by the Church, and it has continued to shape my hopes, fears, sorrows and desires.

This Easter, this reality has come into focus again, not as something new, but as a deeper apprehension and participation in what C. S. Lewis called the “deeper magic” at the heart of creation. And I realise that God continues to answer my prayers, particularly the Anima Christi, which I prayed each day during the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises.

Most of our everyday speech is built to explain, organise, and conclude. It moves quickly, names things, and moves on. But some experiences—grief, love, God, the strange nearness of Easter—don’t fit into that kind of language. They resist being “said” in a straight line.

So I tried to write a poem to speak from within it. This Easter, I have woven the Anima Christi through my Easter Ignatian reflections.

If I Had Been There

If I had been there, I would not have stood apart.

There would have been no “there” left between us.

I would have cried out as they scourged you,

the cry would have risen from within you and me together

your flesh opened, and something in mine

splitting with it too.

Your body, my salvation.

not distant, but breaking open around me.

Each lash gathers me.

my sin, my fracture, my hidden violences.

drawn into your torn body

as though you would not suffer

without taking me into it.

I would have knelt when they crowned you,

and felt the thorns find me too.

piercing through every false self

I have worn.

Your blood, not spilled away,

but falling toward me.

on me.

inibriating me.

washing what I cannot cleanse.

I would have begged to carry your cross,

and found I was already within its weight.

your Passion not beside me

but enclosing me.

Within your wounds.

I would not stand outside.

I would enter.

Held there.

Hidden there.

Kept there.

At the cross, there would be no safe distance left.

I would come close.

not brave, but compelled.

and fall at your feet,

your blood marking me,

your suffering sheltering me.

Your Passion, my strength.

not something I endure for you,

but something you endure

to hold me.

And when the spear opened your side,

I would not move toward it.

I would be drawn in.

Blood and water pouring,

and I

carried into that opening.

where mercy flows

without measure.

Baptised not in symbol,

but in the life that cannot be taken.

O good Jesus,

hear me.

even here.

Because even here,

I would not know how to remain

unless you kept me.

I would take you down from the cross,

but my hands should tremble.

knowing the body I hold

is the body that holds me.

Guard me within your wounds.

not as refuge from the world,

but as the place where I am remade.

I would wash you with my tears,

and find they are gathered into yours.

my grief taken up

into your offering.

I would wrap you for burial

slowly, reluctantly.

because leaving you

would feel like losing

everything.

And in the tomb,

I would not simply stay.

I would be enclosed.

Within your death.

hidden with you.

waiting without knowing how to wait.

Do not permit me

to be separated from you.

even here,

especially here.

The silence.

The sealed stone.

The cooling body.

Enemies pressing in.

doubt, fear, ending.

and I with no strength to resist them.

Call me.

from within this darkness.

Call me

not away from you,

but deeper into you.

And then.

the stone moves.

Not gently,

but as rupture of creation.

And you.

alive.

not returned, but risen.

From the hour of my death.

deliver me.

because something in me has died here,

and something else

is being born.

And I.

undone, but gathered.

Not outside your life,

but drawn into it.

into the place where all things

are being remade.

And I come.

because I must. to your feet,

to kiss, to worship.

not reaching toward you,

but waking to the truth

that you have taken me

into yourself,

and will not allow me to go.

—

May the deeper story of Christ continue to take hold in your life, drawing all that you are into His.