Seeing Ash Wednesday on the calendar used to bring up many feelings, but joy was not one of them. Perceiving Lent through a worldly lens, I approached it as a season of deprivation. It arrives at a time of year when my energy is attenuated by the bitter cold and there is an outdoor palette ranging from taupe to greige. Then it asks me to forsake the ready solace of wine and chocolate!

By the grace of God, I have come to appreciate the figure-ground illusion at work here. Seen through a holy lens, sensory pleasures recede, and their absence (or the absence of at least some of them) during Lent becomes a background against which spiritual gifts can really pop, offering surprise and delight. The season requires me to renew my relationship with everything most important, and gives me reliable tools for doing so: Pray more, and more deliberately. Spend more time at church, whether for Mass, Stations of the Cross or other devotions. Be hungry more often, and offer up your hunger. Be more charitable, and give alms.

I would go so far as to say Lent has become something I can bask in, and this is surely a win. The problem is that leaning into Lent threatens to make Easter feel like an anti-climax, which is one thing the Resurrection should never be.

To clarify, I’m not talking about Easter Sunday. With the return of the Alleluia, abundant lilies and those electrifying verses about what happened “early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark,” Easter is my favorite holiday. What challenges me is the transition from 40 days of Lenten fast to 50 days of Easter feast. No, I do not gorge on Cadbury Creme Eggs for seven weeks straight—no one could enjoy a literal feast of such length. But somehow a prolonged feast in the liturgical sense also throws me for a loop.

What do we mean, after all, by a feast or celebration, when it takes up more than 13 percent of the calendar year? Certainly any type of concentrated merrymaking would be nigh impossible to sustain from Easter to Pentecost. That form of celebration may also seem at odds with the heaviness of our times. When every day brings fresh news of anguish in the world, austerity feels more appropriate. Paul warns the Thessalonians to “stay alert and sober” because disaster can strike without warning; heeding his advice becomes almost reflexive when we sense ourselves on the cusp of disaster already.

The key to elevating the Easter season, then, might lie in asking myself what form celebration should take. I suspect my answer should be specific and dynamic, because what I so love about Lent comes down to its sense of purpose. We often hear reference to a “Lenten journey.” It is an apt description of what it feels like to spend a month and a half endeavoring to deepen our spiritual life, to draw closer to God through a particular set of practices. Even though we fall and fail as much as we do at any other time of year, the very purpose of Lent is to remind us of our weakness. It therefore manages to fold even missteps into our path toward the cross.

At face value, Easter gives us a much less explicit mission: He is risen; praise him! In theory that should be enough, and my heart is willing. But in practice, without the prescribed observances Lent gives us, it is easy to fall back into the slack posture of ordinary time, into routines that make little room for devotion. If Lent sets us on a road whose end is determined (Calvary), at Easter we set out from a known starting point—the empty tomb—and must find direction from there. 

Framing it this way is exciting, an invitation. It suggests that any anticlimax I have felt during Easter in the past means I came to the feast unequipped: I didn’t plan how to integrate its themes of new life, hope and joy into daily life. It is a humbling realization, since we define Lent as the season of preparation for Easter!

Naturally some, or most, Lenten observances are actually meant to be carried into the Easter season. It is never the wrong time to receive the Eucharist or the sacrament of reconciliation, to read the Bible or share what I have with those who need it. If I have formed the habit of spending more quality time with God and the saints over these six and a half weeks, then keeping it up should be at the top of my to-do list now. 

But to everything there is a season, and it is fitting to pair continued commitment with a change in the flavor and inflection of devotion. The thing is to embrace Easter’s flowering just as fully and deliberately as I did the desert of Lent. Celebrating Easter means leaving the desert and going forth—into society and engagement with creation. It means taking Christ with us wherever we go, and wherever we go, recognizing that we walk beside him.

This is exactly what happens to the two disciples in Emmaus. They set out on a long walk from Jerusalem. When a stranger on the road joins them and asks what they are discussing, they unburden themselves. They are not cagey or suspicious, but share everything that is in their hearts and on their minds, and they invite him to join them for supper. After the stranger reveals himself in the breaking of the bread and vanishes from their sight, they marvel: “Were not our hearts burning [within us] while he spoke to us on the way and opened the Scriptures to us?”

After the resurrection, Jesus reveals himself in ways like this: dramatic, yes; also deeply, tenderly, wondrously human. His two disciples in Emmaus, and the seven on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, speak with openness to strangers and find themselves in the presence of the living Christ. There is so much poignancy in their dejection, their directionlessness, their return to profitless fishing. But Easter transforms all of it. They go forth and, even if they cannot recognize him at first, the risen Jesus finds them.

I want to be found by the risen Jesus, to see his face in the most unexpected places and moments. Taking cues from the disciples’ outings, my Easter season might include some form of pilgrimage. It need not take me far physically but should extend beyond my zone of comfort or familiarity in one way or another—whether I take my family camping in the deep woods, invite more visitors into my house or find a new organization to volunteer with. As James K. A. Smith wrote recently, St. Augustine of Hippo framed all of life as a pilgrimage, or peregrinatio, and described Christians as migrants in this world. The early Celtic saints took up this concept with a way of life referred to as peregrenatio pro Dei amore, “wandering for the love of God.” They traveled to holy sites and even foreign lands, encountering God in souls they would never have encountered otherwise and reminding themselves that we are never at home in this world, that “our hearts are restless, until they rest in You.”

Even if my family does not make it into a camping tent, I’d like to spend sustained time in nature as the season unfolds. The peace that comes from being in God’s creation is undoubtedly sacred. Noticing the centrality of gardens in Scripture, not least the garden where Jesus was laid in the tomb, I’m inspired not only to take hikes on trails but to tend to my backyard planters as a way of devotion. We also have several public landscaped and botanical gardens within a short radius, where we might learn more about the variety and plenitude of things that grow in the ground. To give this intention focus, I think we’ll make it our objective to find places where we can pause and recite St. Francis’ “Canticle of the Creatures.”

That beautiful song reminds us of our own creaturehood, but humans also enjoy the priceless gift of being able to “[mirror] the image of God as Creator,” as St. John Paul II described the work of craftsmen in his “Letter to Artists.” Crayons are a universal toy because we are all born with the urge to express what we see through materials. St. John Paul II wrote that “artists, the more conscious they are of their ‘gift,’ are led all the more to see themselves and the whole of creation with eyes able to contemplate and give thanks, and to raise to God a hymn of praise.” To mark a season of joy, we plan to do just that. Once a week, my family will draw together, and once a week, we will write something. Whether it’s a poem, song, skit or story, it will be a hymn.

What else will we commit to this Eastertide? I am open to adding more but wary of taking on too much. I am planting seeds for joy and wonder, and putting too many seeds together tends to stunt growth. But what seeds I plant, I hereby commit to watering well. I ought to take them as seriously as the sacrifices of Lent—and if I fall behind, if I forget a day, I should be just as ready to pick up where I left off and keep going. Easter is a journey of its own.