I spent the Triduum this year in our nation’s capitol, visiting my older brother. The weekend was very cold there, as it was all through the Northeast (I thought we might freeze to death at St. Michael’s last night while we stood outside in fluttering snowflakes, waiting for them to bless the Paschal candle.) Nonetheless, my brother and I took a trip to the Tidal Basin to see the cherry blossoms – or rather, to see what was left of them. Apparently they were at their peak on Tuesday and Wednesday (the above picture was taken by my brother on Tuesday), but by Friday morning the veil of delicate white had already faded into a soft purple, flecked with the green of the new leaves. It’s the second year in a row that I’ve made it down for the blossoms just a day or two too late. My brother, apologetically, recalled to mind a Robert Frost poem that seemed appropriate to the occasion:

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

There’s a devastating simplicity to this verse, which captures the fear that has tormented mankind from the very day that Eden sank to grief. How amply our experience seems to prove its truth! It is one of life’s bitterest ironies that the very things that feel most true and most real at the time they are experienced, come to seem the most fleeting in retrospect. A healthy young person, even though he is familiar with the basic facts about human anatomy, will feel in his bones that his vigor is untouchable, only to find that a few years of abundant health give way to long decades of slow decline and finally decrepitude. In the elation of a great victory or accomplishment, it seems that there is something immortal and untouchable about the sublime feeling; later reflection will show that, far from lasting for all eternity, such moods may not even last an hour. Lovers, in the bliss of what seems a perfect mutual understanding, will find it almost impossible to imagine that they could ever do anything to hurt the other. In actuality, even those relationships that endure through time are peppered with small disappointments and minor betrayals. And how can anything in life fail to be transitory, when physical death promises to bring an end to all such experiences in a startlingly short period of time?

We feel the truth of this more and less at different times in our lives, but in the darkest hours, it is a staggeringly heavy burden. If experience is any guide, then those things in life that seem truest and finest are likely to be the most illusory and false. What should we do? Kill ourselves in despair? Distract ourselves with perverted and addictive pleasures? Try to uproot the better parts of our nature so that they can be replaced with a more cynical outlook, in which romantic fancies about love and health and victory are merely objects of mockery and scorn?

All of these courses have been tried, of course. Sometimes, too, we try to make gold stay in less base ways, giving in to the impulse that continues to insist that the blooming cherry trees of April 3rd and 4th are at least as real as the cold, bare branches of November, December and January. I suspect that this sort of impulsive optimism gets dulled over time. As a small example, I reflect with gentle amusement on a stone that is probably still sitting in a box somewhere in my parents’ house, inscribed in permanent marker with the words “Best Friend Rock.” The names of two girls are written on either side – my own, and that of the girl whom I named my best friend in the fourth and fifth grades – and on the back is written that classic girlish cliché, “Friends Forever.” No doubt it seemed to us that, if something so ordinary as a rock from the garden could endure over years, then surely something so noble and true as our beautiful friendship could do likewise! Well, I hardly need say that I lost track of that friend completely within a few years of making the Best Friend Rock, and if we were somehow reunited today I doubt we’d find much to say to one another. And yet, the rock survived three moves, as a memento not just of the friendship, but also of the touching and childish optimism that inspired us to make it.

We were too young and naive then to know that fifth grade friendships don’t last – in fact, that hardly anything good in life lasts. Over time people learn to be more cautious, to expect less, and to still the impulsive voice that continues to clamor that This Good Thing Must Endure. Some give in to quiet despair. Others try to console themselves with more “realistic” efforts to make at least an echo of gold stay: making photo albums, giving legacies to universities or charitable organizations, writing memoirs.

Sometimes our moral or religious duties demand that we make an effort to establish real permanence. We are commanded to be faithful to our baptismal promises, to religious or nuptial vows, and to the traditions of the Church. We are given to understand that we must do everything in our power to preserve certain goods, even when all the rest of our world seems to break apart against the fortress we have established. But is there anyone who has not felt at times that such expectations are a bit of a joke, noble in name but completely beyond our power to fulfill? Every honest Christian, religious, spouse or parent is aware of a multitude of past failures and personal weaknesses. And experience shows once again that even those who appear from the outside to be the strongest and most trustworthy, have the potential to betray us. This is the observation that leads the cynic to proclaim that faith is for fools and trust for weaklings. We are locked in the vice grip of death, ensuring that everything wise or noble or beautiful must falter and fade. Our best efforts, even more than our more casual failures, persuade us of the deep truth of Frost’s declaration. Everything good must perish. Nothing gold can stay.

The irony of Easter Sunday is that it is just as fleeting as everything else in life. The joyous hymns, the egg hunts and the sumptuous food all pass by as quickly on this as on any other holiday. That is unfortunate, but inevitable. We might think of it as a concession to the weakness of bent and changeable beings such as ourselves; we are both unable and unwilling to sit still singing “Holy Holy Holy” as the saints do, so Holy Mother Church varies our routine a little and allows us to spend the year contemplating, not only God’s nature, but also our own. The hope is that this long contemplation of our own failures and weaknesses will build us up to the point where, on Easter night, when we stand with eyes fixed on the Paschal candle, we will find ourselves able to push aside what seems the overwhelming evidence of personal experience and believe that almost impossible truth: Christus surrexit. Our Lord has redeemed us. Everything good shall be renewed. Gold can stay.

It is Good News indeed, the best possible news. It strikes to the core of our being, promising that our finest and noblest thoughts and feelings really are the most true. No more condemned to wander in the shadows of fleeting pleasures and withered joys, we should feel on Easter Sunday like drowning people who have been plucked from the freezing water and set to dry on a warm, sunny hillside. It would be improper to spend the day thinking excessively about past sin or grief, or the challenges that may lie ahead. Instead we should just try to absorb, and relish, and believe in our souls this wonderful truth, so contrary to all the testimony of our experience. Our Lord has broken the chains of death that seemed to bind us so inextricably. He lives, and so can we.