It was already pasted on the storm door of the house we passed in the car yesterday.  The Easter Bunny, cutout from pink paper with whiskers.  A child's project brought home from school.  It was a visual reminder of our human inclination to skip Holy Week and Good Friday and go directly to Easter Morning - spring-like and blooming and full of flowers and baby bunnies and Alleluias.

As much as we'd like to leave out the hard part of the story that leads towards the Resurrection -- the parts about denial and suffering and death and grief - our Lenten journey is not quite over, the story of Jesus' life on earth has not quite ended. It is wisely said that: "The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story."  This morning there are still things to be told.

Mary Oliver, one of my favorite contemporary writers reflects upon Palm Sunday in a poem entitled Donkey:

On the outskirts of Jerusalem the donkey waited.  Not especially brave, or filled with understanding, he stood and waited.

How horses, turned out into the meadows, leap with delight! How doves, released from their cages, clatter away, splashed with sunlight!

But the donkey, tied to a tree as usual, waited.  Then he let himself be led away.  Then he let the stranger mount.

Never had he seen such crowds!  And I wonder if he at all imagined what was to happen.  Still, he was what he had always been:  small, dark, and obedient.

I hope, finally, he felt brave.  I hope, finally, he loved the man who rode so lightly upon him, as he lifted one dusty hoof and stepped, as he had to, forward.

Oliver, a Pulitzer Prize winner, grapples in her new book called Thirst, from which this poem came, with the ways she has experienced the emotions of Holy Week, in response to the loss of her beloved partner of over 40 years. She has learned that death, grief and sorrow are legitimate paths to deepening the spiritual dimension of life.   She hasn't given up on the possibility of joy finally proving stronger than sorrow, but she knows what we confront today, that "the happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story", that together, we must travel the rest of the journey that leads into Holy Week.  The Easter Bunny and the story of the Empty Tomb wait for we still have important spiritual work to do.

As someone who has listened to the stories of people's lives as a vocation, now for some thirty-seven years, it comes as no surprise that surviving the jagged edges of grief can lead us to important truths about what it means to live life with faith in God.  When we're wrestling with the darkest of days, when even the brightest sun light is unable to penetrate the blankets we pull over our hearts, when isolation with our addiction of choice is no longer an option-God can be encountered, made manifest, and embraced.