When I was a day school chaplain we had an annual routine reminding each other and ourselves that [a] Lent has 40 days and [b] Easter has 50 days because [c] Chaplain Susan didn’t do forty days of Lent to do just ONE day of Easter!

And then during the 50 Days of Easter … the days between Easter Sunday and the Feast of Pentecost … we celebrated fifty days of gratitude. Every day we’d do something in chapel about gratitude … and throughout the Easter season we’d find ways to express that gratitude through our prayers and actions … it was an annual thing.

It’s been 15 years since I started every morning with a chapel full of squirmy grade schoolers but this year — this Easter Monday 2017 — it seems to me it would be a particularly good year to revive that tradition — at least for myself.

Not to replace the Lenten discipline of Sacred Resistance … that’s a long term commitment, not a 40 day project. But in addition to Sacred Resistance I want to take on an Easter discipline of Intentional Gratitude. To start every day identifying, naming and giving thanks for one thing as we journey together through this Easter season and forward into God’s future.

To be reminded that one of the ways we engage systemic challenges and interrupt the dismantling of democracy and survive the seemingly endless barrage of breaking bad news is by grounding our resistance in gratitude.

So that’s my plan for Easter season. If you want join in, that would be grand.

Let’s review:
How many days in Lent? 40
How many days in Easter? 50
And what are you grateful for today?