So, I took a break. It was meant to just be a couple of days. The run up to Easter is busy and I went on holiday. But now I’ve missed a whole season. The big one.

Six collects is probably too much catch up to realistically sort out in the short term, so I’ll probably give them extra attention next year. I’m a bit of a perfectionist, so it’s disappointing that we won’t get to do them all this year, but I think it’s for the best.

It’s all the more a shame because Easter season is the high point of the calendar, a time of great joy for me and probably most calendar observers, and it boasts some of the most lovely collects.

The collect for Easter Day is, at first glance, a little underwhelming. In response to the universe changing reality death has been defeated and the gate of everlasting life opened, we ask that God would bring the good desires he has put in us to good effect. I initially found it a bit anticlimactic. But as the week progressed, I found the collect stirring deeper hopes in me. The resurrection is the guarantee that we who believe in Jesus will one day experience the full fruition of our glorified humanity. It is the assurance that any good desire God in his grace puts into our hearts will meet its perfect satisfaction in Jesus. At Easter, anything seems possible and no good endeavour seems outlandish, if God should prosper it, in the light of the resurrection.

In the first Sunday after Easter the collect combines allusions to two passages in Paul. On the one hand, Christ has died for our sins and risen for our justification, so we are, definitively, righteous in God’s sight. On the other hand, Christ’s death as our Passover lamb carries with it the call to rid our lives of the leaven of malice and evil. Repentance isn’t just for Lent. Not only sorrow for sin, but the joy of redemption call is to new and godly lives.

In the second Sunday after Easter we reflect on Jesus’ death as both a sacrifice for sin and an example of godly life. In two readings (1 Peter 2:19-end & John 10:11-16) which share the image of Christ as shepherd, we see that his death is a model of patiently suffering wrong and a sign of his supreme love for us. Thanksgiving and imitation are the only fitting responses to such grace.

The third Sunday after Easter has a wonderful and poignant collect. Easter is a time of new life and new beginnings. This collect reminds us that sometimes it is Christians who need that new life. God in his mercy shows to those in error the light of his truth so that they may return to the way of righteousness, a virtual life from the dead. In the light of this fact we pray, not only for those we perceive to have fallen into error, but all professing Christians (surely ourselves included!) that God would keep us from things incompatible with our faith and guide us to embrace things consistent with it.

The fourth Sunday after Easter has one of my favourite collects of the whole year. In the resurrection our true joy and eternal happiness has been revealed. Yet so often our lives are geared to the shifting, temporal goods of this world and this age. In this collect we ask that God would reorient our hearts, so that we love what he commands and desire what he promises. This marriage of duty and desire fixes our hearts on the true joys available through Christ, rather than the illusionary joys we otherwise pursue.

On the fifth Sunday after Easter we come full circle. In a brief collect, we once again ask God to be at work, inspiring us to think good thoughts and, in the context, form good plans, which he will see to fruition. It’s not a collect I’ve seen particular depths in, but I wonder if that’s a lesson in itself. Amidst all the profound, universe changing truths of the Easter season, we come back to the simple truth that the risen Jesus proves that good will win out in the end, and no work of love we undertake in hope of the resurrection, through faith in his blood, can ever finally be wasted.

Tomorrow is Ascension Day, a massively underrated feast, and Christ and Calendar will be back, hopefully to normal service.

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!