To those of you using the Gregorian calendar, happy Easter! Χριστός ἀνέστη! “Christ is risen!” I was initially planning to write about the reason for the season—the significance of Easter, why we celebrate, and so on—but if I’m honest, I don’t have it in me to write a Sunday School lesson. I’d much rather talk about my own personal experience since as of today it’s been one (liturgical) year since I was officially received into the Church. What are my thoughts one year later?

To put it bluntly, what I really want to say is this: the spiritual life is difficult. The process of conversion comes with many spiritual consolations, but every consolation is followed by a desolation, although this does not last either. The spiritual life is full of ups and downs, and this is something you’re not quite prepared for when you enter into the Church. I certainly wasn’t, though I believed I was. When you convert, and hear that line of the Exultet for the first time, “O happy fault,” (felix culpa), you rejoice in it wholeheartedly, and understand it in the context of your past life. At that moment, whether consciously or unconsciously, you see your fault as having been overcome, but you have yet to learn the many faults you will make even as a Christian. True, you might anticipate some difficulty, but this is an intellectual assent more than anything else. You know you fell, and will continue to fall. God has caught you this time, but the difficult question is this: will you always trust in God to catch you? It’s harder than it sounds.

Note that I use the word “trust” because if I were to ask whether you know or believed something, it wouldn’t make one difference to your honest-to-God faith. Trust is hard to come by. If you’ve ever felt betrayed by a friend, or betrayed a friend yourself and sought forgiveness, then you would know that trust, when it’s put to the test, is not so easily recovered. This is the challenge of our faith: a theologian could think of a billion reasons why you should trust God, but if you are under the impression that God is untrustworthy, then these reasons mean little. Could God be that evil demon who deceives us all, who Descartes worked to guard himself against? This faltering trust is our original sin, for you will note that in Eden, the Serpent didn’t challenge God’s authority or power. Rather, he sowed the seeds of our distrust, saying: “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Gn 3:4–5) The implication is, of course, that God does not want us to be like him. And that distrust is precisely why, after having eaten of the fruit, the man and his wife hid, as one would hide their true selves from an untrustworthy friend.

Perhaps this shouldn’t be so unexpected. If we stop to think about it, it’s far easier to find a friend than to keep one; it’s easier to get engaged than to stay married; etc. I’ve grown fond of saying that any good religion needs a little harshness to it. The very fact that these things are challenging is what makes them rewarding. Without the challenge, there would be no good story worth telling. There could be no heroes without an obstacle to be overcome. Except that rather than a guy in spandex and a cape, in this story the protagonist is simply nailed to a cross, and fortunately for us, when all seems lost, he returns to conquer death and pave the way for the rest of us would-be heroes.

A monk once told me that sometimes he wakes up and feels a little tired of the whole “monk” routine: wake up at 4:30am, pray, sleep for an hour, wake up, eat, pray, do work, pray, pray some more, eat, then work, after which you pray, eat, relax for an hour, pray, read, then finally go to bed. I can understand how he might tire of it. Nevertheless, even for us with less rigorous routines, we are still challenged to persevere. He may be more developed spiritually, but rest assured that the monk is challenged proportionately. If I have become more ensconced in any of my beliefs, therefore, it is my faith that whatever brokenness we experience in this life cannot be fully healed here. There is always a cross, but thanks be to God, there is also an Easter.