The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, revealed in a special seasonal message to his diocese released this week that his recent trip to war-torn and poverty-stricken Sudan has reminded him to focus on the Easter hope for a world “shadowed by abandonment, terror, pain”, as on Good Friday.

|TOP|Dr Williams started Lent in Sudan and spent Ash Wednesday distributing food in a school and refugee camp.

In his Easter message to the diocese, Dr Williams says that “God is always there ahead of us, his future already part of the present. I think that was the gift - or one of the many gifts - I received from our brothers and sisters in Sudan.”

He further comments that the Sudanese “met the Risen Lord in the darkest times.”

Dr Williams’ Easter message to his Diocese in full:

I was always taught, of course, that you should never under any circumstances say 'Alleluia' during Lent. It was like giving up chocolate or alcohol. Save it till Easter, and then you'll really enjoy it as it was meant to be enjoyed.

There's plenty of good sense about this, if we understand what Lent is properly about - a preparation for Easter, a reminder that we still live in a world in which Easter hasn't yet quite sunk in and changed as it should.

Just as in Advent we have to remember that we all still in some ways live in a pre-Christian world, waiting for Christ to arrive not only in Bethlehem but in our hearts and minds, so in Lent: the cross and the resurrection are never over and done with, never things we have been through and understood once and for all. Ahead of us lies the immense bulk of failure and suffering, to be faced again and again with whatever degree of honesty we can manage. So every year, we need to live for a little while in such a way that Easter comes as a massive surprise and novelty.

|AD|Well, this year I started Lent in Sudan. Ash Wednesday found me in temperatures of 40-odd sharing in food distribution in a school and a refugee camp in Malakal and celebrating Holy Communion in a large and ultra-humid tent. Pretty well everything, every aspect of that environment, seemed set to remind us that we still lived in a world where the cross was the immediate reality and resurrection hope was definitely a thing of the future. Hunger, desperate poverty, the traces of unspeakable trauma and violence, and the present reality of the same unspeakable brutality not too far away in Darfur - this, surely, was a world untouched by Easter.

But one thing you quickly discover at worship in the Sudan is that there is no occasion free from alleluias. That Ash Wednesday service echoed with the joyful shouting of 'Alleluia' - from the children and the women especially as we came in, from every speaker who got near the microphone during the service, in hymns and songs throughout. My liturgical conscience had to resign and slink away. Lent it might be, but this was not an Easter-free zone.

Which is quite a good counterbalance to where I started. Yes, we need to be reminded by abstinence and restraint that the world is still a Good Friday sort of place, shadowed by abandonment, terror, pain. But what if you don't really need reminding? What if, like the Sudanese believers, you have lived so long with abandonment and terror and pain that you can never forget or ignore it? These were people whose whole life was a particularly awful and crushing 'Lent'.

Yet they could not stop saying, singing, shouting, 'Alleluia'. If they lived in a long-term Lent, they also lived in an unceasing awareness of Easter. They had come through the horrors of war and oppression with the confidence intact that God was always there on the far side or in the depths of what they were enduring. If everyone else forgot them, God would not and could not. Because he was alive, they could live too - to echo the words of Jesus in John's gospel.

The mystery of Christian faith is really something we can't ever put into words because it is about so many things that are all true all at once, but we can only talk about them one at a time. Advent and Christmas and Good Friday and Easter and Pentecost, Baptism and Communion and birth and death are all packed up together, inseparably. But whether in our words or in the course of the Christian year, we usually have to pull them apart and take them in some kind of series. And it's good that we do, since we have to give ourselves a chance to think things through carefully and to experience the time it takes to get from old to new, from death to life.

But once in a while something happens that pushes it all together again, confusingly and wonderfully, telling us that Advent is already, eternally, overtaken by Christmas, Lent by Easter, death by life. God is always there ahead of us, his future already part of the present. I think that was the gift - or one of the many gifts - I received from our brothers and sisters in Sudan. Yes, we ought as a rule to take things at their proper pace, one thing at a time. But let's not forget that God is already ahead of us; that there really is an 'alleluia dimension' in the very heart of Lent and Passiontide. And the people who can tell us that are people like the Sudanese, who have, quite simply, met the Risen Lord in the darkest times.

With my love and prayers for a very blessed Easter


Dr Rowam Williams