Holy Week is a lesson in how life is. Some Christians emphasize celebrating the risen Christ and triumph over death, others emphasize his death, the darkness and the grave. But love is both. Both are real and important, for themselves and for each other. I am by nature more optimistic than pessimistic, but I have also known more pain than I'd like to have known for my age. I know it's both. I'm feeling a little blah lately; and, even with that being said, I think this year I'm landing more in the celebratory mood around Easter. Maybe I need it as the balance for where I am. At any rate, this coming Sunday is Easter and I can't wait. I've been looking forward to it for a year.
I didn't grow up celebrating Easter. My family was quite 'religiously involved' but the group we were in didn't observe any of the traditional Christian liturgial seasons...Christmas, Lent, Holy Week, Pentecost, Ordinary Time...none of that. Actually, I didn't even know there was such a thing as a church calendar until my early 20s. No, we weren't Jehovah's Witness...it was probably not a group most of you have ever heard of unless you know me and we've talked about it or you grew up in or around it yourself. There's some information out there but it doesn't convey the experience. I'll share more of my story someday when I get around to writing it, but for now I'll just say that it was a Christian-esque group with some idiosyncracies that included not paying attention to the church calendar.
So the group didn't do Easter. I knew that many people celebrated Christmas as a religious holiday, although we celebrated it as a fun family holiday. But Easter was a mystery, almost entirely off my radar, and we didn't do anything around it. I vaguely remember two of my aunts talking about their families gathering for Easter...the big dinner and the family photos and all that but I never understood what the big deal was. A couple years Mom hid plastic eggs full of foil-wrapped chocolates around the house but it was a little odd. I understood gathering for Christmas, because we did that. But Easter? It felt like any other Sunday to me. I barely noticed that it was Easter at all, let alone that it meant anything. My relatives were all in the same religious group as us so I figured it was just something they did for some reason that my family didn't do. I let it go and never wondered about it. Then we left the group in 1995 and it was sometime in those years, so probably in the early 90s, that I realized that on Easter Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. But realizing it, even observing it every year, didn't mean I developed an attachment to it. Until last year. Before that, there were a just couple years that stood out as significant Easter seasons for me.
2002. I was living in the Czech Republic that year and took the train up to Krakow for the weekend with Brooke, Megan and Priya. We attended mass at the Dominikanie Krakow (Dominican Church and Monastery) then walked up to Wawel Castle. Poland has been a santuary for me...it had been a rough couple years and the gorgeous, sunny, warm Krakow afternoon, in the company of dear friends, and under the canopy of a very old church and traditon, was just what my battered heart needed. We wandered through Josefov where a few boys threw water balloons at us. I think Brooke threw one back. Polish tradition. The city was alive with people -- people in church, people walking, people dressed to the nines, people just wandering around, out and about enjoying the day. At the castle I sat down on a low stone wall, watching people and writing, enjoying the sunshine and the Bach Unaccompanied wafting from the music shop across the lawn. I was going through a period of deeply missing Mom and it was hard to connect with the liturgy; but the liveliness all around me sank in...the transcendence of God. I felt the truth of Easter...the exhasution and the relief...the beauty. I brought home a double-cd set of the Bach.
2003. The year Jonathan and I got married. We went to church on Easter Sunday. I wore a lime green silk dress. I love that dress. I still have it. I bought it on a sale at Talbot's on my way to my friends Matt and Sharon's wedding in Portland right after I moved back from the Czech Republic in summer 2002. Jonathan also taught me that spring how to dye eggs in the (his) Ukranian tradition. Pysanky. He actually got college credit for it and does amazing work. His brother came to visit this past weekend and we dyed eggs most of Saturday. Jonathan puts on Rachmaninoff Vespers, we cover the table with brown craft paper, and we work. Eggs are fragile. Sometimes the shells are left in pieces, the insides running all over your hands. Getting good at the craft necessarily involves becoming ok with brokenness. You have to love the creating, not just the final piece.
A few weeks ago we drove to Portland to visit our friends Alex and Jessica and we went to church with them on Sunday. It's a fairly small, very unassuming little building. Warm, friendly people. We sang old hymns and all the people prayed and I was captured by the amazing cross hanging on the front wall...grape vines stretched out, wrapped with these intricate hand-knit roses of varying sizes, in the most amazing red you've ever seen. And I remembered.
Last year we went to Walla Walla, my hometown, for Easter weekend. Jonathan and I don't go to to church much right now. That's another story too and you shouldn't read much into that. I just say it to provide a contrast - my church in Walla Walla is a special place for me. When we're in town we almost always go. It's the church my family started going to shortly after we left the old group. I feel at home there. I have history there and people there. I moved away from Walla Walla a few months after we left the group, but that church has always felt like mine. I'd heard about their tradition on Easter but never been in town for it. You take a large wooden cross. You wrap it in chicken wire. At the end of the service all the kids walk up the center aisle. As each child comes forward they give their flowers to an adult who tucks the flowers here and there into the chicken wire, and as the congregation sings the cross blooms.
It moved me beyond anything I expected. I sat there singing and as the cross bloomed I felt breathless. There were dozens and dozens of children, and within seconds the line of kiddos filled the sanctuary. One of the adults tossed my sister and me a glance asking for help. We started taking flowers from the kids' hands, anchoring the stems under the chicken wire. By that time the flowers had been clutched in little hands for a long time and they weren't in the greatest of condition; but it didn't matter. I sang and watched the congregation as I took the flowers and bloomed the cross, and something inside me found familiarity. I saw my mom's close friend Kathleen sitting out there and thought, "yes, something is coming full circle here." It was like I was going through my first communion or something. I found Easter. Easter now had a participation that gave it a personal, experiential meaning for me, one that was rooted in beauty and creativity. It's where elements once living are cut down and then give life again. It's where I participate with my body and my soul, singing and watching and blooming. It's where profound Love is honored and remembered and celebrated.
So we're going again this year. We will visit with my family and take care of our 2 year old nephew while my sister and her family go celebrate my brother-in-law's grandpa's 90th birthday for the day. Then Sunday morning we'll get up and go to church. We'll go to the early service. Usually we go to the later service because getting everyone out the door for the early service is just asking too much. But on Easter we go early. The kids each carry a little fistfull of flowers cut from their (or the neighbors'...) lawn and climb into the car and off we go.
I will take my blah-ness with me. I'll take my tiredness with me. I'll take my losses and my questions with me. And I'll take joy. I will find rest and comfort, energy and pleasure, meaning and depth. I'll find Love and Beauty. And at the table on Sunday afternoon, I will look around me and be profoundly grateful for Life.
"Love" by George Herbert
Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guiltie of dust and sinne.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lacked any thing.
"A guest," I answered, "worthy to be here."
Love said, "You shall be he."
"I the unkind, ungratefull? Ah my deare,
I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
"Who made the eyes but I?"
"Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," sayes Love, "who bore the blame?"
"My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," sayes Love, "and taste my meat."
So I did sit and eat.
