Easter

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.

A scandal afoot

Charissa Jones is one of the world's most amazing women. She is kind, fun, gracious, strong, gentle, and wise. To be with her is to experience the best of what it is to be a woman, to be a person. I also just simply enjoy her company. Charissa speaks from time to time at her church, a beautiful Episcopal parish in Seattle. Here (and below...if this isn't working) is a link to a sermon she gave in December. I always love hearing about women!

http://www.epiphanyseattle.org/media/2010Dec19/Sermon.mp3

Remember

Last Saturday, Seattle Police Officer Timothy Brenton was shot & killed as he sat in his patrol car on the side of a neighborhood street. His funeral procession was yesterday morning. The two-hour procession covered several miles & involved over 1000 vehicles and law enforcement officers from across the continent. Images from along the procession route are very moving...saulting boy scouts, grieving citizens, honor guards, drums and bagpipes, dark vehicles moving slowly through the morning drizzle.

I always feel a momentary pause well up from my deepest heart when I see funeral processions. The ritual and tradition of acknowledging death has been a powerful thing for me, ever since early childhood. I honestly do not remember the first funerals I attended - I was probably still a baby. In the religious group I grew up in (which my family left in May 1995 when I was 20), we went to lots of them. There were a lot of old people in the group, plus that's one of the things the people in that group just do a lot of (funeral-going). There was plenty about the content of those funerals that was lacking, preachy, and frustratingly impersonal; and there were plenty of funerals we went to simply because culturally in the group that was what you did; but all the same, funerals became very normal and non-frightening for me. In the year or two before we left the group and since then, funeral-going has become a very different thing for me.

My mom's name is Marion Diane Dahlin Abenroth. Everyone called her Diane since Marion was my gandmother's name too. She was born November 20, 1948. Next week marks the day my she died, November 13, 2000. Ten months after her death, I checked into a small hotel in a little town a couple hours north of Seattle and proceeded to write down every detail I could recall of Mom's death and the days surrounding it. The writing process I went through was highly intentional, ultimately good, very relieving, and wrenchingly excrutiating; and remembering it all...those days around her death & those days when I wrote...is painful. There are books to write about all those days, and each day leading up to & following them. But for purposes of this writing, I'll simply share pictures I carry from the day of her funeral. Her funeral was November 18, two days before her 52nd birthday, at the Presbyterian church my parents had been attending for a few years. My sister & I watched through the windows as car after car drove into the lot. Over 500 people attended the service. I bodily remember walking down the center aisle to the front pew of the church...Dewight, Melody, Me, Dad, Ned. I distinctly remember the five of us standing up in that pew at the end of the service while each person filed past Mom's rose-covered casket. In the midst of our own grief, I think my family were the comfort-providers, simply in standing there, acknowledging reality, looking each mourner in the eye and holding their hand momentarily as they walked past.

Although the two are intertwined, I think sometimes I feel more myself in moments of mourning than I do in celebration. I could stand being better at celebrating - that's one of the things the group I grew up in was not good at. But I'm grateful that marking death & grief feels organic for me because in our culture it seems the harder part. I remember the day we picked out Mom's casket...it was a Wednesday morning & I had a raging headache...standing in that room in the funeral home, feeling utter disbelief at what we were doing...I remember telling Dad, "We should NOT be doing this." We had to but everything in me resists having had to. The week seemed blurry...sort of on auto-pilot, but the day of the funeral I felt grounded until the end when I just wanted everyone to leave my family home and go away. But after that... I felt like the world should stop. My very mother had died and everyone was just going on with life. There were a blessed handful who remembered, who mentioned, who waited, who spoke...who still do that.

I didn't want to wear black for a year but I understand something of that tradition. It's difficult for Americans to be present in mourning. It is granted such a brief allotment of time in the rhythm of our days, and it's relegated to the realm of privacy. I can relate to people's confusion around what to do, what to say. But the failure to even simply say that to one who is grieving bothers me because more often than not the default then is silence. Not expressing uncertainty, not acknowledgment, but silence.

Last month I attended my uncle's funeral in Spokane. The funeral home is next to the cemetery where my maternal grandparents and other family members are buried so before the service Jonathan & I drove into the cemetery and made our way quietly to their section. I got out of the car and walked to Grandma's grave. I stood there in the barren, freezing morning and felt profoundly grateful that, even with the inadequacy of our efforts, we humans do this kind of thing. Every culture has its way...varying of course from people to people...but we humans do not fully just ignore death and the dead, and when it does happen that way we feel like something is very wrong. Life matters. Death is real. Pausing helps. Traditions can be supportive & healthy. These kinds of rituals and observances always make me feel the fundamental beauty and sacredness of mourning & remembrance.

©2009 Mindy Danylak

Borderlands

there is a place
beyond the border
where love grows
and where peace
is not the frozen silence . . .

to get to that place you have to
go or be pushed out
beyond the borders,
to where it is lonely, fearful,
threatening, unknown.

only after you have wandered
for a long time in the dark
do you begin to bump into others
also branded, exiled,
border crossers,
and find you walk on
common ground.

it is not an easy place to be,
this place beyond the borders.
but it is a good place to be.

Kathy Galloway
(the above is an extraction - see first comment below for the full piece)

I and You

Yes, I come from another country,
To your world I can never belong.
Tinkling guitars cannot please me,
I want a wild desolate song.

I do not read my verses in drawing-rooms
To black-coats and dresses like shrouds.
I read my verses to dragons,
To the waterfalls and to the clouds.

I love like an Arab in the desert
Who flings himself on water and drinks,
Not like a knight in a picture
Who looks at the stars and thinks.

I shall not die in a bedroom
With a priest and a lawyer beside me.
I shall perish in a terrible ravine
With a mass of wild ivy to hide me.

I shall not go to a Protestant heaven,
Open to all in tidy blue skies,
But to a place where thief and publican
And harlot will cry: 'Friend, arise!'

Nikolai Gumilev
(Translated by V. De S. Pinto)

The Invitation

The Invitation

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for
and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon...
I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us to
be careful
be realistic
remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.
And if you can source your own life
from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
“Yes.”

It doesn’t interest me
to know where you live or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the centre of the fire
with me
and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom
you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you
from the inside
when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone
with yourself
and if you truly like the company you keep
in the empty moments.

© Oriah Mountain Dreamer, from the book The Invitation published by HarperSanFrancisco, 1999

Mindful - by Mary Oliver

Every day

I see or hear

something

that more or less

kills me

with delight,

that leaves me

like a needle

in the haystack

of light.

It was what I was born for -

to look, to listen,

to lose myself

inside this soft world -

to instruct myself

over and over

in joy,

and acclamation.

Nor am I talking

about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,

the very extravagant -

but of the ordinary,

the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.

Oh, good scholar,

I say to myself,

how can you help

but grow wise

with such teachings

as these -

the untrimmable light

of the world,

the ocean's shine

the prayers that are made

out of grass.