This year, for the first
time in a long while, I did not go to church on Easter. I had no
clear reason why. I had been working hard on a project in the weeks beforehand, and when I finally came up for air, it was 1:00am on Easter morning. I had just
emerged from that luxurious place of concentration so complete that you forget the
rest of the world is there−when you sit down to work for a little while in a coffee shop, and the next time you look up, the room is empty but for the person sweeping the space around you, gently reminding you they closed ten
minutes ago. I actually enjoy this place, but it has its risks. If I stay there for
more than a few weeks, fewer brain cells become available for the rest of me. For example, on Holy
Thursday I walked out of the chaos of ShopRite and realized that, in a full
parking lot roughly the size of the town in which I grew up, I had no idea where I’d
parked my car. I waited for the memory to return while heavy plastic shopping
bags formed deep lines in my forearms. I worried faintly
about Alzheimer's in my family history before remembering I’d always
been like this. Maybe church was out for
today because after a period of intense work, I preferred a quiet expression of
faith through yoga, prayer, piano and sun rather than a large, public
celebration.
Or maybe it was the
current “push” period that is part of my push-pull relationship with the
Catholic Church. To oversimplify, the pull is to music, ritual, family, insights
of timeless parables, Jesus as human and love and story, and a belief that the
church is its people, not its leaders. The push is a recoil against forceful
reminders of positions on birth control, practices impacting people who are gay, or divorced, or women, and a fear that the church might be its leaders, not its people.
But despite my crowded
mind, somehow Easter did find me. At night, between dreams of prose moving itself
around in the document I was working on, I dreamed of my grandmother, who died last summer after an injury and declining health. In the dream she was alive, and I found her standing in a
closet, lost and little and covered with clothes, scarves, belts and clothes
hangers, her small face peeking out while she waited for me to come find her
through the clutter.
She had said before she
died, “Do not forget me,” and I awoke wondering if I’d been too preoccupied to
remember her or her lessons. Then I remembered what a neat freak she was. I
have never been accused of that myself, but lately it's been pretty bad. The inside of my car would make a perfect time machine
for future archaeological study (“Bottled Water, Gum and Dunkin’
Donuts Coffee Consumption in 21st Century American Women”).
Maybe she was just
telling me to clean up. Either way, she was
there. And on Easter I awoke to sunshine casting warmth on a wood floor. Sudden
as Easter was, it came today through my daily morning yoga and meditation practice which, on some days, is God’s only way in. Easter came from my grandmother, and
from a lovely brunch with my father, who shared that he’d been thinking of her
this week as well. It came over coffee, omelettes and pancakes, and stories about
what he loved and admired about his parents. We remembered the ways they are
all still alive in the ways we live, and in the ways we want to.
Easter pulled me out of
a shell of concentration and oblivion to the world, back to the world of sun, food,
father, and reminders of what I believe: that in Resurrection, we will
never cease to be alive.
Easter points to places
in hearts, minds, memory and work where vacuums of hope gape open, asking to be
filled with Resurrection. Whether you believe Christ was God Incarnate or not,
Easter is the arrow that points to questioning all we have cast off as dead,
whether a friendship or marriage, a childhood, part of ourselves, our relationship
to the Divine, or life itself.
Whether Easter comes
through church doors, flower beds or friends’ eyes is beside the point. If life
continued for Jesus after death, and I believe it did, then so it did for the
people we've lost, and so it will for us. The moment we
really believe that, suddenly our insides are able to breathe.
Happy Easter. Whatever
Easter resurrects in you today, may your heart's leanings lift higher than your
mind’s figurings. You will never cease to be alive.
For me, the song “Bread of Life”
always resurrects this truth from its hiding places, whether I am in church
dressed up for Easter or in my sweats on a tired morning, sitting in sunshine,
music and prayer.
The version in the link
below includes the lyrics and was sung in an Episcopal church last Easter. The
version I listen to for meditation is a piano instrumental by Jon Sarta (from The
Catholic Music Project, Volume II).
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CategoriesApril 2011Easter New Blog
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