April 8, 2007
Easter Sunday

Finally on my way to yes
I bump into
all the places
where I said no
to my life
all the untended wounds . . .
the old misdirections
and I lift them
one by one
close to my heart
and I say   holy
          holy.
                    — Pesha Gertler, b. 1930s
                        American poet

As late as 11:00 last night I didn’t think I was going to church this morning. The lilies make my nose itch, I said, and the myriad visitors, though certainly welcome, tend to be a distraction that turns the proceedings into a performance piece rather than a meditative spiritual experience, at least for me. It’s not as bad as at Christmas, but it is a somewhat artificial atmosphere. That’s a fairly selfish and self-centered stance, I guess, making it seem that my spiritual life is all about me and what works for me rather than about reaching out to others with the Good News. I’ve always said I’m the world’s worst evangelist.

Back on Ash Wednesday I’d made reference to Father Francis-Maria Salvato’s observation that “Lent can be a season of joy, a season to let go of old ways of perception and move into a new awareness.” And so it became. I was already moving with an energy that had been created in the fall and had carried me through a winter in which, friends said, I radiated light. I made progress on my writing and on my commitment to renew old friendships and I’d found a new focus for my prayer life.

And I’d had something of a transcendent experience on Maundy Thursday, a feeling that took me out of myself. That’s always the most meaningful part of Holy Week, the day we celebrate the gift of the Eucharist, the heart of my spirituality. It was our woman pastor who preached that night. She talked about joy at the table, about how her experience of family mealtimes has changed as her family has grown. Her youngest has been one of Lynn’s closest friends since kindergarten, and so we’ve had similar journeys through the years when you could pretty much dictate your child’s activities and whereabouts, through the wonder years of meals arranged around sports and other school events, to now, when these young adults they have become tell their friends they’re spending part of the holiday “at my parents’ house.”

Bread and soup, she said, our own version of bread and wine. Easter calls us to love each other fearlessly and completely, as we have been loved. Welcome the guest with bread and soup, and send him away with a bit of what’s left until the next time. And I’d done that, repeatedly through the season, and just the night before, when I’d made mulligatawny, which isn’t soup so much as symbol. Mull, the name by which he calls me, explained here.

The Catholic congregation Ron sings with has a lengthy vigil service plus a festival Mass in the morning, and Lynn was somewhere about her business. Home alone then last night, I wondered just how much corporate worship I needed, given the odiferous lilies and the likelihood that my usual seat and those near it, down left in a spot that doesn’t get the sun’s glare, might be occupied by ranks of guests, relegating me to the folding chairs in the narthex.

But I woke this morning at 6:00, and something impelled me up and out. Mindful of Ron’s comfort and need for more sleep, I dressed in the semi-darkness and was out the door and driving through an unseasonable snow squall fifteen minutes later, on my way to Tree of Life’s sunrise service. I joined a small group of pilgrims, many of them our congregation’s teenagers, who would be preparing breakfast to be served between the 8:30 and the 11:00 services.

My life is changing, and every day I get a different reminder of that fact. During the past week I made the three kinds of bread we always had at Ron’s family’s Easter extravaganza, but the lamb in sauce and the colored eggs and the dozen people at the table are things of the past, now that his parents and his aunt and uncle are gone and his older children scattered to other lives. Lynn had dinner with us Saturday night and went back to school (or, “home,” as she would put it) after seeing some friends so she could be at work at the college fitness center early this morning and then study for a big test coming up Monday. 

I’m on my way to a new yes in my life. I experienced Easter in a different way this morning. I gathered thoughts of all whom I love, all I have been to them and they to me, all that we yet can be, and I said holy, holy.