I was speaking to Susie last night about Easter. This is Holy Week for some of the western Christian traditions. Reconciler is certainly honoring it. After the Palm Sunday service last night, I was speaking with Susie about ecumenism and what I have "given up" in order to participate in the ecumenical movement in the particular (and peculiar) ways that I have. It was a good conversation. As we were speaking I mentioned how, in some ways, the Vigil is an act of "giving up gospel freedoms" for the sake of the wider Church. Dramatic language aside, and even my enjoyment of the Great Vigil, I admitted to Susie that the Vigil never feels like Easter to me.
So, on my way to work this morning I though that I should post on ecumenism and giving things up for the Chrurch and other such ideas. Blah. Blah. Blah. That will wait for another time. Instead, I thought I would play around with a little navel gazing. I need to ask myself what Easter feels like.
I remember my mother's parents' house in Arlington, Virginia. That is one of my more lucid memories of Easter. My younger brother and I would sit on the floor in the little livingroom in front of these giant Easter baskets full of candy. I am sure that it took mere moments for me to tear the thing apart, but what I recall is carefully exploring all the little delights in my basket. I love cocnut and always have, so I would look for the big coconut egg. There was the chocolate bunny, assorted hard candy and usually a small box. Some years there might be a simple toy like a kite or something like that. We never went to church, so that is not a memory. That basket sure is. And so too is the porch at my grandparents' home.
I have been an early-riser for my entire life. My grandfather would be awake and reading the paper by four some mornings. I would rise at about five-thirty or six and sit with him or try to find something else to do. It was about waiting for that basket of candy. but it was also about the porch and my grandfather. I would eat cereal and drink juice. I can smell the flowers blooming now. Easter is seldom as early as it is this year, so mostly I remember azaleas blooming and the smell of the dogwood trees. There was always something different about the smell of the soil in Arlington. It was always dark and rich and had a particular smell to it. The sun would be warm. My grandmother would fix fried green tomotoes. I loved them. The cornmeal would get a little crunchy. That house in Arlington was nothing but smells and colored glass...and chocolate, of course.
My grandmother kept colored glass bottles in the windowsills.
That is Easter to me. I sometimes miss that house and the smells and the colored glass. We stopped going to my grandparents for Easter when I was about seven or eight. So, I only have a few very intense memories. Easter came to an end for a good long while. There would still be baskets and chocolate and simple toys, but I never stopped hoping for the smells and colored glass.
When I was 24, the same year my grandmother passed away, I managed to go to my first Vigil. I was singing in the choir taht year (I have recounted to some that this was my moment of conversion if there ever was one.) But it has never quite replaced those first Easters. In later years, I would sit and wait for the service to end, chomping at the bit to get outside where it would be warm and the sun would be shining and the smells would rise up and the sun would shine through the leaves like it did through the colored bottles in my grandmother's kitchen and livingroom windows. Even with all the smells and colored glass in the church, I still wish for the others.
So, this is what Easter feels like, looks like, smells like. I don't know if this Easter will ever measure up to the side porch and cocnut eggs in my grandparents' house in Arlington. I am not sure it should.
Note: in retrospect, I am not sure that there were fried green tomatoes at Easter. That would be unusually early for tomatoes. So, that would be a conflation of memories. Ah well. - Ed.
Posted by tripp at March 21, 2005 11:16 AMI've had some really cool Easter experiences, Easter liturgies, etc.... but it's not really Easter without my father waking me up with the first verse of "Welcome, Happy Morning" and then the rest of the hymn as the processional at church. (Yeah, it's been a while since I had a 'real' Easter in that sense too.)
Posted by: beth at March 21, 2005 03:21 PMWhen I was a kid, Easter consisted of coloring eggs, and occasional egg hunt. I remember wondering why Easter wasn't the same day each year. There was no religious content at all.
Then for years, it wasn't even that. Even when we had kids, it was back to coloring and hunting for eggs, and the very occasional Easter Sunday service.
I was, in essence, celebrating the vernal equinox.
Not all that long ago, this all changed. Two weeks after I was baptized, I experienced my first Holy Week. I've already posted a few recollections over in my journal.
Posted by: Wes at March 21, 2005 10:59 PMTripp,
I am struck by how the "secularized" aspects of religious holidays affect your expectations of them. This seems strikingly similar to your reflecitons on Christmas.
I am struck the degree to which when I attended my first Easter Vigil, it spoke Easter to me in ways my own traditions celebrations of Easter only did in part. I recognized in the Easter Vigil what my tradition alwasy wished to say and do in celebrating easter. And now the ECC Book of Worship has an Easter Vigil Service, it has been taken into my tradition, or re-appropriated is perhaps more accurate.
Though I think there is an element of your memories that have to do with Easter, though they need to be taken up into the Church's proclamation of Easter.
I won't say that will be an easy task but those sensory memories you describe make me think of new life, which is what we celebrate in celebrating the resurection is it not? Though the new life of Spring is a mere shadow of the Resurection.