scotinprogress

When I was a child, Easter meant eating Cadbury’s cream eggs which covered my hands with goo. My Mum also gave me a boiled egg to decorate with felt tip pens. Lurid blue and green ink smudged on the egg white when I cracked it open, but I ate it anyway. Back in these good old days, there was no such thing as non-toxic ink, and so I if I’ve turned out to be a little bit wacky, I’ll blame it on that.

Joy

Easter, like Christmas, was a strictly non-religious experience, because we didn’t celebrate it in church. I was a student living away from home when I went to my first Easter day service in a Baptist church. It should have been a joyful experience. The church was packed with smiling people, and the choir sang their hearts out, but I felt annoyance, bordering on anger. I had been brought up with such an emphasis on Christ’s suffering and death that I couldn’t understand why they were so happy.

My next Easter experience, many years later was Mass on Easter Sunday. This time I was much less resistant to joy. I was almost overwhelmed by the different sensations: light from the candles, the smell of incense, the sound of singing, the feel of droplets of holy water, from a brush which the priest flicked enthusiastically over the congregation.

At that point, I didn’t understand Lent, or the fact that Easter Sunday is the culmination of a week of preparation which follows the last week in Christ’s life, his death and resurrection.

Sadness

My experience of Easter is like a patchwork. Due to other commitments, I can’t take part in everything, and even if I could, I don’t think I could take it all in at once. This year my new patch in the Easter quilt was a short time of prayer in the church early on Good Friday.

I couldn’t take part in the Maundy Thursday Mass or the Good Friday prayers, but I saw that there was prayer in the church from Thursday night until Friday morning. I gathered my courage and slipped in for a few moments between dropping the kids at school and going to work.

The church felt different. The statue of Christ was draped in cloth and a curtain partly covered the entrance to the side chapel. I crept into the side chapel and found empty rows of chairs facing a little brass box surrounded by a profusion of flowers. The atmosphere was that of a Chapel of Remembrance. It felt as if someone had died. The church itself was a bare shell, too large for the swaddled figure of Christ and the gaping doors of the tabernacle.

Although I had read that the sacrament is taken out of the tabernacle and placed elsewhere to symbolise Christ’s death and burial, it was a shock to see the church like this. Somehow I had thought that these ceremonies occurred later on Good Friday, and had expected to find the church in more or less normal condition.

Even though this was a re-enactment of events which occurred over 2000 years ago, it felt like a bereavement. I knelt in the side chapel and cried as if I had lost a loved one.

Balance

Mine is not a certain faith. I shuffle forwards, testing each step. I keep going, not because I have any assurance that there is anything beyond what my five senses can tell me, but because of a feeling, deep down, that this is what I am meant to do.

The sadness I felt in finding the church empty, testified in a reverse way to the fact that there must usually be a presence there, even if I have no strong awareness of it. The grief I felt at finding Christ symbolically entombed, showed me that, even through the muddle and guddle of everyday life, a part of me longs for him.

I joined the Easter vigil on Saturday, when light is brought into the dark church from a fire lit outside in the night. Throughout the next few days when doubts pecked at me like black corbies, or crows, I remembered that I cannot understand light without knowing darkness, life is precious because we also experience death, and that faith arises from questions and doubts.