Easter Saturday

Yesterday as I drove to work, my NPR station ran a "commercial" for a Miami church that's holding services in a ritzy shopping mall, which will include a visit from the Easter bunny and yoga on the beach between services. 

Immediately I had questions that couldn't be answered.  Would congregants change from their Easter outfits into yoga gear?  How does the Easter bunny fit into the resurrection story?  I have a vision of the Easter bunny saying, "He is risen."  Will he give out eggs as he does?  And why is the Easter bunny male in my head?

I am sure that I was one of few people working yesterday--I feel that way because the traffic was so light.  My colleagues and I have agreed that next year when we all work on Good Friday, we should bring in brunch foods to share.  Of course, what we didn't think about is that next year, Good Friday may not conveniently fall on a break week.

Yesterday, I slipped away from work to go to Good Friday service.  It's not quite as dramatic a Tenebrae service when it's held during daylight hours.  Still, the austerity of the chancel area moved me.  I spent time meditating on the candles on the altar:

It was only when I saw my pastor's photo above that I realized the candles sat not on wood, as it looked from a distance, but on paving stones--one of which was used recently to break the glass in the door so that vandals could come into the church to see what they could steal.

It's been interesting to participate in Holy Week with the news stories of shootings--the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shootings and the police shootings--always in my mind. I am haunted by the juxtaposition of the women weeping at the cross with the news stories of immigrant families ripped apart both in the U.S. and elsewhere. I cannot see how we move forward, but it feels so important to both move forward and move carefully. We seem just steps away from complete self-immolation as a society.

And yet, all around us are signs of hope--one of the hallmarks of our various religious observances that come in Spring.  There's the Christian passage of the Good Friday cross to the empty tomb of Easter.  There's the Passover story of freedom from bondage, with the promise that we can all be set free from whatever holds us captived.  The very earth itself, in the northern hemisphere at least, shows signs that winter will not last.

So, here we are at the Saturday before Easter, when even the non-religious might celebrate by dying eggs and participating in other ancient pagan fertility rituals. At my house, my sister and nephew are visiting, so we will do some things unusual for us, like making a unicorn frappucino, part of a food/drink craze that I never realized existed, along with some of the usual things we do together, like having fun in and around the pool.

Maybe I'll also write my poem in the voice of the empty tomb.  Or maybe a poem about Christ's Midlife Crisis.  Maybe both!