A couple of days ago, we celebrated Easter Sunday. The church service was really good, including a great sermon from Bob (as usual) and an amazing job by four of the youth group members reading an interleaved version of the Easter story from the four gospels. (It's a little hard to explain, but basically, each one read from a single one of the gospels, and they took turns reading, lining up the verses that went together. It was really very impressive.)
Lent (the 40 days, not counting Sundays, from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday) felt a little strange to me this year. It's supposed to be a period of solemn waiting, but since Easter came relatively early this year, it followed right on the heels of Christmas, where we had just ended Advent, another period of solemn waiting. Perhaps the early church could have set the date of Christmas earlier so as to avoid the two events -- the birth and death of Jesus -- being quite so close together. OK, maybe not.
At any rate, I wound up feeling slightly out of place or unsettled for most of Lent. In fairness, it's entirely possible that that has as much to do with things going on in my life and in the world at large as it does with the dates of Advent and Lent. There are some things at work and at home that I've been waiting for, we're all still waiting for al Qaeda to be shut down once and for all, and much of the world seems to be waiting for Sharon and Arafat to either settle down or kill each other. (My money, sadly, is on the latter.) My whole life seemed to be in waiting, but I couldn't bring myself to just let it be and accept it. Thus, the unsettledness of it all.
But Easter Sunday arrived, and afterwards, I felt a lot better. I felt a real sense of connection at the church service, and then afterwards, Meredith and I cooked Easter dinner for us and a couple of friends. We sat around, we talked -- it was fun. Things felt a lot better.
Is all the waiting over? Well, no. Christ may have risen, but Israel and Palestine are still at each other's throats, Meredith is still waiting to find full-time work, I'm still waiting for some things at work, and so on. But now, somehow, I feel re-energized and better about things. Maybe there's something to the whole season of Lent after all.
Happy Easter!
Posted by Mike at April 2, 2002 08:34 AM