Easter Tulips

I may have already written about this, but they are worth at least two entries. And since we are leaving on vacation tomorrow, it is probably the last day I will get to see their velvety glory. The first year in a new house has its ups and downs (ups: having a basement to throw toys into, even if it eventually becomes an abyss that needs a shovel to unearth; downs: realizing the side street is actually a lot busier now that the road construction in the neighborhood is over). But by far the best surprise was waking up on Easter morning and finding on the side of the street, the street that is busier than we like, a mounded bed of tulips opening their arms to the sun. They are more than your average tulip, though since we had nothing to do with planting them, I don't know what kind they are. They are low to the ground and have broad leaves that came up just after the snow melted. When they are open, the inside of the petals shimmer and reflect the sun so much that when I tried to take a picture, the light bounced right back. These are not flowers that want to be photographed, at least not by my point-and-shoot camera. Inside there is a dollop of yellow surrounded by a black frame that invites the bees to come, taste and see! We will miss their daily show while we're gone, and most likely they will be finished by the time we are back. But for their brief glory, and their Easter gift to us, we are grateful. Now, do you think our flowering tree can hold off until we get back?

Paschal Reflections

I should begin with, Happy Easter! before I launch into thinking about how we celebrate Easter, thinking back on last week and some conversations with friends. So a Happy Easter to everyone who celebrates it, and a Happy Passover to everyone who celebrates it. And welcome back colored petals of all varieties, please don't be intimidated by today's snow.

Our family Holy Week observances have varied from being at multiple services all three days (and even most Wednesday evenings in Lent) to missing everything but Ash Wednesday, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, which was Ryan's season during residency one year. A dear friend held off Easter dinner until he could be home so at least he could taste the celebration. I think our most committed year was the year the boys were in utero. The washing of the feet was especially heart-felt for me that year as it had been some time since I had been able to touch my own feet.

Of course since having the boys, evening services have been a challenge. Our first year in Chicago we wanted to alternate evenings so that at least Ryan or I could be at each night of Holy Week. But just as the service was getting underway, I paged Ryan frantically. "Dietrich can't nurse. He's wheezing! It sounds like this: 'heeet', 'heeet'. His heart is racing." I spent the rest of the night in a brightly lit ER room with a child who promptly stopped wheezing when he went outside, who contracted a stomach flu via playing on the floor, and who finally screaming to sleep during an unnecessary nebulizer treatment. On Maundy Thursday, we learned how to treat croup, but no one had their feet washed or gathered at the Eucharist.

This year, the same kid who kept us from Holy Week a few years ago made it to services all three (four, counting Easter Sunday) days. Elliott, Dietrich, my mom and I went to the noonday Maundy Thursday service where we were invited to gather at the alter, pray forgiveness, and be blessed by the pastor. Friday night Dietrich and I Sat in darkness and listened to the passion story sung in parts. Saturday we planned to all attend the Easter Vigil, if only we could all nap. The napping hour turned to roucus playtime, but when given one final chance, Dietrich fell asleep, determined to go back to church, and see the darkness become light. He and Ryan ventured off as I helped Elliott (and me) into jammies and brushed teeth.

When they came home, Dietrich was literally bouncing off the bed with excitement -- the fire! the candles! the organ and instruments! He witnessed the baptisms of twin babies and an adult. He tasted the first meal shared after the days of silence. He also heard a college kid in a car driving by, "I'm glad their dead!" thinking the gathering was a funeral procession. But amidst the excitement and confusion of the culmination of Holy Week, the liturgy stands for itself in saying what we cannot explain. And why would we want to?

The Easter Vigil is something still new to me. My first vigil was at St. Phillips Episcopal parish in Durham, NC. The darkness and fire and lighting the candles and all the readings awoken my senses, but I wasn't ready for the lights, the organ, the trumpets and the Easter lilies to suddenly appear out of nowhere. It was shocking to say, "The Lord is Risen!" when I had never said them before the sunrise. I came home and felt the Easter joy coming over me, and yet guilty for not waiting for the sun, the dawn, to be the light. I mentioned going to several services one year -- this was the year. I went to an Easter dawn service on the front lawn of a Moravian church. I do not recommend going to both Easter vigil and Easter dawn. But even if I was more awake, it, too, somehow wasn't right. I was missing the tombstones.

In all the years I'd celebrated Easter, with the exception of when I lived in Thailand (when Easter coincided with the Thai New Year celebration and meant I was doused with water on my way to church) I heard the Easter proclamation in a cemetary among the tombstones. We had a small band, we waited for the sun to peak over the crest of the hill, and the pastor began, "The Lord is Risen!" A liturgy of hymns and gospel readings followed, and a hearty breakfast after that. There were years that hail pebbles pinked off the xylophone bells I was playing. There were other years that we stood in fresh snow or the spring thaw. Most years we shivered. But it was always amongst the dead, waiting for the sun to rise or at least the sky to lighten.

It seems that both these practices, Easter vigil and Easter dawn are needed to keep the church from being too right in what it does. And maybe there is something to be said about keeping the Good Friday silence all the way until the first Sunday of Easter and sound out the trumpets then. The Easter vigil places the light of Christ in the hands of the people. It is up to them to bring light into the church, and into the world. It is Christ who offers all light after having seen all darkness, but it is Christ's followers who are charged to be light in the world that all too often chooses, or simply finds itself, in darkness. But to wait until the dawn, until the light has reached the world, reminds the church that the light has come to the world, it is not ours to create. And to say the proclamation among those who have died brings all the irony into focus.

So with that, we are well into Easter week. Elliott hums the Easter hymn, and Dietrich gets most of the words (though he was first belting out, Jesus Christ is Born Today, Ahhhhhhleluia!"). We grateful to be here, however we ushered in the light.

Good Friday

I've heard the passion story read by one person, by a few people, and even acted out. But I've never heard it sung until tonight. Dietrich and I went to the evening Good Friday service after each of us had a short, but renewing, afternoon nap. I told him there would be a chance to touch the cross at the end of the service, but I did not prepare him for the story of Jesus' death to be sung by a narrator, Jesus, and the choir. Not that he needed much preparation for that. He simply took it in. I needed it, though. As the slow melody of the story unfolded I noticed words, phrases, that I have not heard before, or at least had not heard in a penetrating way. It reminded me of reading in Hebrew, when each word had to be carefully parsed before I could imagine its meaning and put it together with other words. A phrase would take minutes to collect, a chapter would be a hard day's work. But as I learned to read, the slowness of it changed how I read the stories and how I saw the ancient images. Where I had imagined a fuller understanding, or a hidden meaning, I found instead a new world that was not masked by the English translations I'd grown up on, but a world that I read too quickly to see. Tonight, the sung passion moved me in the same way. When it came to the part where Peter denies Jesus three times, I kept hearing, "he stood there, too, warming himself...he was there, keeping warm." Oh Peter, I am so quick to judge you, but tonight I stood there with you. How often I would rather just keep warm than either risk becoming cold by asking hard questions or dare becoming enraged in confronting ingrained realities. Peter stood there, denying the one whom, just the day earlier, he was falling before in adoration, the one who was now being led off to be killed. And it is Good Friday, and that is where I stand, and stay, for a while longer.

Summer Air

Is this weather some kind of April fool's joke? How can it feel, even smell, like summer on the first day of April? As I perused the yard today, in flip flops (in Wisconsin, in April!) red edges were peeking out of their tulip stalks and daffodils that were looking like bunches of grass are bulging out at the top. The dusty beds needed water yesterday. Elliott was more than willing to help pour the watering cans and refill them. But we didn't tempt nature with attaching the hose.

We have an arched gate on the side of our house that leads to the backyard. The small wood door sits just off-level, making the latch nearly impossible to close routinely. Instead, we prop it on the cement to keep it open, or let the breeze hold it closed. Creeping up the side of lattice arch is a vine that I left alone last fall. Everything else -- except the trees and a few bushes, I leveled off to the ground. Most of it was overgrown anyway, and needed more pruning than I could do evenly. Now I check almost daily to see which of them have survived. Many have. One of the bushes I left alone, however, has a rotten root and is barely hanging on to the soil. It probably didn't help that we built a snow fort over the top of it.

The vine on the arched gate still has its crinkly leaves that never really turned yellow or red last fall. They just froze over and stayed on the vine. More than once I thought, as I was shoveling the walk past them, why didn't I just cut them down? I guess I'll do it in the spring. But yesterday as I passed through to get chalk or a rake or some other prop for the boys' impromptu front yard rock band, two shoots of green poked out from the brown, whithered vine. The buds were in the same spots as the dried out, frozen-over leaves, but plump and green. As I looked closer, the vine is covered with them. I plucked off a dead leaf easily, but am not about to do that for all of them. Somehow it will figure out how to cast off the leaves so the new ones can thrive. Somehow the vine will turn green and eventually flower, even as its leaves from last year return to the dirt. And it will probably endure the cool April showers -- even snow showers -- that are likely to pass through. Until then, it is out there enjoying a 70 degree evening, with a metal snow shovel still propped up against the imperfect gate.