Easter Vigil Remembered

Easter Vigil 2

“How blessed is this night when earth and heaven are joined and man is reconciled to God.” Exsultet, Book of Common Prayer, p. 287.

I revisit this past Holy Week and remember some wonderful stories of the excitement of the Easter Vigil at each of the churches where I have served. I remember one priest telling us at his homily many years ago that our presence at the Vigil didn’t give us extra points with God for being there, getting more stars in our crown. It was simply a privilege to be some of the first at the empty tomb to meet the risen Lord.

One of my favorite surprises was waiting to see how the altar guild would often decorate my larger harp for  the Easter Vigil.

Many congregations then follow the Vigil service with an elaborate reception or dinner late at night at church or at someone’s home.

 Once at Trinity Cathedral as the deacon tilted the candle ever so slightly to light its wick from the first fire, oil ran out of the top of the candle and the fire became surreal, like the tongues of fire described at Pentecost.  At St. Margaret’s we did the Vigil in the Columbarium garden and I played a smaller lap harp as I sang the Exsultet to stay on key. I cannot describe the feeling of shouting out in the great outdoors, “The Lord has risen indeed!

At St. Luke’s one of my favorite lectors reading of one of the Old Testament lessons was having difficulty seeing in the dark in the middle of the long reading and put her candle closer to the microphone at the lectern catching the foam covering over the microphone on fire. She so elegantly blew the fire out and didn’t miss a beat in the reading. Also at St. Luke’s one of the amazing teachers of the children ministries and her two children planned a flashlight egg hunt for older children after the Vigil outside around the church which was a huge success as well as increasing the number of young people at the service!

The Vigil is so unusual, however, that it also is so easy to get caught up in the many tiny details of this once a year liturgy and view it as a performance rather than an offering. The Vigil is a service to be enjoyed and celebrated. We can always count on the Vigil to bring surprises just like the risen Lord.

Joanna joannaseibert.com

Easter Week Visits

Easter Week Visits

“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8:38-39

Painting at Our Mother of Perpetual Help Parish

I talk with so many people who do not believe they deserve God’s love. I remember visiting with a very alert, highly educated woman in her 90’s still involved in her successful business who wanted to start going back to church but only after she got her life back together and felt like she was a better person. I told her the famous line that “the church is not a museum for saints but a hospital for sinners,” but she never returned.

I talk to many people recovering from addiction who feel so much shame for the life they have led. They do not see how God and others can forgive them. So many have been raised by a judgement God who is looking over their shoulder to catch them in sin.

I want to let them know that there is another way, those who believe in resurrection, an Easter, which always can come after a Good Friday life or experience. If I can, I remind them of Jesus’ disciples who abandoned, denied him. He did not return to them in that upper room on Easter evening and say, “Shame on you.” Instead he said, “’Peace be with you.’ When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them. ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven.’” (John 20)

We talk about the difference between shame, “I am a bad person,” and guilt, “I did a wrong thing.” We also talk about addictions not being a moral failing, but a disease.

We talk about seeing any sign of God’s love alive and well, working in their life.  We pray that the Holy Spirit will led both of us to recognize the Spirit alive in each other, to see and be led by the Christ in each other. Sometimes I tell my story of how God has been present in my life through so many difficulties to see if they see any similarity in my story and theirs. Lastly, I may share the above mantra from Romans I used for several years as I became more aware of the harm I had done in my life to others and myself and was seeking forgiveness.

Joanna  joannaseibert.com

John Updike: Easter

John Updike: Easter
“The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.”                John Updike, Seven Stanzas at Easter

John Updike not only gave us this poem reminding us of the real bodily experience of the Easter story, but among other things, one of my favorite resurrection short stories in The Afterlife and Other Short Stories called, “Short Easter,” about the occasion when daylight saving time begins on Easter Sunday. I first read the story in volume 2 of Listening for God, a series of short stories selected by Paula Carlson and Peter Hawkins, the first then from the department of English and the second a professor of Religion and Literature, both at Yale University. The four-part series includes a DVD about the author of each contemporary short story which can be studied especially in a book group to use literature as an icon to hear and see God.  

 In “Short Easter,” this high holy day for Christians becomes one hour shorter when the clocks are jumped forward and an hour of sleep is stolen. “Church bells rang in the dark.” Updike goes through the day of a well to do man named Fogel (“Fog” is God spelled backwards.) who keeps wanting to attend church services on Easter Day but puts it off until at the end of the day, he has never gone. At the story’s end, Fogel wakes up from an afternoon nap “amid that unnatural ache of resurrection.. the weight of coming again to life” and realizes that “although everything in his world is in place, there is something immensely missing.”  

This is the moment of clarity that God continuously reveals to us. I regularly need to remind myself and spiritual friends to try to be open to that moment that is often fearful as it was for Fogel. It is like the fear of the women at the empty tomb on Easter Day. It is resurrection.  It always speaks to something more that we have missed.

We have put something else in our “God hole,” and whatever it is, prestige, money, marriage, work, family, fame, beauty, it will never fill that hole inside of us where only God is large enough to live.  

Joanna  joannaseibert.com