Easter Sundays
We passed four churches on the way to our own: two baptist, one episcopal, one Catholic. Our church looked like none of them. It was plain.
When my grandfather founded our church in the mid-1930s, the building itself had very lately been a grocery store. All cinder block and red brick, even into the 1970s it resembled a warehouse more than a place of worship. Over the years, the church has expanded physically by necessity. When I was very small, a fellowship hall was built behind the sanctuary. A few years later, a two-story educational building was built next the the fellowship hall. Though a fiberglass steeple was added in the mid-80s, it came back down a few years later. It never looked quite right up there, and besides it made the roof leak.
Our simple church was never filled with the kind of light that powers a cathedral. The windows were (and still are) large, pebbled panes, almost industrial. The congregation couldn’t see out, passers by couldn’t see in. My guess is the windows were an inexpensive solution. Someone found a bargain and the church had a need and that was that. This left the weather a welcome surprise after the benediction. Was it raining? Was the sun shining?
But on Easter, the pastor wore a stole of white after eight weeks of deep Lenten purple. Parishioners were decked out in pale yellows, dusted pinks and birds egg blues. Children were dressed like little adults. The sanctuary was filled with calla lilies that made the whole church smell like springtime. I can’t remember a single sermon from an Easter Sunday, but I keep this perfect image in my memory of that sanctuary, those people in that church, everyone smiling as the pastor greeted us with a hearty “This is the day that the Lord has made!” And all the people said, “let us rejoice and be glad in it.”
There is a song my Dad sang in church on Easter mornings. “I’m so glad / I’m a part / of the family of God.” I have always loved the sound of my Dad’s singing voice. It was the highlight of every Easter service for me.
We spent Easter Mornings in church, dressed in our Sunday Best, but the afternoon found us at my grandfather’s house in the Country. Every local relative on my Dad’s side would converge. Cars and trucks would ascend the very steep drive and park in front of the horse barn. Out came aunts and uncles and so many cousins, firsts and seconds. Everyone had a covered dish. Casseroles joined fried chicken on Miss Ann’s kitchen table, all accompanied by potato salad, slaw, green beans and deviled eggs by the score. The women gathered in the kitchen, not to cook, just to sit and talk where the men wouldn’t interrupt. Men sat in rusted metal chairs overlooking the pond below, a pond occasionally occupied by whatever fish my Dad would bring from parts elsewhere. Just imagine how confused those displaced fish were, yanked from Lake Nickajack, never expecting a new life in a tiny pond some twenty miles away.
The kids, cousins close and not so close, had other business. Still dressed to impress, we were there with a singular purpose: hunting eggs. After lunch, eggs we’d dyed the night before would be handed to one of Miss Ann’s people for hiding, older teens who hid impartially and without favor. Egg hunting incorporated both hide & seek and tag. There was a lot of running and a lot of yelling and plenty of room for both.
Those Easter gatherings in the Country were celebrations of another sort. My grandfather was born in April of 1897, so Easter Sunday was always close enough to count for a party. The suit and tie he wore to church was replaced immediately by a khaki workman’s jumpsuit, his favorite clothes for tending his garden, smoking a pipe, or watching kids run around his yard. While we played like children, he’d sit outside with my father and many uncles, and telling stories they’d heard many times before about fish caught or neighbors helped or other oh-what-a-times he’d had. For a poor boy from South Georgia, a veteran of the First World War, it must’ve felt extraordinary to find himself surrounded by so many branches of his still-growing family tree. What did he think of us as we ran to and fro, hunting and hiding among his tall apple trees grown from saplings and seed?
In February of 1995, my grandfather died. He was 97.
On the day he was buried, I served as a pallbearer. He seemed so light, easy to carry. We laid him to rest at a cemetery near Peavine Creek, next to Dollie, his first wife who preceded him in almost thirty years prior. Afterward, we gathered in the fellowship hall at church. The service was over, but we wanted to linger. So we sat in metal folding chairs in the fellowship hall of the church my grandfather founded and ate more food and shared memories with one another. It was a wake, only the departed was already buried and we were only drinking sweet iced tea. A cousin-by-marriage took notice of the scene and said out loud how nice it was, how good it felt to see everybody all in one place, just as we used to gather for Easter Sundays.
Those Sundays in the Country hadn’t happened for years. So many of us kids and cousins had grown up and gone on with our lives. We made it to college and real-life, found adult jobs and those first flickers of a career. Those Easters were always for us, and since we were all so much older, it just didn’t seem as necessary. Most of the local relatives saw each other at church anyway.
My grandfather was the anchor of my family. A desire to be near him kept most of his children only a handful of miles away. He was a strong magnetic core around which we orbited, very few escaping the gentle pull.
He would never say as much, never thought of it that way, but establishing a church that he knew would outlast him was a gift in perpetuity. In that tiny church, he left us a place to converge even after he was gone, to gather on Easters and other occasions.
Easter’s place in the church calendar compresses a Messiah’s live into a matter of months, not years. We celebrate his birth in December, only to watch him suffer and die for our sins in Springtime. It’s hard to grasp the scope of a life in so little time, particularly as a child.
As an adult, I’ve had the same struggle. Weren’t you just born? Didn’t you just get here and now you’ve the weight of the world on your bleeding shoulders?
In assuming a human form, he knew a life lived just as imperfectly as all of us. He could hurt, bleed and die. He could also feel, see and experience small wonders. He could see firsthand the beauty of our imperfect humanity.
We love who and what we love not because of their perfections, but for their flaws. The flaws make them vulnerable, bring them down to a level where we can relate. Humans are fragile creatures, only existing for a pocketful of years in the grand scheme of things. And because we are only here just so long, we tie our little lives to one another, braiding and intertwining to make each other something stronger, longer lasting. Love is an attempt at immortality. Love is death-defying, a fight against a dark inevitable. And as the Easter story tells it, one of us managed to win.
I know the Apostle’s Creed, can recite it from memory today just as I’ve done since convocation class as a pre-teen. In a wonderful economy of words starting with “I believe,” the Creed summarizes the basic tenets of Christian faith inclusive of the entirely of Jesus’ biography, from birth to death to resurrection. While the resurrection is a triumph over death itself, there is something else unspoken yet wonderful. That not only did a son of God spend 33 years among us, knowing us at our best and worst, but even after all he’d seen, we were worth coming back for. Isn’t it amazing to find a message of absolute acceptance right in the middle of a faith so often abused in the name of intolerance?
I’m so glad we are all part of this flawed, beautiful, endlessly fascinating and always evolving human family.
Happy Easter.
