Happy Easter

I hope you had an enjoyable Easter with family and friends. We had nice weather until the arrival of evening thunderstorms and tornado watches. All week we had very pleasant temperatures and has instilled the hope that spring has a solid foothold in the Midwest.

I feel like Easter caught me by surprise this year. I hardly felt prepared to celebrate such a sacred holiday. I ignored both the secular and religious aspects of Easter in this last week leading up to Easter Sunday. During Holy Week I realized that I had never listened to any of my favorite "Easter" music, Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar, or a song Dugger introduced me to, by U-2, earlier in the year called Until The End Of The World. It's a song that hints at the first person voice being Judas. It's very interesting song that I added to my Easter collection. I didn't attend any of the holy week masses or prayer service. I just let it all slip past me.

Now that our children are older we didn't have egg hunts and had a very subdued egg dyeing event. Mimi was the only one interested in dyeing eggs. I can't get my kids to dress up. What ever happened to Easter finery and bonnets?? In addition our church renovation is ongoing and we had mass in the school gym, so it was a quiet simple mass. This wasn't a bad thing, just different. Our priest had to work a little to get some excitement from the parishioners. I felt like it wasn't just me who's heart seemed solemn at Easter. This priest described the Easter meaning as "to follow", to follow Jesus. It made me think in particular of my cousin's wife who had left the hospital to go home to die from cancer. I wondered if she might follow Jesus on Easter Sunday and if her family was ready to let her go.

Our priest also likened our following of Jesus to being on a train that goes into a dark tunnel and not knowing what's on the other side. Now this priest is currently working on earning a doctorate in mathematics so when he mentioned the train I immediately thought of those old math problems. You know those problems where the train leaves the station at a certain miles per hour .... I couldn't resist turning to Doug and saying the priest lost me at the word train. I'm not doing any math in church.

I plan to more fully participate in Holy Week next year. I really missed that time of preparation this year. As I look to the future I'm also reminded of the past. Here is a "warm" memory of an Easter past.