Dining with Squirrels

Happy Easter everybody.

It’s been a strange, un-Easterly day here.  Karl stayed home from church, sick as the guy in the Alka-Seltzer cold commercial with the giant, red, cartoon nose, snuffling and blowing and sneezing wall-shaking sneezes.  I asked Ben to please put on clean clothes for church, “not the ones you wore yesterday, which you wore to bed last night, which you are now wearing.  Not ratty shorts, not a scrubby t-shirt with words on it.”   Somehow, he managed to comply with all these strictures while still looking mismatched and resolutely casual, like he had been lounging naked and threw on the nearest thing to go answer the door.   Because I was busy putting together a fruit platter for the all-church brunch [and okay fine, making one more latte for the road], we were late for our church’s Easter processional, where congregants process in with plants and flowers brought from home to dress the altar.  Ben and Lucy had to put their foil-wrapped pots on a side table in the fellowship hall and skulk into the back of church with me.  The service was lovely, but I couldn’t recount the sermon for Karl when we got home and neither Ben nor I had our favorite song to sing.  Lucy and I finally started an Easter craft that I had been promising for the last 5 days.  It was not a transcendent mother-daughter moment, more of a let’s-do-this-now-because-tomorrow-I’ll-really-feel-like-crap-if-we-don’t moment. Now Karl is watching tv [at my encouragement — isn’t that what I have the kids do when they’re flopping about, too sick to play?] and Ben and Lucy are playing with neighbor kids who have been released from their family gatherings.  This Easter has felt weirdly off, like we just didn’t have our Easter mojo.

Maybe your day has not been like this.  We have friends who are in Spain right now, celebrating Mass at the Cathedral of Granada.  La dee dah.  Maybe you’re lying on the floor, recovering from a giant ham dinner at Grama’s.  Perhaps your children all wore color-coordinated outfits to church today. Or maybe you were all alone, doing your laundry or in your car all day or eating ham dinner with people you really cannot pretend to like.

But however your Easter has been, you and I — if we are celebrating — are celebrating the same thing:  Jesus lived as us, with us.  He died.  He rose.  He did it for us.  It’s a mind-blower.  I feel a little kooky just writing it.

I just re-read this incredible book called Take This Bread by Sara Miles.  Her experience of faith and communion is so gritty and unexpected and full of desire and frustration –  I just love it.  She’s coming to the Festival of Faith and Writing here at Calvin College in a few weeks and I will stalk her.  In a midwestern, polite sort of way.  Anyway, of the 30 or so pages I flagged on this second reading, here’s one that’s caught my eye again today:

“It was so very tempting to try to turn Gospel into law, I thought; Wisdom into knowledge.  But there was Jesus, the Word made flesh.  There he was, over and over sweeping away his followers’ attempts to codify and regulate their experiences of the divine.  He’d spit in men’s eyes and stick his fingers in their ears, touch unclean women and corpses, yell at religious authorities, and impatiently demand that people drop their churchgoing and give the poor everything they owned.  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said.  ‘It’s me.  Come on, let’s go.'”

And it’s so tempting for me to think we haven’t celebrated Easter because I didn’t really listen to the sermon and ate leftovers for lunch.  Standing up.  But I think Jesus would say “Hey, guess what?  I died anyway!  I rose anyhow!! The way you celebrate it doesn’t matter.  You’re not making it happen.  I made it happen; it’s done.  You’re welcome.”

It’s like the magnolia tree is our front yard.  We don’t do a thing for it, and most of the year it provides lovely, but unassuming shade.  However, this weekend the khaki-colored nubs on every branch suddenly, without fanfare or warning, sprouted pink.  In two days, that tree is going to be a glory.  Cars will slow down to look at it, photos will be taken, my friend Michele will come by to visit it.  It just happens every single year, without our help.

Now Karl is taking another nap.  Ben is on the floor of his condemned room, eating jelly beans topless and listening to Harry Potter for the 18th time.  Lucy has her new jump rope tied around her waist and is engaged in a game with a gang of neighborhood children that looks something like Horses Playing With Contents of Recycling Bin. And I am contemplating this next year, wondering about where He will have me go.