Pascha redux...

We're still experiencing the effects of "pascha fatigue" up here as Bright Week continues with a good dose of April snow and gray skies. It's a quiet kind of tiredness that reaches out and grabs you when you least expect it. Your memory just isn't as sharp, the world seems different, you still want to sleep even when you're at work.

Pascha is always a busy time but at a small parish it can be thoroughly hectic. A small group of people really have to put themselves out to make it all work and a liturgical cycle rooted in a time when time itself was marked in a different rhythm often stands in sharp contrast to the present. Our little church, of course, was full with old friends, those who are Orthodox for this week only, and family. We live the reality of St. John's Paschal Homily that some will come even at the 11th hour, but all are welcome at the feast and will continue to be welcome. Such is the mercy of God and those who wish to complain would do well to be reminded that this mercy is for them as well. We never know if we ourselves will wander and one day need that 11th hour mercy so we dare not begrudge it to others.

I had pictures taken of it all and I hope to post some here and some on our parish web site. We made the local paper as well, the colorful nature of Orthodox faith always makes for a great front page photo. We've by and large resisted the urge to turn our churches into large and faceless corporate style "worship centers" and so there is still something to look at besides a jumbo-tron when you visit. The picture was actually of me lighting candles at the bier on Great and Holy Friday but lest I get too proud the story directly underneath the caption was about the need for more child porn enforcement, so there you have it.

One of the things Pascha always brings out is the closet Orthodox in the LaCrosse area. There appear to be little pockets of Orthodox hidden all around the area and if all of them showed up on a regular basis we'd have quite a parish. I encountered a Serbian man who walked in our door and stated he lived in Sparta which is just about a half hour away but normally traveled all the way to Milwaukee for services, a trip of nearly four hours! We also have Bulgarian and Russian immigrants in the area that come out for Pascha alone but never seem to make it back for anything else. I sometimes ask myself, "What haven't we done, or what could we do to give these people a home for more than a few hours on one night of the year?" This good man, tall and sturdy like many Serbs, was genuinely unaware there were Christians of Arabic descent or that we long ago have become, despite our name, a very muti-ethnic Orthodox home, in fact most of the major Orthodox bodies have been that way for years as well. Alas our work at just being Orthodox without hyphens attached still has a ways to go.

And of course there were glitches in the service. That always happens. For some reason we've scheduled perhaps the most complex service of a liturgically complex faith at that hour of the night and morning when we are most tired. I don't remember the details but I know I missed my lines, as it were' a few times and once inadvertently bounced the censer off the altar. But what can we do? Can anyone go through a three to four hour service with utter perfection? The humanity of the time is just part of it all.

But beyond the fatigue I hope the people there were reminded of a great truth. We believe Christ's resurrection wasn't a metaphor, a vision, a dream, or a myth that somehow describes the rebirth of the Apostle's hope. We believe a very live being, a unique hybrid of God and human, actually died, was actually buried, and actually returned to life again of his own power. We know the early Christian movement preached this and could have been stopped in its tracks but just producing a rotting corpse or one soldier on site that night who could identify the people who overwhelmed them and took the remains. They could not, and because of it all of reality has to rearrange itself around this event. If Christ died and then came back to life again nothing can be the same, ever, and everything about our lives must be different no matter how difficult that may be to accomplish. And the hope that would emerge from that would change the universe. No matter how beautiful the service if people miss that they might as well have just stayed at home. But I hope they got it because it means everything, it really does.