[SB] Sabbath Blessiing

[Molly Wolf]

Illusions

Maybe where you are, Easter is what all the dear old hymns sing about: a 
time of rebirth, of flowering, of spring. But not in Eastern Ontario. (Nor, 
of course, in the southern hemisphere, something we tend to forget about.) 
Where I live, Easter is a tricky business.  We're as apt to have a white 
Easter as a white Christmas; in fact, this year, Christmas was the balmier 
of the two.

This is because Easter invariably falls in Spring Mud Season, an unsettled 
and unsettling period between Real Winter (ends, roughly, mid-March) and 
Spring (early May, if we're lucky). Technically, that's six or seven weeks. 
Personally, it feels endless. Spring Mud Season demonstrates the true 
elasticity of time, which, at this season, stretches out and sags limply 
like Silly Putty. This is because, quite frankly, we have all HAD IT with 
rotten weather.

Moreover, while Fall Mud Season has its quiet beauty, all Spring Mud Season 
reveals is what everybody's left lying around the landscape over the course 
of the winter -- litter and dog droppings, mostly. And because the lake and 
the air are doing little temperature dances around each other, it is 
cuttingly damp -- not a nice, soft, blurry mist, or real fog (which I quiet 
enjoy), but a steely ongoing mizzle that seems to sap the very warmth from 
your bones. Bleagh.

It's really easy to do Lent in Spring Mud Season. Easter's a little trickier.

Easter is sometimes tricky in other respects: when, for example, its the 
anniversary of someone's death or a time of emotional difficulty. I'm 
sitting with a friend who is in considerable physical debility and pain, 
and it's hard to figure out how to deal with that, especially when you 
don't know when you'll be better and you deeply fear that you're only going 
to get worse. My heart is sitting with a friend who is sitting with her 
husband, who is on his way into the Life to Come, though nobody knows when. 
There are times when it feels a little as though Easter has left us behind, 
or maybe bypassed us altogether -- that we're still fasting, still out 
there in the wilderness.

It's like that living as Christians in a world of so much hurting and 
violence, a world in which children eat garbage and snort gasoline fumes to 
dull their emotional pain, a world in which people deliberately and with 
malice aforethought kill and maim other people. And that's not to mention 
climate change and tectonic plates, AIDS and cancers. Christ died and rose 
again to take away the sin of the world, but sometimes it's hard to believe 
that it really worked.

It's hard to rejoice when you're hurting. Rejoicing when we live in a 
hurting world sometimes feels like we're just slapping it in the face.

But Easter it is, and we have taken all the "Hallelujahs" out of hiding and 
rung the bells and blown the whistles. Because even when we don't feel 
Easterish, we are still an Easter people.

This clonked me sharply on Good Friday, during the procession of the Cross; 
a group of a hundred and some walked a largish wooden cross from church to 
church, hearing the Passion read out and singing "Were you there when they 
crucified my Lord?" The group wasn't especially sombre: it was friendly, a 
little subdued. Normally, this would make me cranky (aren't we supposed to 
be keeping Jesus company in his agony?) but this year, it didn't. Because 
this year, I realized that we no longer have Good Friday without Easter, 
and because of Easter, we can never see Good Friday in the same way again.

It's rather like losing an illusion. Once you've been disillusioned about 
someone or something, you can never be blissfully illusioned again; that 
possibility has ended. Only in Easter, the process moves differently: not 
from bliss through pain to acceptance, but goes from pain through 
acceptance to bliss. The illusion we've lost is the illusion that the 
darkness will triumph, or even just hang in there indefinitely. We've been 
disillusioned about the primacy of death. Instead, we have the assurance -- 
no illusion, we trust and believe -- that God's purpose for us will be 
fulfilled. And that purpose is our flourishing, our becoming all that God 
calls us to be.

Not that the process is always fun or easy; it was not fun or easy to Jesus 
to make his way through his final days to the Resurrection. But he did it 
for us, and God gave love the victory. That's what we know as an Easter people.

Okay, it's Spring Mud Season, and we're due for snow tomorrow, I've been 
told. But it's also past the midst of April; any snow we get will be gone 
by the end of the week, and this will likely be the last of the winter. The 
sky and the lake may be steel-grey, but the tulips are well out and I've 
seen snowdrops and even the occasional crocus. The trees are still bare, 
but if you think to look, you see the slight laciness of growing leaf buds. 
A week or two more, and we'll have lawns blue with tiny flowering scillias. 
The geese are back, and the songbirds, and I heard a mourning dove's sweet 
cry this morning.

Winter's an illusion now. All we need is to sit tight and trust, and act on 
the basis of that trust, and spring's inevitable, however otherwise it 
seems for this moment.

(for Kathy, with love)