Were you there?

Once upon a time, I was at a service where one of the old Spirituals, I think it was "Were you there?" was played on the bells. I commented to my Dad, "that is so wrong!" For a song like that, you need altos and basses, slowly singing plaintively, "Were you there, when they nailed him to the tree? Sometimes, it makes me want to tremble, tremble, tremble. Were you there, when they nailed him to the tree?"

Easter, for me, is one of those holidays. Christmas I almost always spend with my parents, because in college we would get three weeks vacation, which allowed me the time to travel to whatever far flung destination they found themselves: Warsaw, Poland, or Rye, New York. Thanksgiving I generally spent with aunts and uncles. Easter, since it was just a Sunday holiday with maybe a day off on Friday or Monday, was usually celebrated wherever my mailing address happened to be. In my first two years of college, I was often invited to my friend Pam's house, to spend the day with her family. I remember one year, my junior year in college, it was my first year at W- College in Chestertown, MD, and after church, we went to lunch at the dining hall and that was it. Back to the books. I felt cheated. Here it is, a holiday more important than Christmas in the main scheme of things, and I am sitting in a dorm room, with the spectre of papers to write. My parents were in Rye, New York my senior year of college, so I think I made the trip to be with them. Or maybe not. I had changed churches and was a part of a 24 hour prayer vigil Thursday night at the Presbyterian church in town.

So where I spend Easter is very important to me. A few years ago, I became Catholic. Well, you become Catholic on Easter, at the Easter Vigil service, which starts at sunset. So I stayed in Pittsburgh that year. Last year was the first year I celebrated Easter with the Open Door, and I think my parents just understood that I wanted to be with my friends and my community for this special day. This year, I had Mother Daughter book club today (no one came, but it was on the calendar, so I had to show up) and it is the OD's first Easter at our new location at the Union Project.

For me, Easter is not just the eggs and the chicks, pink bunnies and chocolate. It is a time of real mourning, of real reverence. Lent is a time of contemplation. This year, I had a notebook that I started when Lent began. In the front, I copied out a quote from Soren Kierkegaard, "So now, with God's help, I shall become myself."

I am beginning to realize that being a part of a community is also a discipline. Going to services that don't feed where you are is a part of the suffering of Christ. Thursday's service was too happy for me. But it opened a wound that needed to be opened, and it gave me a chance to realize that I had been depending on my community to fulfill my inner needs. Needs that only Christ can fill. So I had my own tenebrae service, where I lit all the candles I own, and read Walter Wangerin's short story, "The Ragman" by candlelight, exstinguishing candles until the only light in the room was that of the Christmas lights that I have lit year round.

In the days of wine and roses, when I loved being at Bellefield, the pastor there had the heart of a poet. He played the saxophone, sometimes in the middle of a sermon. He was not great at some of the other things, and through a bunch of stuff I'll probably never understand, he was voted out. But he oversaw the best preparation for Easter that I ever attended, Thursday Tenebrae services. He would read "The Ragman," and members of the congregation would read passages from the Gospel story. After each passage was read, more lights would be extinguished. I remember twice, sitting there in the dark, at the end of the service, just crying. Tonight's service purports to be liturgical. I am in the throes of hormonal distress, having slept 16 hours yesterday and needing bland foods and ThermaCare hot pads. I'll go home from work, stop off at the Big Bird (Giant Eagle) and get some spuds for my famous potato salad for tomorrow's after church brunch. So I'll pray for the service to open my heart, but I'll pray for my heart to already be open. For my need to not be met in the sacraments, but in my own heart.

Part of the gist of the movie Lady Jane (which is now on the list of my top ten movies) is that in the Reformation, there are not seven sacraments but two. That a person can come to faith without the help of the church and priests and holy water. I know now that I need both: my community and my own heart, bleeding as it may be.

This entry goes all over the place, and I do not claim to offer any answers, only more questions. I am writing this on borrowed time (since no one showed up for Mother Daughter, I'm using *that* time to write this, and I need to get back to cataloguing DVDs) and I'm not going to edit. But I guess I'm trying to wrestle with this: how do we work out our faith, in fear and trembling, on our own, within a community. Christ was alone on the cross, and there will be times when we will be alone in our suffering. But he also gave us the Church, his Bride, so that we could live with each other.

So I offer this post up to you, and to the One I serve, poorly, and with a broken heart. May we each find the joy and pain that this Pascal season affords us.