Dear Friends,
It seems like just yesterday that I was writing to you about Christmas and about the depth, the richness of our hymn “Silent Night.”
We just observed Palm Sunday, and were listening, at the beginning of Holy Week, to the story of Our Lord’s suffering and death.
“M-o-o-o-m! There’s a hole in my sock!”
It was Sunday morning, 20 minutes before Mass, and our household was a-flutter with our four children scurrying about donning church clothes, brushing teeth, and fixing hair.
My eight-year-old son was in his room, half-dressed, with a sock on one foot and disdainfully holding up the matching holey one. “I can’t wear this holey sock to church!” he cried.
Every Lent — thanks to an idea I found years ago on a Catholic blog listed below — we set up a crown of thorns in our living room. It’s just a small brown vine wreath covered with toothpicks, but it has a very specific purpose.
Each time one of my children performs a small sacrifice, or does something nice for someone else, he or she gets to pull a thorn from the crown of thorns.
One by one, the number of thorns dwindles, leaving the vine wreath bare. On Easter morning, the crown of thorns, now void of toothpicks, is covered with beautiful flowers, a symbol of how God took away our hurtful sins and replaced them with beauty of eternal life.
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The Resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the be-all and the end-all of the Christian faith. If Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, all bishops, priests, and Christian ministers should go home and get honest jobs, and all the Christian faithful should leave their churches immediately.
As Paul himself put it: “If Jesus is not raised from the dead, our preaching is in vain and we are the most pitiable of men.” It’s no good, of course, trying to explain the Resurrection away or rationalize it as a myth, a symbol, or an inner subjective experience. None of that does justice to the novelty and sheer strangeness of the Biblical message.
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Excavating my desk recently, I found the program notes from a Tallis Scholars concert my wife and I had attended a few months ago.
The Tallis Scholars are a marvelous a capella ensemble, but most of their music that night was rather too minimalist for my tastes. In any event, the author of the program notes described Arvo Pärt’s I am the true vine and its “qualities of stasis and timelessness,” as reminiscent of what “former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has described as ‘silently waiting on the truth, pure sitting and breathing in the presence of the question mark’.”
Which put me in mind of an old joke that used to circulate in the editorial offices of First Things. Harvard University’s crest, it seems, used to read Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae [Truth for Christ and the Church].
Christ and the Church were jettisoned over a hundred years ago; the crest now reads, simply, Veritas.
Over Easter weekend, I watched the 2014 movie Exodus: Gods and Kings, which tells the epic story of Moses and his flight from Egypt to the promised land.
This Ridley Scott film seems to be based fairly accurately on Scripture. After seeing the movie, I did need to do some research into the actual biblical passages to find out who was who. My knowledge of the Old Testament is limited, I discovered.
I was not aware that Moses was married (his wife’s name is Zipporah) and he had one or two sons. He actually lived as a shepherd for many years before God appeared to him out of a burning bush and told him to lead the Hebrews out of Egypt.
Greta Weissman, a […]
Most of us have some sense of the Church’s liturgical year. The priest wears purple during Advent, the sanctuary is filled with poinsettias during the Christmas season (and beyond), and our parishes add extra hours for the Sacrament of Penance during Lent. The life of the Church is ordered around the rhythm of the liturgical year.
Unfortunately, most people’s lives are ordered around a different calendar. School starts every fall, December is packed with too many things to do, travel plans are made when the kids are on spring break, etc.
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Just a few weeks before the most significant Christian holy day of the year, British Prime Minister David Cameron, speaking on an evangelical radio program, articulated what, for him, is the meaning of Easter.
He explained that the central message of Easter is “kindness, compassion, hard work, and responsibility.” I’m for all of those virtues, but so, I would venture to guess, is any decent person from any background, religious or non-religious. Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, fair-minded agnostics, and atheists would all subscribe to that rather abstract and harmless description of the significance of Easter.
In a sense, we shouldn’t blame the prime minister for his characterization, for the Christian Churches in general, but especially the Anglican Church, have not distinguished themselves for the crispness of their doctrinal formulations.
But if that’s all Easter is about, not to put too fine a point on it, the jig is up.
