On my post for March 2nd I wrote about Rob, the husband of my coworker Lili. He is in the Navy and was in Afghanistan in late February when he came down with some kind of massive infection. He was pretty critical for a while and we weren’t sure there would be a happy ending. The combination of hard work, the dedication of many people, and the prayers of many more, Rob is now home. Yesterday Rob dropped by our team meeting; there are no words to describe how good it was to see him. Lili also gave me a magnet and a bumper sticker she picked up at Union Station in Washington DC that said this:

• Tank of Gas: $100
• Prescription Refill: $500
• Cost of the War in Iraq: $300,000,000,000
• New President in 2009: PRICELESS

Welcome home Rob. We’re still praying for you.

I’m writing this on the evening of Easter Sunday. We celebrated Easter at church last night; the mass began at 10PM and ended this morning a little before 1AM. This Lent has been difficult for me in that I haven’t been able to get a handle on it. At the beginning of the mass as I watched the lighting of the fire I realized that perhaps that was the point. We see Lent through the eyes of Jesus and the 40 days he spent in the desert before his entry into Jerusalem; during that time he was presented with certain temptations (presumably including the temptation to forget the whole thing and fade into obscurity). In a sense to try to “do Lent” is to miss the point. The inability to control my experience of Lent became for me exactly the desert experience it was supposed to be.

The most poignant part of the mass for me was the beginning. The Easter fire was lit at 10PM and the image of light out of darkness was clear. As I watched the fire I thought that the mystery of Easter is …. well, a mystery. OK, I know that sounds like a horrible cliché but we (I) spend so much time trying to understand what is simply to be believed in all of its shrouding. Jesus died, rose from the dead, and has promised that same resurrection for us all. I don’t know what that means, and I work in a profession where I can’t count the number of people I’ve seen die. I believe what I believe not because it makes sense, but because it doesn’t make sense. More later…

A few days ago I wrote about some of my unease over Easter both in its meaning and how it is celebrated. I’ve been thinking more about this. Certainly a large part of this is unease over how it is celebrated. I’ve never been a big fan of the “more is better” school of liturgy; our Easter Vigil celebration this year begins Saturday night at 10PM and will almost certainly last until the wee hours of Sunday morning. Typically parishes pick only the best readers to read, the choir sings the most complex and difficult music, and nearly everything gets thrown into the mix. Also, everyone who has been journeying to join the Catholic Church (through a process called the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults, or RCIA) is welcomed into the church that evening. We are blessed, as always, with a large group.

But that said, where does an empty tomb on a quiet morning with a few grieving friends fit? Certainly we celebrate an empty tomb only because it lacks what it was supposed to contain: the body of Jesus. But how did we go from that nothingness to this celebration of everything-ness? Can we find a way to celebrate the stillness of that morning? Is there away to allow the quiet to speak for itself? Unfortunately that quiet has been much of the penitential nature of Lent, the season that is closing.

In fairness I see the burst of excitement and energy that comes with the recognition that even death could not defeat Jesus, and that our worst fear has turned into our greatest joy. Perhaps Easter would be easier for me if I saw that the day after Easter wasn’t much the same as the day before. Jesus preached that he would rise from the dead and give eternal life to everyone but he also preached a Kingdom where the hungry would be fed and the enslaved would be freed. I wish I saw more of that. A few days ago on Andrew Sullivan’s blog a reader wrote in to talk about how upsetting it was to listen to the account of the Passion knowing that we continue the torture of “enemy combatants” in the same way that Jesus was tortured. That puts us on the same plane as the Roman soldiers. Well, enough for now.

Yesterday was Palm Sunday and the beginning of Holy Week. Most of us have images of how the events of Holy Week looked and don’t really think about where these images come from. The sermon we heard last night was really good in challenging this. On Palm Sunday we read the account of the passion and this year we read the account from the Gospel of Luke. All four gospels recount the passion but have different details (Luke’s gospel does not say anything about Judas regretting his actions, Jesus being flogged, or crowned with throns). There are scores of movies about the passion and most of them cobble together details from all the accounts and those are the images we carry. A few years ago Mel Gibson produced The Passion of the Christ which he claimed was how those events really happened. It’s worth noting that he included Veronica wiping the face of Jesus as he was carrying his cross which is nowhere in the Bible.

I have to confess a certain unease when it comes to Easter. Part of my unease comes from the elaborate liturgies we celebrate; Easter Vigil on Saturday night will normally go over 2 hours and this week has more RSI (rehearsals per square inch) than any other time of the year. I sometimes describe myself as a closet Quaker when it comes to these celebrations (less is more); I’m grateful that I don’t have to participate in the planning of these things. In addition to that there’s a paradox to Easter: we celebrate the empty tomb. After Jesus was crucified his followers came to his tomb and expected to find his body but found instead….nothing. Jesus made a few appearances and promised that we would all be raised from the dead, and that he would return someday. Over 2000 years later we continue to believe in the ressurection and await Jesus’ return and don’t fully understand it. But, as Fr. Dominic told us yesterday, since we don’t fully understand this, we continue to tell the story.