Writing on the Monday after Easter, I am already reliving in memory the religious and family-centered pleasures attendant upon the festival in our household. While one size does not fit all, there remain some cultural habits of such long duration and of sufficient current vitality as to provide for most of us a template for the continuity of the human species. The basic unit of human society has mainly been the family, and the family has mainly been the product of the sexual union of a man and a woman. Family life, though it reveals an extraordinary variety of forms throughout the human community, generally shares certain common practices. Important among these are communal gatherings of some implicit or explicit solemnity involving the consumption of shared food, conversation, and other common social pleasures.
One is unlikely to think about matters in this schematic way. Mostly we live life rather than ponder over or anthropologize about it. But there are occasions, such as when you find yourself sitting alone and in the dark in the chancel of a vast Gothic church at five in the morning, when the thoughts might come. That is the situation in which I found myself, briefly, on Easter morning. It all started long ago and with a single short word in the medieval Latin Bible: mane, meaning “early morning”. The women went looking for the body of Jesus early in the morning two days after the Crucifixion. My own story happened like this.
For the last few days we had been enjoying a visit of one half of the family we call the Montrealers—our younger son Luke, daughter-in-law Melanie, and grandkids John Henry and Hazel. As simple folk, we call this family the Montrealers because they live in, duh, Montreal. We also have New Yorkers and Brooklynites. Naturally we see the Montrealers less frequently than the New Yorkers and Brooklynites. And on this occasion only Luke and Hazel were able to come. Melanie and John Henry had other Easter obligations of their own in Canada. You know the old adage about absence making the heart grow fonder. But there is a trade-off. There is always some pain in having to say goodbye to loved ones infrequently seen. So I felt a little sniffly as their Dodge van disappeared from out driveway earlier in the day.
But they had been with us for the whole of the triduum, which is the churchy name for the extended period of the Easter weekend, including Good Friday, a period that includes several interesting ancient rites and services. The spiritual themes of the weekend obviously accord with the sense of renewal and rebirth visibly present in spring in the northern hemisphere and widely marked by many pre-Christian or simply non-Christian groups. Many things about Easter are syncretic, revealing pre-Christian parallels in other religions. The very word Easter is probably pre-Christian. Rites of Spring must be universal. Winters are tough; and in earlier periods of history they were much tougher, at least for the vast majority of the population. I began my teaching career in Madison, Wisconsin. The winters seemed endless. When the ice finally began breaking up on Lake Mendota it did so with loud cracking sounds. Madison, which seemed to me at the time so far north, must actually be roughly along the latitudinal line of Brittany in France.
Almost everything about Easter is syncretic—meaning that in its history, its etymology, and even to a degree in its spiritual interpretation it brings together several different poetic and theological traditions. That spiritual interpretation itself has evolved. But as the festival observance of the stupendous claim at the heart of Christianity—that Jesus, a male human being, after being horribly executed and his dead body buried, a couple of days later, by eye-witness testimony from many alleged witnesses, reappeared as a living man--is of very ancient origin. The Resurrection has always been for Christians the essential and necessary fact of human history. So revolutionary and extravagant a belief so long held by untold millions for many long centuries formative of our civilization and so widely examined in their art and philosophy is not to be easily abandoned. It encapsulates in historical narrative an attractive solution to the most tragic reality of human life, which is human death.
But enough about the Meaning of it All, and back to my sitting in the dark. By heroic effort Luke, Hazel, Joan and I all made it to the Episcopal Great Vigil Eucharist which begins at 5am in the Princeton University Chapel and runs for about two hours. This is a fabulous service which takes place in the large chancel of a cathedral-sized building. It begins with the congregation making a solemn procession, two by two, with studied pauses proclaiming the coming of the “Light of Christ”, down what seems like an endless nave in semi-darkness, the only light being supplied by small candles, one for each marcher. You then climb four or five stairs to the level of the banked choir stalls. My mobility is poor in bright daylight. In the dimmest of dim religious lights it could be catastrophic. So Luke offered to take me in and settle me in the top rank of the choir stalls on the gospel side. I would have to sit in the dark and wait while he and all the others gathered on the outside of the building’s massive oak front doors for the “lighting of the new fire”, in itself an impressive liturgical event. They would then join me in my perch high in the stalls. That meant that for perhaps ten minutes I was sitting alone in a building with a seating capacity of nearly two thousand. It was not absolutely pitch-dark, but until the slowly advancing Light of Christ approached, plenty dark enough to encourage some serious solemn thought. It was an experience I never anticipated but one I shall not soon forget.
All major human institutions, I suppose, are likely to present interesting patterns of change within continuity. But to participate in a very lengthy liturgy that is in effect a textual recapitulation of thousands of year of Jewish and Christian history while sitting alongside two other generations of one’s own history, a mere blink of the eye in our species’ existence, offers a special kind of experience, contemplative subject matter of universal utility but with a special relevance for the aged and the infirm. Why seek the living among the dead?
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