Easter 2013

I had a minimalist Easter.  To an enthusiastic Christian that is possibly an oxymoron.  It pleased me well enough.  My Benedictine liturgies and offices remained shut.  I listened to none of the great music.  I would have been glad to read what Rowan Williams preached on Easter morning, but he is no longer at Canterbury and on the web.

On Sunday morning, early, on the Concert Programme, there was a sublime Bach cantata – but it had to yield to what my family expected to hear, the Sunday Easter hymns on the National Programme, sung by great choirs.  Switching over to that however, we found instead a sad relay from the Anglican cathedral at Waiapu, too embarrassing for words, totally disappointing.  So we switched it off. 

At 8 am I was at the Anglican church in Warkworth.  Oh dear… I had to rely on the fact that I was at the Eucharist, and that however mangled, all I sought was there, somewhere, in the ruins.  The elderly priest hashed his way through a perfectly simple liturgy.  The vicar preached about losing her keys and going from despair to joy when she found them. 

The woman who read the gospel lesson apparently believes she has a mission to show us all how it should be done.  She elocutes.  It is best described as former-times BBC English resuscitated and caricatured.  And she seemed to have arranged with the organist to bracket her reading with a screeching, painfully reverberating and totally inappropriate fanfare on the digital organ’s trumpets and cornopeans, before and after she performed the lesson. 

Chocolate easter bunnies were handed out at the door. 

Why is it that when I go to church I am obliged to sit there battling with myself?  For some reason, hanging on the altar rail on a long cord is a referee’s whistle.  I am not making this up.  Perhaps I should surreptitiously photograph  it.  I am informed that it is a fire precaution requirement.  On the altar rail…?  Is someone likely to be smoking there?  They do light candles, I guess.   Should I perhaps blow the whistle when I go up for communion?  Maybe everyone then would, by reflex, leave the building and gather at a designated point outside.  I might just resort to that next time I hear the liturgy read as though it is the report of a bad day at the Pukekohe stock sales. 

So Easter came and went, despite the church.  For me it was a time of peace and truth.  It is no longer a question of creeds and drama.  It is a presence, a matter of where you are living, in Easter or out of it.  For some reason I don’t understand, while others need to remember it and celebrate it and enact it, I don’t.