Last year was my first Pascha (Easter) in the Eastern Orthodox Church. If a mystery is best defined not as something we cannot know, but something that we know through participation, then there really aren’t words to precisely communicate my experience.
After many weeks of intentional fasting, prayer and repentance, I found myself sitting on the eve of Holy Friday in a sacred place - emotionally, spiritually, and physically - at the back of a candle lit Cathedral. On my lap was a little boy whose extended family often stood in our row, and who, without the loving care of a mother, began to cling to me during services. I thought my heart was as tender as could be as we approached this Great and Holy weekend, but as we rose to leave he looked up at me and pleaded, “No. I don’t want to leave. I just want to be with you. I just want to be with you.”
I stared back down at him, tears welling up in my eyes and I thought, “It’s not supposed to be this way!” I thought about raising my own beloved cousins who also never knew the tender loving care of a mother and my spirit cried out within me, “It’s not supposed to be this way!” I thought about all of the people I love who have suffered tremendously and tears streamed down my face for them. For me. For all of us.
On Holy Friday, as the crucified Christ was moved to the center of the Cathedral, I felt like an orphaned child, looking up at my lifeless Lord crying out, “I just want to be with you! I just want to be with you!”
As we participated in the unnailing of Christ from the Cross, laying him on the Bier adorned with flowers, I realized something stunning. I have been to many Easter Sundays throughout my life, and a handful of Holy Friday evenings remembering what happened more than two thousand years ago. But that’s all it was - a remembering. The beauty of this ancient tradition that has utterly claimed me, body and soul, is that we aren’t merely remembering a story. We are participating in a miraculous mystery. I was standing before Christ crucified right before my very eyes. I was present when they removed the nails and lowered him from the cross. And I wept alongside the Theotokos, the mother of God, as her son’s body was laid to rest. My heart exploded with the pain of motherless children and childless mothers. My heart broke for fatherless children and childless fathers. And something from the deepest part of me cried out, “Why God?! It’s not supposed to be this way!”
I let myself linger here for a bit. Holy Saturday - Christ crucified but not yet risen. So many people spend their entire lives living in this liminal place, the place in-between. A perpetual Holy Saturday.
But then, the next morning, the sun did what the sun does; it rose. Sometimes it’s the greatest gift. Sometimes an utter cruelty. Time marches on.
Whether you feel buoyed by the current of time or drowning in it, my prayer for all of us this Great and Holy weekend is that the mercy and grace of God would illuminate our being with the light of a perpetual Pascha. With the paradoxical joy of the already but not yet.
No, it’s not supposed to be like this. But let us carry on. We must. Let us accompany the women to Christ’s tomb.
Close your eyes. Do you see them?
The men in shining garments? Listen with your whole being and take heart, “Why do you seek the Living among the dead? He is not here, he is risen1!”
“I’m beginning to cellularly perceive why the Prophets weep, and why the Saints wear a veil of grief.
Standing in the back of a candle-lit Cathedral in the shadow of a holy eclipse is like standing under the weight of an eternal ellipsis.
Brackets in time holding the tension of the already but not yet as we linger in the liminal, life like a perpetual Holy Saturday, what is and what ought to be unbridgeable.
Christ crucified but not yet risen, and somehow also risen but not yet returned. We’re confused. How are all things redeemed, but not yet renewed?
His body twisted and torn like a question mark lifted into the sky, What does this mean? I cry!
“IT IS NOT supposed to be like this!” I scream silently from the pit opening up inside of me.
IT IS NOT supposed to be like this, humiliation and defeat on display. No, it is not supposed to be this way.
Like glaring sirens that keep getting closer and closer but never seem to arrive with the closure of
Hope. Like an asterisk, easily passed over, sitting at the bottom of the page or the end of the book.
So we look to the soft urgency of the flickering flames of faith, inverted exclamations of fire, raising our desperation and desire toward the Heavenlies.
Every day bulleted by the blunt edge of the bittersweet fate of the pain, guilt, death and tragedies that shape us.
Our prayers punctuated and carved out by rivers of grief, we continue to weep with the Poets and Prophets and Saints, until the candle burns down to the withering wick.
We cling to the ageless apostrophe, never whole by ourselves, enduring the eclipse of the passing passion.
We long for that final period when the shroud is removed and all is consumed and renewed by the light of a perpetual Pascha.”
Beautiful Nicole, I especially loved the realization that you wept alongside the Theotokos. I will be remembering this next Holy Week, thank you.
So beautiful -- and a gift to see it take this form after a year. Thank you for sharing it with us all!!!