My Favorite Easter
I had a quite lovely and troubling Easter yesterday.
Easter is one of my favorite days of the year, because I get to spend some quality time with my family of 26 years, as well as for the personal, spiritual significance of the day itself. However, in addition to the traditional pleasantries like Easter baskets and ham-feasts, I also experienced a pleasant amount of awkwardness and alienation, as I am wont to do.
My family is Catholic, and we went to the Easter vigil service, which some of you might know if the biggest hootenanny of the Catholic liturgical calendar. Traditionally, the service is 11 hours long, and marked by prayers in latin, a darkened church until midnight, and incense billowing like a fricking rubber fire. The modern church has whittled it down to 2-3 hours, filled with lots of unique music, along with adult baptisms, confirmations, communion, and lots of standing, sitting, kneeling, and squatting. Somebody apparently thought it would be a novel idea to have a woman do an interpretive dance while scripture was being read. This literally went on for over 15 minutes - a passage from the Bible, and this woman wearing more scarves than Stevie Nicks would spin, hop, and flop all over the place. This was all accompanied by the punishing sound of awkward silence. Occasionally, somebody might cough, or a child would begin softly crying from watching this unsettling spectacle, but for the most part, the entire congregation merely averted their eyes and stared at their programs hoping for it to all be over soon. I, of course, while also feeling distinctly uncomfortable, was softly laughing to myself (my dad saw me and also began laughing). I have never seen anything so unbelievably pointless and embarassing to all involved. It was literally worse than the Rodney King riots.
This experience, coupled with the fun of coloring Easter eggs with my siblings (decorating eggs with such messages as, “Happy Easter/NCAA Tournament!”, and “Don’t Drink and Drive”), made for a wonderful holiday weekend. By the time we had finished feasting on swine-flesh, the whole family was feeling plump and pleasant. We spent the rest of day resting, relaxing, and watching holiday television programming reminding us of the reason for the season (most notably a Passion of the Christ-like scene where the Easter bunny was flogged for 27 minutes).
Categories:
March 28th, 2005 at 11:16 am
Interpretive dance?
While celebrating the resurrection of Christ watching the Timberwolves dance team (and watching the basketball game inserted between dance routines) they treated us to Native American dancing during the halftime show. Apparently, as well as being Easter, it was Native American Appreciation Day.
March 28th, 2005 at 12:05 pm
What channel was the flogging on? I can’t believe I missed it!!!!
March 28th, 2005 at 12:15 pm
Fox…it’s going to be cancelled after one more episode and released on DVD later this year. So you have not missed an opportunity to see it forever.
March 28th, 2005 at 12:22 pm
:snort:
March 28th, 2005 at 1:04 pm
On Easter Sunday, God took the form of Michigan State’s Shannon Brown, who torched the Wildcats for 24 pts. on 8-10 shooting… His torried second half energized the Spartans, who advance to their fourth final four in eight years.
March 28th, 2005 at 1:07 pm
Hosanna in the highest!
March 28th, 2005 at 1:14 pm
Mmmm, swine-flesh. :drool:
March 28th, 2005 at 4:14 pm
I wasn’t “interpretive dancing”. I just had communion 47 times Easter morning and just let the Spirit move me. I had no idea people were watching….
March 28th, 2005 at 6:49 pm
When exactly does interpretive dancing work?
(I just need to know)
March 28th, 2005 at 6:55 pm
Ah Easter liturgy… 3 hours of pure entertainment… yeah… in our Byzantine Catholic church we have the.. privelage of hearing the gospel in not one, not two, but three different languages: English, Greek, and old Slavonic… and what’s more is that in our rite there is no kneeling in the easter season, so for the bulk of the liturgy we were standing. The old babas always look like they’re about to pass out… Fun stuff it is! Hey, but at least the swine flesh is always great, eh?
March 28th, 2005 at 8:39 pm
oh man, i remember going to the easter vigil with my family. my dad’s still a big fan of vigil masses, and one year forgot about the big shindig easter vigil. i still can’t believe we made it out of there. it went on forever! its too bad there were no interpretive dancers, but there was some laughing.
March 29th, 2005 at 11:44 am
I’m glad that not a day goes by without some sort of awkwardness… it would have been quite a disappointment for me if it had.
Tell us more about this easter bunny flogging…
March 29th, 2005 at 5:03 pm
I too would like to hear more about this Easter Bunny scene. Perhaps there’s a Rock TV in there? Huh? Huh? Ya think? Huh?
March 29th, 2005 at 5:46 pm
Will this Rock TV be titled: “The Passion of The Easter Bunny”?
I can see the resuurection scene going something like the bunny using his divine powers to turn all non-believers to chocolate, leaving them vulnerable to the world to be devoured.
Maybe I shouldn’t have eaten all those chocolate bunnies….
March 29th, 2005 at 9:14 pm
The movie ends with the Easter Bunny dying for the sins of the world and then being made into a tasty stew.
March 30th, 2005 at 1:08 am
Instead of Icon productions, the whole deal could be produced by Cadbury…