A Tale of Two Easters

The last time I set foot inside a church was a year ago today, Easter Sunday.

I had promised myself that the next time I stepped into a church it would be to hear a woman preach. It had been almost a year since the time before that, back in the Time Before Everything. So as Easter approached I decided it was time. I considered several different churches, chose one that seemed free of baggage I had left my own brand of Christianity for and geared up for the return.

My reaction was unexpected. I sat in the unfamiliar pew, and listened to the familiar songs. Sitting alongside squirmy children, passing down crayons and coloring pages, standing and sitting and singing songs that had muscle memory into my earliest childhood. And suddenly I was sobbing. Not just tight throat, silent tears, but gut wrenching audible sobs in the middle of the Easter service. I clamped my hand over my mouth to try and stifle the sobs, but I couldn't stop crying. I’d settle myself and then another familiar song would play and they would start again.

I cried for a lot of reasons that Sunday, some I understood and some I didn’t. I cried because I thought perhaps it would feel like home, but instead it was like returning to your childhood bedroom and finding that the ceiling and the walls have shrunk. Like opening that closet and attempting to dress yourself in the tiny sweaters and jackets you loved as a child but not even being able to get them past your elbow. Even when I tried to patch the holes and stretch the fabric, I couldn’t stretch them far enough to cover the new me. I had to face the fact that I'd outgrown them, even the ones I loved. Even the ones that didn’t pinch and chafe and stifle and bind me, even the ones that were comforting, and soft and warm.

I cried because while the voice in my head had been silent for a long time, I noticed that silence sitting in the pew. The dialogue that had continued for all of my living memory between me and God, the Jesus in my heart, my bestie the Supreme Ruler of the Universe and ultimate authority for my life had ceased. A few vestigial prayers when I couldn't find my keys would slip out from time to time, but the place where the voice had been felt empty and the echoes were suddenly deafening. “All those years,” I thought, “I was talking to myself.”

I realized as I sat there, the people around me were not my people. Even though they would have accepted me as I was, about to be divorced, unsure of my beliefs. Even though they wouldn’t have limited my leadership because of my gender or expected me to follow the unwritten code of conservative political allegiance. This wasn’t home and not because it was a new church with strange faces.

Christianity itself felt unfamiliar. It was as though I was suddenly looking from the outside at a new religion and all I could think was “how odd.” I remembered the lyrics from a Christmas song “This is such a strange way to save the world.” The song was talking about the stable in Bethlehem, but I found myself thinking the same thing about the bloody pageantry of Easter. I remembered being a child forcing myself not to shut my eyes during movies depicting torture, to listen to description of flesh ripping, the naked humiliation, asphyxiation and death. And while I listened I told myself over and over “This was for me. This was because of me, I did this.” I always imagined myself in the screaming crowd or as one of the soldiers hammering the spike into the holy palm.

Now, suddenly I was looking from the outside and the blood and the gore and the guilt seemed so strange and archaic. It reminded me of how I’d felt touring a temple when I was on a mission trip as a teenager. I had a level of reverence for someone else's sacred space, but it felt like stepping back to an ancient time of gods and goddesses, deities who had animal forms and half human children. Now I was seeing the biblical stories with new eyes, talking snakes, aquatic destruction, virgin consorts. Now even the word “sacrifice” which had slipped easily past my lips a thousand times left a coppery taste in my mouth. Blood atonement really is a very strange way to save the world.

So I cried. I sobbed for the strangeness of it all, for the silence in my head, for the loss of so many years spent in a dream. And I left that church knowing I was Not a Christian. Like the women who wrapped the body, perfumed it and lovingly placed it in a grave I grieved it and laid it to rest.

Today I reflected on that Sunday and the year between these Easters.

In that year, I didn’t go on a quest looking for a new religion, I didn’t study frantically looking for answers to take the place of my old shattered certainties. But I did listen. First I listened to other voices that resonated deeply in my soul. I read and I listened and I talked my thoughts out to any willing ear. I explored with curiosity and wonder and amazement.

My uncertainty about the After somehow brought the Now into clearer brighter focus. The smell of new grass, or warm earth or woodsmoke. A belly laugh or a good cleansing cry, the taste of food, the crackle of a fire and the warmth of a good wine buzz. Because there was no Meaning all these things became meaningful. My soul and spirit had been working full time on the Very Important Eternal things for my entire life and they had burned right out. So I gave them some time off. I didn’t know at the time whether the sabbatical was temporary or permanent. But I knew I needed to stare into the void and make peace with nothingness. Perhaps nothingness was all there was in the After and I needed to be ok with that. Knowing it was likely that the here and now was all we get made the here and now exquisitely precious and sweet. I spent some time savoring the drops on my tongue.

Slowly some things began to happen. First I began to inhabit my body. Where before I had often described my relationship to my body as a soul wearing a flesh suit, I now felt an integration. I WAS my body. All of my cells were me, my soul was woven into the whirls on my fingertips and my eyelashes and the wrinkles on my knees.

The next thing to happen was my shame began to slough off like dead skin after a good exfoliation. The idea that my very nature and the core of my being was wicked, prone to selfishness and not to be trusted was deeply ingrained. But as I let those external beliefs loosen and fall away I began to see a new self peeking out like fresh pink skin. This self was there all along of course, whispering to me as a child that “maybe I wasn’t horrible and wicked, maybe I didn’t deserve eternal torture for sins I’d comitted as an 8 year old child, or sins committed for me in a primordial garden in an ancient story about forbidden fruit.”

This self needed a little coaxing, she had been pushed down and silenced, called all kinds of names like rebellion and pride, compared to the talking snake and the wicked queen in the stories. She’d been speaking for a while, telling me to let go of the responsibility for all the souls except my own. Telling me to put down the cross of gratitude for a rescue I hadn’t asked for, that I couldn’t be bought with a price because I wasn’t something to be sold. I belonged to myself and the responsibility for my own growth and health and peace were mine and mine alone.

So I began to listen. I had to listen hard at first. I had to sift through the other voices that sounded like Her but weren’t Her. I discovered that the more I loved my body the easier it was to hear her. She lived in my gut and heart and my skin. She lived in the places I could never ever talk about and she shouted her joy when I found them and discovered they were good and holy places too.

I listened and I learned and sometimes I was wrong. Sometimes I thought I heard her when I didn’t. I learned that while she lived in my body and she shared my emotions and my thoughts, she wasn’t my instincts, impusles, my emotions or my intellect. She was levels deeper than that. And she beckoned me to go farther in and farther up. To a quiet place, the inner I of the storm. In this place there was compassion and curiosity and courage and clarity.

She wasn’t a nothing, a no-self, but She was underneath the turmoil and the passion and the pain. And as I listened She told me another secret. A secret so beautiful and profound that as soon as I heard it I’d always known it. She told me that she was me and she was more than me. She told me she was Everything and so was I. She helped me feel those gossamer threads that connected me to the tiny pinpricks of light scurrying in my garden and to the vast celestial bodies rocketing through space. I felt the roots tangling down, grounding me into the earth and the waves of light wash up and out to the ocean of blackness above. I felt the ebb and flow and it was good. She was the Word and the Word was with us and the Word was us.

Of course this wasn't a secret at all, mystics of every religion have sounded the call to look inward not outward. The Quakers call it the Inner Light, in Hinduism it’s Vedanta, in Tibetan Buddhism it translates to the Luminous Mind. The Greeks called it logos, and believed that the animating force of the universe was the same power that gives humans the ability to reason. John later uses the same word to describe Jesus as that creative force in human form.

As the wheel of the year turned from Easter to Easter my anguished “I was talking to myself” became a triumph of “ I was talking to my Self!” I grieved a loss and let it rest and slowly but surely something new grew in its place. Something that wasn't really new but very very old, something that was different but also the same as the thing that had died. So this year on Resurrection Sunday I’m celebrating a different kind of rebirth. It’s the continual cycle of all things. Life, Death and Rebirth. It’s not the celebration of victory over death, it’s the recognition that death is a part of life and necessary for it. Without death there can never be growth, the new is built on and nourished by the old.

I didn’t go to church this year. I did not feel anything about not going. Not going is my normal now. My Sundays are reverent in their own way. I try my best to protect them from activities. I drink my coffee slowly, sit in the sunshine and let myself slip out of the current of responsibilities for a little while. But I’m reading a book that brings tears to my eyes and makes my chest ache, and I’m thinking thoughts that make me burst with excitement and risk boring my friends because I can’t stop babbling about them. And I have plans to visit a Quaker service and sit in silence while other people listen to their Inner Light and we think divine thoughts together. In between this Easter and the next I have so many pathways to explore, running a little ways down one and then another like a small child in an enchanted forest, and also to run down paths in literal forests and dig my fingers into the earth and get some sand between my toes and sun on my face. And while I do those things I’ll listen to my Self and maybe learn some more secrets and be happy to know that all those years I was talking to my Self all along.