"American" Easter
When I was a kid, I learned there were two Easters: “American” Easter, the one most of my friends celebrated, and “Greek Easter,” the “real” Easter. American Easter often fell on Greek Palm Sunday, so when all of my friends were joyfully eating whatever they gave up for Lent, I was bitterly following a strict Holy Week diet (eating nothing from an animal for seven days) and going to church at least once every night.
Actually, that’s the narrative most Greek-Americans tell about their childhoods, but truthfully, I loved Holy Week. It was my favorite time of year. Now, the closest Greek Orthodox Church is three hours away. Since I moved to Minnesota six years ago, I have driven into the Twin Cities to attend “Greek” Good Friday and Easter liturgy every year. I miss the earlier though less ornate services, like Lazarus Saturday, a simple Liturgy the day before Palm Sunday that ended with the women gathering in the church to dye the eggs for Easter and fold the palms for Palm Sunday. I loved the way the palms felt in my hand, so smooth, and the way they smelled, like new grass but without the silvery-brown smell of dirt. I loved carrying the new Palm Sunday cross home and taping it to the head of my bed for another year. (We had to burn the old one; anything blessed in the church could not be discarded unless it was burned). The Monday and Tuesday services in honor of the woman who poured oil over Jesus’ feet (my favorite Bible story), the Wednesday ritual of Holy Unction, and Thursday’s crucifixion were sad and, at the same time, full of promise. We knew what was coming: the candle emerging from the tomb, the priest proclaiming, “Come, receive the light,” and later, the Easter lamb on the spit, the magiritsa (lamb-gut soup), and the bounty of cheese and milk and yogurt and ice cream and chocolate, everything we couldn’t eat during Lent.
As a teenager, I’d hold vigil in the church on Thursday night, taking turns staying awake at the foot of Jesus on the cross, praying for forgiveness and peace. (It wasn’t all on the up-and-up, these retreats. I remember giggling late at night with other Greek girls after the priest had gone to bed. I recall comparing our first kisses—I had to lie about mine since I didn’t have any desire to kiss boys—but that’s another story). The next morning, we would help the women decorate Jesus’ tomb, lovingly winding carnation stems together after the Friday morning service of Old Testament readings. Usually, only the girls who had spent the night were at that morning service, and sometimes Fr. George would let us read some of the passages, a rare honor for a girl. There was also a Friday afternoon service, when Jesus was laid to rest in the tomb, and then the Friday evening parade around the church with candles, the first hint of Easter light. I never failed to feel changed when I would crouch under Jesus’ tomb to be born again with Him. As I emerged from the tomb, I would think to myself, everything will be different this year, I am sure of it. I don’t know exactly what it was that I wanted to change, except, well, everything.
Easter Liturgy is the highlight of the week. It starts at about 11 p.m. and goes until 2 or 3 in the morning. In the Twin Cities, I always arrive early, speaking in Greek to whomever is standing behind the candles so he (it's usually a he) will know I belong there. After six years of these annual retreats, I have begun to recognize some of the people, but only in relation to someone I knew from back home. One woman who sits in the third row on the left reminds me of old Mrs. Gerves who had a chapel in her home, who would press silver crosses into my hand on an almost annual basis after my mother mother died. “Too rich for her own good,” one family member who shall remain nameless used to say about her, but I loved her smell, a mix of fish and baby powder, and felt there was some sincerity in her kindness and faith (even though she once showed me a jar of cold cream and claimed that God had carved a cross in it while she was sleeping). The voice of the man who sits toward the back sounds my Theo (uncle) Elias’, deep, imposing, melodious. The family I always sit beside is like my cousins’ family, second generation, the brother and sister laughing out loud and poking each other, the father joining in, the mother holding out as long as possible and finally giving in as well.
But really, I am always looking for my mother, and she is never there.
What would my mother think if she could see me standing alone through that long liturgy, singing the old Greek hymns? I admit it is rather lonely: no cousins to giggle with, no waiting Easter meal, not even a partner who shares my faith. Would my mother wish I had never come out, had never moved away? What would she think, moreover, if she could have seen me today, in the United Church of Christ/United Methodist Church I attend in my now hometown? By chance, it was my turn to serve communion today on “American Easter.” I found myself saying “Christ is Risen” to each church member who made his or her way to the bread and cup (an ordinary loaf, not the special antidoro baked with special prayers and an official stamp, and grape juice instead of wine). After six years, I know these people, or rather, I know at least a little something about each of them—where they live in town, who they live with, how many grandchildren they have, recent hospital stays or divorces or family deaths, where they work—something perhaps inconsequential, but enough to make me feel I belong here--in a way.
When I feel lonely at church, which is often, I think it is because these people don’t know me, not in the way I was known as a child in my church, and certainly not in the way my mother was known as an adult. There is no history here, no grandfather who came from Greece to start a life here, no father who jumped ship illegally and married my mother so he could stay, no old people who have known me all my life, who know who I am named for, who remember how lost we all were when my mother died a long and painful death. But then I remember that nobody really knew my childhood loneliness, the different-ness I felt, something larger than what people called my “creativity” or my “intelligence” (something larger, even, than my queerness, though even now I can’t name it exactly). And nobody really knew my mother, either, I suppose, at least, not in the way I knew her. Who saw her brooding over a difficult question about politics or ethics? Who heard her curse every injustice she saw on the news as if it were her own, private sorrow? Who saw her rolling down the hill in front of our house on a summer afternoon, or studying a new growth in the garden, or holding me on her lap?
Since I was 18, I have called myself Greek Orthodox and atheist and Buddhist and agnostic-Unitarian and finally Christian again (in about that order, give or take). I have come around to a new kind of Christianity. I like to think I’m a liberal, seeking-truth kind of Christian, the kind that longs to hear Jesus’ story because it is a story of social justice, of radical love. When I first realized I could read the Bible by myself in third grade, it was, after all, this Jesus of conscience and strength and truth-telling whom I loved, not the dark, frowning Jesus in the Byzantine icons or the skinny, pale man hanging on the cross. That doesn’t mean I don’t miss the old Byzantine hymns or the icons and stories of the saints or the incense or the prayers of old, those humble, beautiful, timeless prayers (if one can get past the sexist language and self-flagellation that is so much more terrifying and honest than the prayer of confession we recited today). But I am comfortable in a different and perhaps more important way with the theology of the church I now attend—though I doubt I’ll stop making my annual pilgrimage to a Greek Orthodox Church in the Twin Cities anytime soon.
My church is in the process of determining whether to become open and affirming—publicly welcoming of all people, including gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people. The conversation has lasted more than a year and promises to go on until at least next January. It is a painful process, but one I’m willing to stick out because I have, ironically, the kind of faith in the people who come Sunday after Sunday that I believe my mother had in the other Greeks in Akron, Ohio. They frustrated and annoyed her. They were at once too much like her and nothing like her at all. They loved her unconditionally, knew her better than anyone, didn't know a thing about her. She served them and argued with them and worked with them in the kitchen and laughed at them behind their backs and stood up for them when others did the same and fasted with them and yelled at them and once, famously, talked a good number of them into signing a petition that, to make a long story short, really pissed off our priest (who was at least as stubborn as my mother).
They did all of these same things to and with her. They were also at her bedside when she was dying. I won’t forget them. I have no idea how they would feel about my life now, about what I believe or who I live with or how I live, and I rarely have an occasion to see them anywhere except, occasionally, at a funeral or wedding--but I won’t forget them. They are my heart-family, my faith-family; they always will be. I can see all the ugliness and back biting and conformity and sexism and heterosexism and patriarchy and dogmatism that made me leave—but I can also see the mystery, the beauty.
I will never feel completely comfortable at the church I attend now, just as I will never feel comfortable at any Greek Orthodox church in the country; but I see now that I am living in a way not so different from my mother’s way—except I’ve had the chance to choose this way, to live it with a freedom she never had.
On Maundy Thursday, one of my former students gently washed my hands in preparation for the meal. As he turned my hand over, I couldn’t help but remember the priest crossing my forehead, my cheeks, my chin, each palm, and finally, the back of each hand with holy oil on Holy Wednesday, calling me forgiven. And when I washed the hands of the teenage boy sitting on my other side, and later, when I helped clean up in the kitchen, I couldn’t help but think of my mother, talking with the teenagers at church (whom I believe she really listened to) and casually chatting with the other women while cleaning up (though here, there are men in the kitchen, too—imagine!). It doesn’t look so different, except that my mother never had the chance to choose a partner or a church, to explore her spirituality, to live out her talents for the good of the world (though one might argue that raising children of conscience was that living out, more than most people do), to realize she was worthy of washing and of being washed in this ritual-way (this was the priest’s job, after all).
Today, a friend agreed to dye eggs with me on “Greek” Palm Sunday because, although she didn’t understand exactly, she figured out that doing so mattered to me. I told her we were a day late, that we were supposed to do this on Lazarus Saturday, and she didn’t shake her head or tell me I need to start living in the present. When I (perhaps incongruously) made the sign of the cross and sang a Greek hymn nearly two thousand years old while using crayons and vinegar-tablets to decorate the eggs, when I mixed prayer with complaints about campus politics, when I confessed I couldn’t eat the eggs until next Sunday because I would be keeping the Greek Easter fast, and she just nodded, just kept dipping egg after egg into the colored dye, I realized I had chosen my friends and that they knew me as well as anyone can know anybody else. Did my mother have such friends?
It’s easy for me to believe my mother was an insider in a way I’m not at my church now, but there was the matter of her intelligence, her anger at injustice, her serious questions about life, things that set her apart, things that probably made her feel lonely. Maybe there were others who felt or thought as she did, but I don’t know whether she found them, whether she or they were ever able to truly talk or not-talk in the way of good, close friends (one woman comes to mind, but were there others)? Who knows who my mother would have become if she’d lived longer? Who knows how I would understand her life in relation to my own if I had known her longer? And who can say that there is any cure to loneliness, really, for anyone who is living the hard questions, who does not back away from them, who refuses to numb out and just go on with their lives? Who knows how my life will shake out, for that matter?
Everything is mystery. We are Easter people, my minister reminded us today, not Good Friday people. When we mourn on Maundy Thursday, on Good Friday, we can do so without losing hope because we know what’s coming. The thing we long for most—the empty tomb, the women’s discovery, the risen Christ, the good news, the light—we already have. Maybe we no longer know the story in the shape or color or scent we imagined we’d know it when we were kids, but we can stop longing, stop thinking that this will be the year that everything will be different, better, changed. The resurrection is here. It is real. It is new and not new at the same time, but it is real.
Actually, that’s the narrative most Greek-Americans tell about their childhoods, but truthfully, I loved Holy Week. It was my favorite time of year. Now, the closest Greek Orthodox Church is three hours away. Since I moved to Minnesota six years ago, I have driven into the Twin Cities to attend “Greek” Good Friday and Easter liturgy every year. I miss the earlier though less ornate services, like Lazarus Saturday, a simple Liturgy the day before Palm Sunday that ended with the women gathering in the church to dye the eggs for Easter and fold the palms for Palm Sunday. I loved the way the palms felt in my hand, so smooth, and the way they smelled, like new grass but without the silvery-brown smell of dirt. I loved carrying the new Palm Sunday cross home and taping it to the head of my bed for another year. (We had to burn the old one; anything blessed in the church could not be discarded unless it was burned). The Monday and Tuesday services in honor of the woman who poured oil over Jesus’ feet (my favorite Bible story), the Wednesday ritual of Holy Unction, and Thursday’s crucifixion were sad and, at the same time, full of promise. We knew what was coming: the candle emerging from the tomb, the priest proclaiming, “Come, receive the light,” and later, the Easter lamb on the spit, the magiritsa (lamb-gut soup), and the bounty of cheese and milk and yogurt and ice cream and chocolate, everything we couldn’t eat during Lent.
As a teenager, I’d hold vigil in the church on Thursday night, taking turns staying awake at the foot of Jesus on the cross, praying for forgiveness and peace. (It wasn’t all on the up-and-up, these retreats. I remember giggling late at night with other Greek girls after the priest had gone to bed. I recall comparing our first kisses—I had to lie about mine since I didn’t have any desire to kiss boys—but that’s another story). The next morning, we would help the women decorate Jesus’ tomb, lovingly winding carnation stems together after the Friday morning service of Old Testament readings. Usually, only the girls who had spent the night were at that morning service, and sometimes Fr. George would let us read some of the passages, a rare honor for a girl. There was also a Friday afternoon service, when Jesus was laid to rest in the tomb, and then the Friday evening parade around the church with candles, the first hint of Easter light. I never failed to feel changed when I would crouch under Jesus’ tomb to be born again with Him. As I emerged from the tomb, I would think to myself, everything will be different this year, I am sure of it. I don’t know exactly what it was that I wanted to change, except, well, everything.
Easter Liturgy is the highlight of the week. It starts at about 11 p.m. and goes until 2 or 3 in the morning. In the Twin Cities, I always arrive early, speaking in Greek to whomever is standing behind the candles so he (it's usually a he) will know I belong there. After six years of these annual retreats, I have begun to recognize some of the people, but only in relation to someone I knew from back home. One woman who sits in the third row on the left reminds me of old Mrs. Gerves who had a chapel in her home, who would press silver crosses into my hand on an almost annual basis after my mother mother died. “Too rich for her own good,” one family member who shall remain nameless used to say about her, but I loved her smell, a mix of fish and baby powder, and felt there was some sincerity in her kindness and faith (even though she once showed me a jar of cold cream and claimed that God had carved a cross in it while she was sleeping). The voice of the man who sits toward the back sounds my Theo (uncle) Elias’, deep, imposing, melodious. The family I always sit beside is like my cousins’ family, second generation, the brother and sister laughing out loud and poking each other, the father joining in, the mother holding out as long as possible and finally giving in as well.
But really, I am always looking for my mother, and she is never there.
What would my mother think if she could see me standing alone through that long liturgy, singing the old Greek hymns? I admit it is rather lonely: no cousins to giggle with, no waiting Easter meal, not even a partner who shares my faith. Would my mother wish I had never come out, had never moved away? What would she think, moreover, if she could have seen me today, in the United Church of Christ/United Methodist Church I attend in my now hometown? By chance, it was my turn to serve communion today on “American Easter.” I found myself saying “Christ is Risen” to each church member who made his or her way to the bread and cup (an ordinary loaf, not the special antidoro baked with special prayers and an official stamp, and grape juice instead of wine). After six years, I know these people, or rather, I know at least a little something about each of them—where they live in town, who they live with, how many grandchildren they have, recent hospital stays or divorces or family deaths, where they work—something perhaps inconsequential, but enough to make me feel I belong here--in a way.
When I feel lonely at church, which is often, I think it is because these people don’t know me, not in the way I was known as a child in my church, and certainly not in the way my mother was known as an adult. There is no history here, no grandfather who came from Greece to start a life here, no father who jumped ship illegally and married my mother so he could stay, no old people who have known me all my life, who know who I am named for, who remember how lost we all were when my mother died a long and painful death. But then I remember that nobody really knew my childhood loneliness, the different-ness I felt, something larger than what people called my “creativity” or my “intelligence” (something larger, even, than my queerness, though even now I can’t name it exactly). And nobody really knew my mother, either, I suppose, at least, not in the way I knew her. Who saw her brooding over a difficult question about politics or ethics? Who heard her curse every injustice she saw on the news as if it were her own, private sorrow? Who saw her rolling down the hill in front of our house on a summer afternoon, or studying a new growth in the garden, or holding me on her lap?
Since I was 18, I have called myself Greek Orthodox and atheist and Buddhist and agnostic-Unitarian and finally Christian again (in about that order, give or take). I have come around to a new kind of Christianity. I like to think I’m a liberal, seeking-truth kind of Christian, the kind that longs to hear Jesus’ story because it is a story of social justice, of radical love. When I first realized I could read the Bible by myself in third grade, it was, after all, this Jesus of conscience and strength and truth-telling whom I loved, not the dark, frowning Jesus in the Byzantine icons or the skinny, pale man hanging on the cross. That doesn’t mean I don’t miss the old Byzantine hymns or the icons and stories of the saints or the incense or the prayers of old, those humble, beautiful, timeless prayers (if one can get past the sexist language and self-flagellation that is so much more terrifying and honest than the prayer of confession we recited today). But I am comfortable in a different and perhaps more important way with the theology of the church I now attend—though I doubt I’ll stop making my annual pilgrimage to a Greek Orthodox Church in the Twin Cities anytime soon.
My church is in the process of determining whether to become open and affirming—publicly welcoming of all people, including gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people. The conversation has lasted more than a year and promises to go on until at least next January. It is a painful process, but one I’m willing to stick out because I have, ironically, the kind of faith in the people who come Sunday after Sunday that I believe my mother had in the other Greeks in Akron, Ohio. They frustrated and annoyed her. They were at once too much like her and nothing like her at all. They loved her unconditionally, knew her better than anyone, didn't know a thing about her. She served them and argued with them and worked with them in the kitchen and laughed at them behind their backs and stood up for them when others did the same and fasted with them and yelled at them and once, famously, talked a good number of them into signing a petition that, to make a long story short, really pissed off our priest (who was at least as stubborn as my mother).
They did all of these same things to and with her. They were also at her bedside when she was dying. I won’t forget them. I have no idea how they would feel about my life now, about what I believe or who I live with or how I live, and I rarely have an occasion to see them anywhere except, occasionally, at a funeral or wedding--but I won’t forget them. They are my heart-family, my faith-family; they always will be. I can see all the ugliness and back biting and conformity and sexism and heterosexism and patriarchy and dogmatism that made me leave—but I can also see the mystery, the beauty.
I will never feel completely comfortable at the church I attend now, just as I will never feel comfortable at any Greek Orthodox church in the country; but I see now that I am living in a way not so different from my mother’s way—except I’ve had the chance to choose this way, to live it with a freedom she never had.
On Maundy Thursday, one of my former students gently washed my hands in preparation for the meal. As he turned my hand over, I couldn’t help but remember the priest crossing my forehead, my cheeks, my chin, each palm, and finally, the back of each hand with holy oil on Holy Wednesday, calling me forgiven. And when I washed the hands of the teenage boy sitting on my other side, and later, when I helped clean up in the kitchen, I couldn’t help but think of my mother, talking with the teenagers at church (whom I believe she really listened to) and casually chatting with the other women while cleaning up (though here, there are men in the kitchen, too—imagine!). It doesn’t look so different, except that my mother never had the chance to choose a partner or a church, to explore her spirituality, to live out her talents for the good of the world (though one might argue that raising children of conscience was that living out, more than most people do), to realize she was worthy of washing and of being washed in this ritual-way (this was the priest’s job, after all).
Today, a friend agreed to dye eggs with me on “Greek” Palm Sunday because, although she didn’t understand exactly, she figured out that doing so mattered to me. I told her we were a day late, that we were supposed to do this on Lazarus Saturday, and she didn’t shake her head or tell me I need to start living in the present. When I (perhaps incongruously) made the sign of the cross and sang a Greek hymn nearly two thousand years old while using crayons and vinegar-tablets to decorate the eggs, when I mixed prayer with complaints about campus politics, when I confessed I couldn’t eat the eggs until next Sunday because I would be keeping the Greek Easter fast, and she just nodded, just kept dipping egg after egg into the colored dye, I realized I had chosen my friends and that they knew me as well as anyone can know anybody else. Did my mother have such friends?
It’s easy for me to believe my mother was an insider in a way I’m not at my church now, but there was the matter of her intelligence, her anger at injustice, her serious questions about life, things that set her apart, things that probably made her feel lonely. Maybe there were others who felt or thought as she did, but I don’t know whether she found them, whether she or they were ever able to truly talk or not-talk in the way of good, close friends (one woman comes to mind, but were there others)? Who knows who my mother would have become if she’d lived longer? Who knows how I would understand her life in relation to my own if I had known her longer? And who can say that there is any cure to loneliness, really, for anyone who is living the hard questions, who does not back away from them, who refuses to numb out and just go on with their lives? Who knows how my life will shake out, for that matter?
Everything is mystery. We are Easter people, my minister reminded us today, not Good Friday people. When we mourn on Maundy Thursday, on Good Friday, we can do so without losing hope because we know what’s coming. The thing we long for most—the empty tomb, the women’s discovery, the risen Christ, the good news, the light—we already have. Maybe we no longer know the story in the shape or color or scent we imagined we’d know it when we were kids, but we can stop longing, stop thinking that this will be the year that everything will be different, better, changed. The resurrection is here. It is real. It is new and not new at the same time, but it is real.
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