Edina Hall
Sisters and Brothers in Christ,
As you read this, I am busy preparing for Easter, but more in a secular way than I might admit.
I host an Easter Tea and there are sandwiches to make, linens to be pressed and a table to be set with our grandmother’s fine china. I will have the soundtrack of Jesus Christ Superstar by Andrew Lloyd Webber (original cast) blaring in the background from my turntable, reliving my childhood obsession with the music and story.
But it all somehow doesn’t feel quite right. Jesus is dead.
I am aware that I know the end, the glorious resurrection, and Jesus’ followers did not. It is because of this that I feel like I should be little more tuned into the sorrow of the day than the upbeat tempo of 1970s rock opera. So I try to put myself among the followers of Jesus on that Holy Saturday for just a little bit.
In recent years, I have found the easiest way to mark this sorrowful day is to reflect on the day my father died.
His passing wasn’t a dramatic or sudden one. In medical terms it was “failure to thrive” (ie: it was his time). As the hospice nurse came to pronounce him dead, my sister, mother and I clung to each other in unbelief and sorrow.
When the funeral home came to take his body away my mother retreated to her room. My sister and I watched as his body was zipped into a bag by our own Joseph of Arimathea and the gurney was wheeled to the white minivan retrofitted for this purpose.
I knew I would feel emotions at my father’s passing, but I was not prepared for the palpable physical and emotional emptiness of losing the patriarch of the family. There was a gaping hole that no one could fill.
Struggling to understand it all, I borrowed words from Star Wars:
“I felt a great disturbance in the Force…”
In their hearts maybe the disciples believed the words Jesus spoke of his resurrection, but in their newly experienced trauma, fear and sorrow, perhaps they felt more acutely that emptiness and the space that no one else could fill.
I hope you will join me in recognizing the disturbance of today.
Soon there will be enough joy to fill (and overfill) all the emptiness.
—Edina
