To Church Or Not To Church? That Is the Easter Question.

Easter Sunday morning.  I'd wake up to a bright sun shining through my lacy white curtains and Keith Green's "He Has Risen" turning on the record player.  Mom would be making pancakes, or cinnamon rolls - something special on this special morning.  I'd put on my brand new springy dress, one of the only times a year I wanted to wear a dress, and if it was still a little chilly outside (a March Easter, perhaps), a pair of soft white pantyhose.  I'd run down the hall to find my pink plastic basket in between my brothers' blue and green ones, all filled with green plastic grass and multiple multicolored plastic eggs, full of chocolate and jelly beans and Sweet Tarts.  After gorging on special breakfast and however many eggs my parents would let me open, the five of us would pack into the minivan and drive to church.  The church would be full of beautifully dressed little girls, some of us with white straw hats, and combed little boys in shirts too starched to be comfortable.  We'd sing joyful, boasting songs like "Up From the Grave He Arose" and listen to the glorious story of the man whom death could not defeat.  After church, we'd drive to my grandmother or my aunt's house for a huge family feast - all the cousins, uncles, aunts and grandparents would be there - and we'd hunt for even more Easter eggs, some plastic, some boiled and dyed (always a disappointment to find) in the large country yard before stuffing ourselves for the second time that day, only now with ham and deviled eggs.

If you grew up in America, and particularly if you grew up a Christian in America, this is a familiar scene from start to finish. While Easter was never as big to as Christmas, or even Thanksgiving, it was in the Top Three for exciting annual holidays.  Even as a child, getting the whole family together for a huge feast was the top reason I loved these holidays so much.  (Well, maybe it was in the Top Three reasons I loved them. Presents and chocolate were major factors too.)

As I got older, and the church calendar began to take on greater meaning for me, I started practicing Lent every year before Easter.  Lent was a deeply personal experience for me. I never attended a church that observed Lent, so I was pretty much on my own for figuring out what it was all about.  For many years I practiced it on my own, giving up a wide range of indulgences or vices, from chocolate or alcohol or meat to anger or shouting at my kids. Some years I even fasted on Good Friday.  Lent was a time of recognizing my shortcomings as a human, acknowledging my sinful nature, and finally rejoicing on Easter Sunday in my salvation from my broken and helpless state.

When my kids came along, we started up the secular traditions of Easter too - rolling eggs down a hill, egg hunts, Easter baskets and the confused Easter Bunny who for some reason lays eggs instead of giving birth to live young like all other honest, hardworking mammals. I continued my personal favourite Eastertime tradition of getting a new dress, for myself and for my two darling, sugary sweet daughters. And of course, we always went to church and sang "Up From the Grave He Arose", and when I remembered, I played Keith Green, no longer on vinyl but compact disc.

This is my first fully secular Easter.  Last Easter was complicated, as I was deep in the throes of confusion and doubt over my faith, but desperately holding onto belief in Christ and his resurrection with everything I could muster. I struggled through Lent last year, each day a reminder that I didn't fully believe anymore, as if I needed any more reminders tacked to my weary, conflicted heart. We rolled eggs down a hill on Easter morning, but the church service, as beautiful as it was, left me empty.  A year later, I'm now facing my very first Christian holiday as a confirmed agnostic, and I have no idea how to confront it.

Actually, that's sort of untrue.  Almost forty days ago, I faced Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent with a sad tug at my heart.  Observing Lent now meant nothing to me, but I missed it.  After wrestling with the concept for weeks beforehand, I decided I could practice Lent for personal reasons without including the spiritual aspects of it, but I couldn't stick it out.  Without the religious ties, Lent had no strength or power over my cravings, and I gave in after the first week.

I asked my husband what we would do for Easter.  He shrugged.  Having been raised in the United Kingdom in a church that didn't formally celebrate holidays, Easter involved some egg rolling and a slightly more built up Sunday dinner.  If he was lucky, someone would call out "Up From the Grave He Arose" for the congregation to sing, but it wasn't a given.

I told him I thought maybe we should just go to church.  It's Easter after all, what else does one do on Easter?  He didn't see the point.  I didn't either, but really, how else would Easter be Easter?  And getting down to brass tacks, if we didn't go to church, there would be no justification for a new dress!

Yes, if we're all honest about it, despite what we say is the "true meaning of Easter", consumerism, like pretty much all religious and non-religious holidays, is always going to be at the forefront.

Scott told me just to go buy new dresses if we wanted them.  And we'd do an Easter egg hunt and make baskets and such.

Without church, though, it seems, well, sort of a let down.  Rather anti-climactic.

None of this changes how I feel about church, however. The whole Jesus story is just a fairy tale now, like something I read in a children's book full of pink fluffy cloud illustrations and angels in white gowns with wings speaking with exclamation marks in word bubbles.  In fact, the church side of Easter, aside from the actual ritual of attending, irks me.  I realized just how much it irks me this morning when the young two kids and I went to the community library for Story Time, like we do most Thursdays.  The books were about Easter.  The first was a story about a little chick doing something inane and cutesy, and the second was about a little girl who lost her special Easter egg.  So far, so good.  Until halfway through book number two, when the little eggless girl explains what Easter is. "A man called Jesus came to earth to save all of us from our sins. But the people didn't like what he was saying and they killed him and put him on a cross.  However, three days later, the rock that was in front of his tomb had been rolled away and Jesus came back from the dead!"  She tells us that on Easter we go to church to learn about this man Jesus.

I didn't want to be that stereotypical anti-religious person who kicks up a fuss about religion being expressed to my children in the form of truth, so with great difficulty, I kept my mouth shut and my face smiling.  I did not manage to suppress a couple of deep sighs, though.  Luckily, a mother with a toddler and a five year old is allowed to sigh for any reason under the sun, so it wasn't noticed.  I looked around the room.  The likelihood is, most, if not all, these mothers, would be in total agreement with the story - in fact, grateful that the "true meaning" was being expressed.  I chalked it all up to part of living in a religious society, and at least it was Lolly who was hearing the story and not the Fifi.  Lolly has always been our resident atheist child, the one who told us when she was barely old enough to speak that Jesus was pretend, who has always refused to pray before meals or join the chorus of "amen"s after, and who recently told me with the decisiveness of a forty year old that "I am not a Christian" despite my never saying similar things to her. And Jaguar, well, he's not even two.  He just wanted to pull the books off the shelf.

It all comes down to this: I don't know what we'll do this Easter.  I have plastic eggs ready to fill and three baskets with plastic green grass.  I have new springy outfits for all of us, and will be bringing deviled eggs to the big family Easter lunch. We may go to church out for cultural reasons, or we might stay home and roll eggs down a hill (stone rolling away from the tomb associations aside).  I'm covering new ground here. Maybe in a few years we'll make our own traditions as we meet others like us.

No matter what we end up doing, however, I will never buy, nor can I understand why anyone, especially Christians, would ever buy, one of these.

Surely this is, like, six kinds of wrong?