my most beautiful day

this is my 44th easter. it has been a beautiful day. my most beautiful day.

the gospel reading brought me to tears: the experience of mary as the first one to experience the risen christ, her passion for jesus, and his direct, personal communication with her. jesus calls her by her name, "mary," he says, and that's how she recognizes him, which seems very intimate to me. "don't hold on to me... go tell my brothers: 'i am returning to my father and your father, to my god and your god.'"

mary is the first to be charged with relating the experience of the risen christ. i find this passage even more moving today as i am still under the effect of reading the bulk of the da vinci code yesterday.

i was further moved by jim's sermon. i have never heard such a sermon before in my life. "this is not a book of rules," he said, holding up the holy bible, "it's people's experiences of god."

i wrote earlier about my dissatisfaction with logical proofs of god. today i write about my joy of the experiential proofs of god. starting with mary and the disciples: what could possibly motivate, asked jim, a scattered, fugutive, leaderless group to go out into the world (in the coming years and decades and eventually suffer torture and death for their evangelism), but the experience of the risen jesus?

i offer no proofs myself, only my own experiences, modest and minor. jim charged us to look to our own experiences, to find the living, dynamic word and ourselves be alive and be dynamic, like jesus. and because we are the church, (and the church is not some slow-moving institution made of sticks and stones) jim has charged the church to be dynamic, to be at the forefront of change, to effect change, for heaven's sake.

i can't do the sermon justice. you had to be there. i hope i got these snppets mostly right.

before the service, i sat next to a woman who hadn't been to church all year. she said she wouldn't tell me her age, but she held a copy of the pioneer camp catalog and said she had gone to pioneer camp 66 years ago. she said that while misses the old hymns, she thinks this contemporary setting is the right thing for the church.

after sue was kind enough to give me a lift home with all my musical gear, i called wes, who was dogsitting at his mother's, and arranged to have brunch with him. i packed my sack and put my banjo around my neck, walked down to tim horton's and up to see my son, playing "lord of the dance" all the way. well, practicing it, actually, but by the time i got to karen's, it was good enough to call playing.

wes met me at the door, spied the banjo, and groaned: "you've brought the devil's ax." i promised not to play it in the house.

i made brunch: scrambled eggs topped with salsa, with buttered homemade whole wheat bread on the side, and wes and i ate in the kitchen. i asked wes if he had read the da vinci code (he hasn't yet, but i gathered that he had a good idea what it's about), and i said it's the topic of the next two sermons. wes asked me if i'm a christian now, and i said yes, and he groaned again, and i thought: this conversation is going to last two minutes.

it lasted two hours. i think it's the first adult conversation i've had with my son. if anyone's reading this who doesn't know wes and how significant this is, not only is he a typical, self-absorbed, benignly rebellious teenager who knows everything and has humanity and divinity basically figured out and thinks he's an atheist, he has, due to his asperger's syndrome, a very narrow scope of interest, and if the topic doesn't have to do with dungeons and dragons or star trek, it won't hold his attention for very long. people with asperger's syndrome also tend to be all output; they do all the talking and aren't interested in what others think. or say. or feel. but this was an actual discussion, a dialogue, and not just about ideas, but also about my experience of god. wes heard me. he was engaged.

incredible.

oh, by the way. i broke my promise. i absentmindedly picked up my banjo and quietly played intermittently while wes and i discoursed. he never seemed to notice.

i went home, grabbed my bass, and headed to the farquhar's 17th annual easter egg hunt (my first), where blind mary played a small set, augmented by kelly lefaive on fiddle and her dad on spoons and shakers, and ted from down east, who was new to everybody, sitting in on guitar.

home again home again jiggedy jig. dishes done. floor swept. blog written. now to bed to finish the the da vinci code, which i'm finding extraordinarily relevant to my life.

post-script: so, i don't know if wes will come to listen to the da vinci code sermons, but i just spoke with karen, who has read the novel, and she's interested and she'll probably attend with at least our youngest daughter.