Easter QuickTakes

1. I love chant. That is all.

2. We Byzantine Catholics greet each other with 'Christ is risen' until Ascension, so be prepared to respond just in case I bump into you...

Christ is risen - Indeed He is risen - in different languages
Albanian: Krishti Ungjall! Vertete Ungjall!
Arabic: Al Maseeh Qam! Haqqan Qam!
Armenian: Christos harjav i merelotz! Orhniale harutjun Christosi!
Byelorussian: Khristos Uvoskros! Zaprowdu Uvoskros!
Chinese: Helisituosi fuhuole! Queshi fuhuole!
Coptic: Pikhirstof aftonf! Khen o methni aftonf!
Czech: Kristus vstal zmrtvy'ch! Skutec ne vstal!
Danish: Kristus er opstanden! Ja, sandelig opstanden!
Dutch: Christus is opgestaan! Hij is waarlijk opgestaan!
English: Christ is Risen! Indeed, He is Risen! many more languages at Byzcath.org

3. I didn't have time to bake the traditional sweet bread ("pascha') for the blessed baskets so I bought two loaves of challah bread. I felt a bit bad because it was the Jewish Passover. I hope that the stores carried enough challah for everyone. I love it when Jewish passover and everyone's Easter is the same week- I pray that our calendars can be aligned soon.

4. I had an interesting 'how was your weekend' conversation with my ESL students this past Tuesday. I teach adults in a college setting, so we are free to discuss about any subject with sensitivity. Occasionally, we talk a bit of religion if it is relevant to the conversation. They know I'm Catholic; they don't know I'm a Byzantine Catholic priest's wife.  I wouldn't want their heads to explode. Anyway, a Protestant Mexican student was very eager to discuss how immoral it is to have eggs and bunnies and such on Easter Sunday. "It isn't a religion; it's a relationship." Um ok- how do I quickly discuss this and get back to the matter at hand- English class and present continuous and colors. I did sympathize with her that yes some people give up tequila for forty days and then are too smashed to celebrate the resurrection properly.

5.But I couldn't let her 'get away with' her anti-Easter celebration attitude so easily. I did agree that the commercialization of Easter and six-foot tall mall bunny rabbits are not the best way to celebrate Christ's rising from the dead. But when I said "my older daughters led music and worshiped on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I think that some chocolate and new running shoes are a way to 'balance' things so that they remain, as children, enthusiastic about God and His Church." My student didn't like that answer. We should always worship perfectly and not do anything different on a random Sunday. Um-ok. She believes that there are no seasons to life. She can't wrap her mind around a feasting-fasting seesaw. She sees it as hypocritical.

6. And what about eggs? I showed the class an icon of Mary Magdalena holding a red egg. The egg symbolizes life and the blood of Christ. I find it one of the most powerful icons in existence. My student just sneered and said that Magdalena did not have an egg in the Bible. All I could do was smile and say, "And there are also many other things which Jesus did, which if they were written in detail, I suppose that even the world itself would not contain the books that would be written." (John 21:25) Then we got back to learning about the present continuous tense.

7. Mary Magdalena is a favorite saint of mine and the patron of my second daughter. She's amazing and an example to us all. We call her 'equal to the Apostles' and yet have never thought that she should be an Apostle/priest herself. So it really irks me when her name is used to push a political agenda. It is a political, not spiritual agenda because women can hold clerical positions in almost every denomination, but some people want the Catholic Church to become Episcopalian. Most are not content to be Episcopalian themselves. They need to be Catholic priests, not Episcopalian ones.  There's a PhD dissertation in that.

find more quick takes at conversiondiary.com