Thursday April 8, 2021

The church congregation I belong to has held an Easter Sunrise service for at least 40 years. The last two years, however, Covid-19 has thrown a virus into the works. Health restrictions prohibit any gathering of people. And any singing. 

            This year, for some reason that I cannot fully define, I felt that I needed a sunrise service. 

            If we couldn’t have one collectively, I decided, I would have one individually. 

            Which is why I found myself, half an hour before dawn on Easter Sunday, climbing a steep trail up Spion Kop, a local peak. 

            Spion Kop is not really much of a mountain. At least, not here in rugged B.C. It rises about 1700 feet (a little less than 600 m) above Okanagan Lake, but it’s still lower than the mountains on either side of the lake. 

            I realized, as my feet stumbled up the rocky trail, that I was re-enacting a 2000-year-old tale. 

            On Easter morning, the Bible says, the women disciples came to the tomb before dawn, to provide last rites for the man they believed in. They came as soon as it was light enough to see the path. They couldn’t come the day before, because it was the Sabbath, the prescribed day of rest, the day when devout Jews do nothing that could be considered work. 

            Jesus’ dead body had been taken down from the cross late on Friday, and hastily placed in a borrowed tomb. 

            The Sabbath began at sunset that day. It wouldn’t end until sunset on Saturday. Sunday morning was the earliest those women could prepare Jesus’ physical body for its final rest. 

The old old story

            My feet were clad in hiking boots. Theirs would have been in sandals. But we both slipped on loose rocks. We heard gravel crunch under our soles. And we went in silence.

            They came to the top of their ridge. And in the first rays of the new day, they saw that the rock which had blocked the entrance to a cave dug into the rock had been rolled away. 

            And the tomb was empty.

            Mark’s gospel more or less ends there, with the empty tomb. The other three gospels elaborate, providing details of interactions with angels, young men, and Jesus himself. 

            I didn’t see any of those on my mountain. I kept climbing until I reached a rocky knoll, beneath a tall Ponderosa pine. 

            The eastern sky was cloudy. Then, at just the right moment, the clouds parted for a few minutes. The bright yellow disk of the sun clawed its way through the black trees on the far ridge. Long shafts of sunlight flooded across my hillside. 

            And I sang. At the top of hill, at the top of my lungs: “Morning has broken, like the first morning…” 

            And Jim Strathdee’s “Dance with the sprit, early in the morning…”

            And the South African anthem, “We are marching in the light of God…”

            I was still singing as I came down the mountain.

            Most Easter sunrise services, we read the old story. We talk the talk. 

            This Easter, I walked the walk. 

            It was worth getting up before the sun. 

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Copyright © 2021 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups, and links from other blogs, welcomed; all other rights reserved.

                  To comment on this column, write jimt@quixotic.ca

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YOUR TURN

I got no letters at all about last week’s column –which shouldn’t be surprising, because apparently I failed to send it out to the subscriber list! I have now, at least, posted it to my webpage, https://quixotic.ca  It was about who deserves a Covid-19 vaccination, or not, and why, or why not. 

            So the letters I have for you today are about the three prayers I posted two weeks ago. 

Jean Chandler asked, “Have you ever read Prayers of the Cosmos: Meditations on the Aramaic Words of Jesus by Neil Douglas-Klotz?  I think you would find the translations from the Aramaic much more consonant with your theology than are the traditional versions from the Greek.  For me it was transformational.”

            Yes, and I keep several of Douglas-Klotz’s versions of the “Lord’s Prayer” on hand for use, when necessary.

Ruth Burgess “turns to ee cummings for my idea of prayers.” Here is the first verse of one of cummings poem/prayers; I encourage you to look up the whole thing. 

i thank You God for most this amazing

day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

Tom Watson had a preference: “Of the three alternative prayers that you cite, I much prefer the third, by Richard Wagamese. The words in that one sing, and resonate. The first two, with the possible exception of a couple of lines, don't do much for me; they're interesting to read...once...but not as a steady diet. I, like you, have trouble with three imagery of an old man in the sky, but if I were looking for an alternative to use in public worship the treads on the first two would quickly wear thin.”

Dawne Taylor liked all three prayers, but had a “slight correction. Richard Rohr’s Centre for Action and Contemplation is in Albuquerque, New Mexico, not in Texas. A lot of your readers may also get Richard’s daily meditations, and so will know the location of CAC.”

Isabel Gibson admitted to writing her own expression of that prayer: “Decades ago I reworked the Lord's Prayer slightly for myself (I was singing my own national anthem for a few decades, too, until Parliament finally caught up):

Our God, who art with us and beyond us,

Hallowed be thy name.

Thy kingdom come:

Thy will be done, by us as it was by Jesus.

The rest was unchanged. 

            “Not everyone cares about words in the same way. For some, it can be good to have another phrasing that gets closer to what is meaningful for them.”

“I, too, have some difficulties with aspects of The Lord’s Prayer,” Elizabeth Burns wrote from Australia, “and so appreciate different wordings that reflect more closely my thinking.”

James Russell: “I have to admit a fondness for many verses in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, not least

Oh Thou who Man of baser earth didst make

And who with Eden didst devise the Snake;

For all the sin wherewith the face of Man

Is blacken’d, Man’s forgiveness give – and take!

Steve Roney values “the great power in set prayer formulae. 

            “I can’t agree with you that the ‘Our Father’ depicts God as an ‘old man in the sky.’ The sky is not mentioned anywhere. It says he is in heaven. That is a metaphor.

            “At the same time, it is valuable to prevent the error of supposing God is only ‘in here,’ and not also ‘out there,’ pervading the cosmos.”

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Psalm paraphrase

It’s too bad I didn’t have this paraphrase of Psalm 133 to post last week, in anticipation of Easter dinners --  although Covid-19 restrictions might have made family dinners impossible. 

1          How good it feels to have the human family 
gathered together for this sumptuous feast. 

2          Here we rejoice in the rich repast 
of fruit and tree and vine. 
Apples and oranges, grapes and cherries,
yield their joyous juices to our lusting mouths. 
Drops of surplus pleasure trickle down our chins. 
We dab them unselfconsciously with rumpled napkins.

3          This gathering refreshes like sweet morning in the mountains, 
like a prairie sky polished bright by gentle breezes. 
Surely this is what God intended 
when God invented community.

You can find paraphrases of most of the psalms in the Revised Common Lectionary in my book Everyday Psalmsavailable from Wood Lake Publishing, info@woodlake.com.

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TECHNICAL STUFF

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PROMOTION STUFF

To use the links in this section, you’ll have to insert the necessary symbols. Some spam filters have blocked my posts because they’re suspicious of some of the web links.

                  Wayne Irwin's “Churchweb Canada,” an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. http://wwwDOTchurchwebcanadaDOTca He’s also relatively inexpensive!

                  I recommend Isabel Gibson’s thoughtful and well-written blog, wwwDOTtraditionaliconoclastDOTcom. She also has lots of beautiful photos. Especially of birds.

                  Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” -- ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at tomwatsoATgmailDOTcom (NB that’s “watso” not “watson”)

ALVA WOOD’S ARCHIVE

                  I have acquired (don’t ask how) the complete archive of the late Alva Wood’s collection of satiric and sometimes wildly funny columns about a mythical village’s misadventures. I’ve put them on my website: http://quixotic.ca/Alva-Wood-Archive. You’re welcome to browse. No charge. (Although maybe if I charged a fee, more people would find the archive worth visiting.)