It’s Easter Sunday. It still looks like winter with snow piled four feet high  in the back where the plow dumped snow for the last four months. And it’s still too cold to leave my parka at home. But, a few purple crocuses dare to peek from the ground and I just saw a very fat robin digging beneath a shrub. Joy, oh joy! It is the time of rebirth and resurrection.

I never tire of this mountain landscape or thanking God  who has wonderfully orchestrated my life. I  ask myself more than once:   How in the world  did  I get here to central  Idaho from the Bronx? You see, I grew up in the upper Bronx  during my childhood and adolescence in apartment buildings and on concrete streets. It was where my family came from Germany and where they instilled their faith and religion into me and my brothers.  Because of them, I have known and celebrated Easter for a very long time – except for when I did not.

Easter in my family was a religious holiday  in that it  meant going to  our neighborhood church and attending Mass which on Easter was always a “High Mass”, which meant it was longer than the normal hour  service which meant that we kids had to  really sit still and not squirm on the hard wooden pews or suffer the consequences of our mother’s steely eyeball pinioning us into proper attention.  Or worse later on. I actually loved the heightened pomp of these Masses: the acolytes hovering near the priest, the candles and the golden, swinging censers which sent out clouds of cloying smoke. I always came with a prayer book and later a missal and of course the de rigeur accessory of every Catholic schoolgirl – a pearl or silver rosary – looped  just so over my hands. The missal gave me reading material when I was bored and it was probably there I actually learned the content of the Gospels more than from the priest’s homily. Of course I had no idea what was going on at the altar with the priests and attendants, especially before Vatican  2 when all we saw from pew seats  was the backs of the celebrants chanting in Latin.   (The Latin Mass was my first language instruction. By osmosis a lot of it just seemed to stick to my brain). After Vatican  2, when the priest faced the congregation and celebrated in English, it was so radical that many Catholics were upset. It was no longer familiar.

But before church, the most exciting event was to find an Easter basket filled with shredded green  paper grass and a large, gold foil wrapped chocolate rabbit, some colored eggs and jelly beans scattered about, perhaps a coloring book and best of all, brand new crayon! While younger brother gobbled off the rabbits’ ears, I couldn’t wait to open up the box of 24, look at each beautiful, crisp  Crayola, like exotic fruit. My mother sometimes put in a jar of bubbles with the stern warning: Outside only. Not on the furniture!  I knew it was my parent, not the fairy tale  Osterhaase, who’d left the basket near my bed because her smiles and giggles always gave her away. We never hunted for eggs  because our  basement apartment had no backyard except for a   concrete pad and you couldn’t very well hide eggs outside on the sidewalks ! Egg hunts were not part of our tradition.

We walked several blocks to church as a family. April in the Bronx was often rainy, cold, and miserable, but walk we did, not matter what. That’s what umbrellas and spring coats were for. Peter wore his new Sunday suit because he’d always outgrown last year’s. “It itched like crazy, “ he told me recently. It took weeks before the stiffness wore off. I in turn wore a new dress bought just for Easter and still remember the blue sailor dress with its square, cape-like collar that dwarfed my shoulders. I felt terribly grown up in that dress and tried to wear it all the time. And of course, there were hats to go with the new dress. Sometimes I got a bandeau covered in daisies or roses. Sometimes it was a straw boater with ribbons. And sometimes, as a teen I’d choose one with a short flouncy veil because my cousin boasted one  like it. It often hugged my scalp like a vise, itched like crazy  and gave me a headache, but a new hat every Easter, just like the other girls had,  made me feel less gawky and shy. My father never went to church without a suit, usually brown, with a white shirt and  off color polyester tie. Mom wore her best, rarely new dress and last year’s hat and always seemed less cranky after church than before.

My parents were staunchly Catholic about some things like going to Mass, but in other ways they closed one eye to the church’s dictums. In particular, Mom served meatless meals on required holy days, but she never once fasted or asked us to do so.  My father dutifully knelt to pray in church but privately he had a lot of questions with no answers.  And silence.  My parents taught us our childhood prayer, but I received no instruction in the faith from them because that was the business of the nuns in school and priests at church. That was how my parents and their parents before them all the way back for generations  had learned.

Easter in my childhood had no meaning outside the rituals and teachings of  Roman Catholicism. I knew the facts of Jesus’ crucifixion, death and resurrection, that he died for my sins  and I loved the stories about Jesus’ life but there was no connection to the bigger story and meaning of salvation. I never heard of a personal relationship with Jesus or that God actually speaks to us. The Holy Ghost was an enigma, one I hardly remember being aware of. There was no Bible in our home or Scriptural references to the Bible.  It would have been unseemly in my parents’s eyes. They held priests and doctors in equally exalted positions and  never questioned their authority.  We children were expected to be equally respectful  and acquiescent and to remain innocent of things beyond our ken.

I think back to those  Easter days  in the Bronx, to the love of my parents and how simply we celebrated Christ’s Resurrection. I am grateful to them for seeding me with their faith, for all their prayers through the years and for being moral and godly parents. The journey from then in the Bronx to now  in New Meadows, Idaho, has been interesting, to say the least, but I can honestly say. Thank You, God for all of it.  Thank You God, for where I was and where I am now. Today I  celebrate and sing: Resurrexit, sicut dixit. Alleluia. Alleluia.

He is not here; He has risen, just as He said! Come, see the place where He lay..Matthew 28:6