Easter weekend, and knowing what day it is.
More about time – it seems to be following me about. It’s Good Friday, but it feels like Saturday. Why would that happen? Have I been a day ‘out’ all week? I spent the day with the tinies as usual on Monday. I spent the day with the tinies on Wednesday too – which, followed logically, would have today feeling like Wednesday. But no. Saturday. Why was I listening to The Reunion at 9.10, not Saturday Live? Because it’s not Saturday. Obviously.
Something to do with the weather maybe. Sunny. Bit of a chill wind, but warm in the sun. Time off weather – Saturday, clearly. But I don’t have a regular working week any more, so that link doesn’t work
And now we’re out of the oddness of the Easter weekend and its holidays. Or am I? I spent three hours – The three hours – in church on Friday, but my system held on to the fact that it was Saturday, not converting to the ‘logic’ that it was clearly Sunday. I went to the 6am service at Church on Easter Day, by which time I was securely back in sync with week-time. The early start that day meant that the first-thing dog walk was back in the almost dark again. Poo-picking by torch and street lamp, the cold biting at fingers and face – a pitch-back into January or February, but for the birdsong in the gloaming quiet. And then the circle around the fire, the prayers and readings which pick up the Biblical promise-points of salvation and resurrection; the Paschal candle lit, enflaming each of our candles as we moved into the dimness of the church; the blaze of light and sound at the acclamation of the risen Christ and the shift into more familiar Eucharistic liturgy.
I have been here before, many times. There should be no surprises. And yet here is the catch at the throat, the breath held, heart and gut and brimming tears responding to the now-ness of the truth of it. The astonishing, inexplicable pleating together of linear time which does not admit of separation between then and now, which makes those promise-points more than history, which makes the redemptive defiance-to-death of human judgement and the absolute absolving of resurrection every bit as now as it was then.
These are profound moments, when the eternal ‘now’ that is God, seeps insistently through the time-bound ‘now’ of our calendar-time. I am glad of them, for they are my grounding, my way-marks on the path that often seems hard to discern. They keep happening, so there must be a path beneath my foot-falls, however bizarre the syncopations in the rhythms of time.
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