Hello everyone,
It doesn’t seem right to wish you a ‘Happy’ Holy Week – perhaps a blessed one or a special one would be more appropriate… or maybe ‘thoughtful’.
Our accompanying weather at Easter is not the northern hemisphere spring. Our New Zealand autumn imagery suggests another way to look at Easter – an Easter with a much longer gestation time. The golden leaves fall to the ground in autumn as Jesus was cut down and ‘fell’ into the ground of the tomb. The original Easter transformation has been sold to us as a three day wonder. We know, however, that the time between the ‘death’ of golden and bright vermilion leaves and the green bursting forth of Spring is months long.
This can remind us that for any transformation to be worthwhile it needs to take time. It is not as simple as just a day between the suffering of Good Friday and the rising of Easter Sunday.
We grow when we suffer – or at least we can grow if we are prepared to. (We can also become bitter and twisted and shrivelled as all compassion within us rots to nothing.) It costs us to embrace suffering. It hurts to let it teach us – usually uncomfortable truths about ourselves, surprising facts we did not know before yet have lived with for years.
Like Christmas, Easter is associated with holidays as well as hot cross buns and chocolates eggs so we can miss the underlying seriousness of this season. Let’s not this year.
Decide carefully what you need to do this year – take a break as the Moderator advised last week, attend on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday or Easter Sunday or all three – decide carefully what you need to do – then do it with joy and abandon! And joyfully, turn your clocks back on Saturday night – we don’t often get the chance to turn the clocks back!
Celebrate, relax, be quiet, shout out. Whatever you choose to do, do it deliberately and carefully and so have a specially thoughtful Easter.
Susan
P.S. The exterior door codes have been changed. If you use the doors to the Church and Hall from the car park, please email the office (or visit the office) for the changed code. (Do not phone, codes will not be given out over the phone). People on rosters will have the front door code sent to them with the reminder.
To view the full newsletter please click on this link: http://mailchi.mp/2659b908ce5b/this-weeks-newsletter-from-st-andrews-on-the-terrace-1378897
