Our wandering away from the habits of church and Christianity is almost always a peaceful wander. Our settledness with being Jesus-y at our best, and vaguely hopeful at our worst is almost always fine. Except for the days when it's not. And Easter Sunday is most assuredly a day when it's not.
I am not dying to be at church. I do not miss my messy judgey heart at the beachside baptisms. My faith in the resurrection would not be strengthened by passing a basket - a basket of bread, a basket of eggs, a basket for tithes. In fact, all of those make me angry.
And yet. And yet. And yet.
I am sad, so sad, that I don't have it in me to be giving my smalls what I was given: the storybook faith that grew and evolved to this place. For how can they get here, a place I love being almost every other day of the year, if they don't first travel through there? Through all the places I went first? How will they know about light overcoming dark? How will they know that death has no victory, no sting? How will they know that Life Wins, every time, because Jesus won, that one time?
The corner of my heart that believes in a God that notices each of us, that notices me - that corner believes that God notices my smalls, knows them and loves them and will bring them to where they need to be. But the corner of my heart that scoffs at that other corner is certain if not me, then... then they're fucked. Oddly, that corner is also the corner where the faith I am glad I outgrew lives. The corner where I've packed away the part where we believed we could somehow get something so catastrophically wrong that eternity would shift. Why do I unpack that box? Ever? Sigh.
This weekend, we celebrated the marriage of a friend. She has married her beloved, another woman we have come to know, and for whom we are thankful. And as they agreed in front of us, and their friends and their family, I cried as I so often do at weddings. But I cried, not just moved by the hope that each twosome brings to each wedding, but moved by the miracle that these two women could choose each other, and in public, in front of anyone who cared to join, be legally married. When I was my children's ages, this was impossible. Impossible. But yesterday it wasn't.
Those who chose not to celebrate with our friends - people who should have been in the middle of it, dancing with their daughter, cheering this love - they chose not to believing that's what God thinks they should do. They missed out on the sweet joy of yesterday because... because in their time and their world, God would rather they quit on their own sweet girl than carry on with her if she's going to love another sweet girl.
This isn't why we don't do church or Christianity anymore. Not exactly.
And yet. And yet. And yet.
It is the part (a part) of the story I don't want my smalls to learn. A part of their inheritance that they'd best not be bequeathed.
This weekend was all kinds of light and dark, all kinds of dead and nearly dead. And so today, I cling to my heart's belief that the resurrection is real, that Life Wins. That whoever Jesus is, his story is still True (if not accurate), and therefore, the story I'll build my hope around. The story I'll hope my own life finds a way to tell to our smalls, in its own small way.
One way or the other, this Sunday, it still matters: He is Risen.
