Easter Gladness and Lupines

My son is many Spring Equinoxes past believing in the Easter Bunny, and yet I still haunt the aisles of drug stores in search of cream-filled eggs, jellybeans, and chocolate bunnies. I no longer secrete these items in baskets filled with neoprene-green grass, no longer leave the baskets like Moses in the bulrushes outside bedroom doors. Now, I merely arrange the offerings on our placemats at the breakfast table. And from years of retrieving squashed bunnies and stale jellybeans from dust-bunny-deep corners of my son’s bedroom (miracle of miracles, he has not inherited my passion for corn syrup-laden poison), I have whittled down the leavings. This past Easter, one slim white chocolate bunny with a collar of lavender flowers and one fudge-filled hedgehog jollied up the family breakfast table.

Like most children in our secular American society, my son is better acquainted with the Easter Bunny than Jesus Christ. He has never attended an Easter service, and though I begged him to accompany me to UU this past Sunday, he cheerfully passed, preferring to worship at St. Mattress and leaving the resurrection to more wakeful souls.

When my mother was alive, she fretted about her unbaptised grandson’s lack of religious literacy: that he couldn’t have explained the difference between Moses and Jesus, never mind between Jesus’ mother and Mary Magdalene. If you had pointed out that Easter is an ancient pagan holiday, that the First Council of Nicea which created Easter in 325 A.D. was really engaging in an act of theological piracy, stealing the goddess “Eostre,” from the Anglo-Saxon pagans—if you had spouted such talk, Gigi would have made a face.

Had I dragged my sleepy son through the blue doors of UU, he would not have left any the wiser regarding, say, why Mary Magdalene is sometimes pictured in blue, or why Jesus says “Noli me Tangere,” before ascending to heaven: instead, the intergenerational Easter service featured a dramatic reading of Miss Rumphius. The story followed Miss Rumphius from childhood to old age with our new lady minister reading from the illustrated book by Barbara Cooney and groups of children and adults cavorting beneath the pulpit.

In case you haven’t read the story, here is a summary: Miss Rumphius informs her elderly seafaring grandfather that when she grows up she wants to be like him, traveling the world, then returning home to a house by the sea. The grandfather explains that this is all well and good, but that she must also “do something to make the world more beautiful.” Miss Rumphius becomes a librarian, then rides camels through the desert. As an old woman, she fulfills her promise to her grandfather by scattering lupine seeds about the hillside near her Maine home, which grow into long-stemmed blue, pink and purple wildflowers. To dramatize the final scene, several folks in the middle pews held up real lavender lupines and waved them about. In homiletic summary, our minister explained that Miss Rumphius is a bit like Jesus Christ, doing her part to make the world more beautiful.

Conflating Miss R. and Jesus C. is a boneheaded connection only a Unitarian could make, and it would have caused my mother to make a major face. Which set me to reflecting on my own memories of Easter at the mock-Gothic Christian Science church on Wendell Avenue in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

Christian Scientists don’t make a fuss over most Christian holidays, but for some reason, they make an exception for Easter. The bare, white-walled nave was dotted with potted Easter lilies and the first and second readers on the podium were decked out in fancy vestments, almost like priests or cardinals. There were readings from the Gospels, and a plethora of Mary Baker Eddy’s syntactically tortured sentences about the immutability of the resurrected body. My sister and I, in matching Tweedledum and Tweedledee Easter outfits and sporting carnation corsages, struggled to keep our hands to ourselves and to arrest random attacks of pins and needles and charley horses. Our parents, rarely together anywhere let alone in church on a Sunday (my father joked that he worshipped at the church of the New York Times), flanked us at either side, dignified as Greek Kouri.

With the singing of “Easter Gladness,” a remake of the 1734 Easter staple “Jesus Christ is Risen,” by Charles Wesley, a wonderfully rousing hymn in c-major whose melody and single line, “Every day will be an Easter,” my mother loved to hum, with this thrilling finale, my sister and I were free to escape onto the grassy patch in front, usually “mud-luscious,” and seriously messing with our Easter finery. But Mom didn’t notice: she was too busy introducing Dad to the other doddering, blue-haired Christian Scientists. By the time we were home, she didn’t mention the mud on our bobby socks and patent leather shoes, occupied as she was with haranguing Dad to visit her practitioner, which seemed about as likely as Mary Baker Eddy making a phone call from the grave. (After Mary Baker Eddy’s death, a telephone was installed in her crypt at Mt. Auburn Cemetery, in case she was moved to communicate from the great beyond.)

My sister and I leapt out of our dresses and into our corduroys and returned to the serious business of sacking our Easter baskets, trading jelly beans and marshmallow peeps (she liked the black and orange ones, I preferred the reds and purples, and our bartering was as peaceable as the early transactions between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Mashpee). By afternoon’s end, there was nothing but neoprene-green grass in our baskets, and we were working on tummy aches severe enough to require the prayerful intercession of a practitioner. But we would have to heal ourselves, because Mom and Dad were busy ramping up their own version of The Thirty Years’ War--“Create in me a clean heart, Oh God,” my mom shouted down the stairs at the retreating figure of my dad--with Dad jumping in his silver Corvette Stingray and pealing out the driveway, and Mom minutes behind him in her blue Wagoneer.

There’s a scene at the end of the movie “Annie Hall” where Alvy Singer has broken up with Annie Hall, but realizes he still loves her. Alvy tells this joke about a guy who goes to a psychiatrist: “'Doc, my brother’s crazy; he thinks he’s a chicken,'” and the doctor says, 'Well, why don’t you turn him in,' and the patient says, 'Well, I would but I need the eggs.'" Alvy reflects that love is like that, crazy and irrational, but we keep going back to it because we need the eggs.

Religion, I often think, is like that too: crazy and irrational but we keep going back to it—filling up churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples on Easter and Passover and Ramadan--because we need the eggs, the pale out-of-the-blue proof that life is renewing itself, that every day really is a sort of resurrection.

My son’s white chocolate bunny with its collar of lavender flowers lies uneaten in the cupboard, and the hot-cross buns I served for Easter dinner are a mess of hardened icing, but I wake in the ever-lightening mornings humming “Every Day Will be an Easter,” and sometimes when I think of my mom, gone from the earth these five Spring Equinoxes, I imagine her riding her bike through the lupine-filled woods near her summer cottage on Georgian Bay in Canada, and I think she is a bit like Miss Rumphius, free at last to scatter the seeds of her Easter gladness.