Two years ago, I sat in a stiff polyester glider in a dark room: monitors beeping and blinking, alerting me to every moment that my six-day old baby dropped her breathing and heart rate.  I tried to sing the hymns of Pascha, that my exhausted, anxious mind could remember, to this little baby experiencing her first Pascha in a hospital room. 

I smiled into my phone as my husband FaceTime’d me from the feast letting me say, “Christ is Risen” to my other two little girls and our family and friends.  Pressing “End Call” I burst in to tears and I gave myself a minute to let all the tears fall and then turned back to the little babe in my arms and sang “The Angel Cried.”

I had tried to watch a Paschal service livestream earlier in the night but had to turn it off when my mind couldn’t focus and I needed to just be with my baby in a chair in the dark singing hymns. 

That year really changed my view of Pascha.  And perhaps that’s what’s gotten me through the very strangeness of this year without a Pascha.  But I will actually be doing the inverse of what happened that year as I’ll be one of three people allowed into my church to conduct the Paschal liturgy. And I will be singing all of the hymns in an empty room by myself.

As you’ll hear in the forthcoming full episode entitled “Storge,” Natalie and I will discuss the idea of the Greek word storge: the natural human love described by C.S. Lewis as “comfortable like a well-worn pair of slippers.”

I had originally planned to talk in my rabbit trail, about my children and the storge I feel for them: this familiar, nostalgic feeling-driven love.  Life’s taken a turn since then to say the least and now I want to share my thoughts on the storge we often experience with the Paschal feast.

I discovered my own Paschal storge two years ago singing the hymns in the hospital by myself.  I sang them over and over until “Rejoice, rejoice O Pure Virgin” came alive and the words held the joy of Pascha I had only ever experienced in church.  But it was only after I was forced to let go of the traditions, the familiar parts that surround Pascha and really make Pascha, that I could find the true joy lying underneath all of those comforting rituals that signaled Pascha for me.

My love of Christ and his resurrection have been put into a box that I could open once a year and feel a happiness akin to opening a birthday present: happiness around getting dressed up, the anticipation of going to church in the middle of the night, and the hunger for a feeling of excitement all bottled up in to one event I could count on to make me sure that God was real and the resurrection too because now I feel it.

This year my storge for Pascha has yet again been placed on an altar to be refined.  I don’t think I can do away with all the little traditions like Pascha baskets and dressing up, nor do I really think we should.  But I am being given the opportunity to offer these things back and say, these things are not the only places to contain Pascha.  Not even the service does that.

For my love of Pascha to grow beyond the earthly familiarity I have for it, I have to truly accept that Christ’s resurrection is beyond these ideas of time.  It is always and forever a reality.  There are moments to sit in the events that lead up to His resurrection. To see the pain and brokenness of the God of all having to be slain. 

Holy week and Pascha invite us to partake in the perpetual reality of Christ’s death and resurrection. But that isn’t contingent on us having brought a basket to a feast.  It requires our lamps to be lit, our garments to be washed.  And it requires our own crucifixion. 

I say all of this not because I want to be some sort of ultra-pious, monastic person who doesn’t even participate in the feast of Pascha and all of the rich traditions of our church culture.  But because I would hate to spend my whole life believing that this earthly love of the familiarity of Pascha is all I need. 

I don’t know yet what Pascha refined will mean but I suppose it’s best if it doesn’t have a specific meaning or time I can pinpoint: but when the mystery of Pascha and the joy of the resurrection can be found all around me in familiar and unfamiliar ways: when I can find Him in the deaths just as much as in the resurrections.