I am ashamed to admit that one of the most provocative dates on the Christian calendar quickly came and quickly went for me this year. Normally I am extremely religious, in spite of myself. But this year I didn’t attend a Passion play (being straight up honest – they weird me out), didn’t hear an Easter musical of any sort (I would’ve settled for collective worship – there are some GOOD hymns regarding this important day in Christendom, we didn’t sing a one of them), and our Pastor preached on bringing “hope to the hopeless” (which left me feeling neither hopeful, nor hopeless).
I’m going to take a guess here that the problem lies within me. This Easter I just felt extremely distracted by all the new clothes, new people, not enough room at church, loud crying babies in stereo (that’s the last time I sit in the middle!) bad music….sadly the closest I came to being spiritual was the Wednesday before when we had Communion at staff meeting.
This has been such a year of transition. My life was no where close to perfect before, but I don’t ever remember being so emotionally & mentally schizophrenic. I have literally felt myself change moment by moment – react and try to curtail those spur of the moment reactions. And on a day when the focus is on resurrection, I felt to myself dead on the inside.
In being gut-wrenchingly honest, I don’t know if I’m just in a blah, hard place – or if spiritually there is something wrong with me. This year has taxed me emotionally, mentally, spiritually – even physically. I have often felt and still feel like an onion that is being peeled: layer by layer that protective covering is coming off, and I’m being stripped down to a place of reality; and more than once am making those around me cry in the process.
In a moment of reality I can admit that while I work in a religious environment full time and now part time as well, I just don’t feel all that spiritual. I feel very passive and hate it.
Not too surprisingly, Pastor (or rather, big Jesus through Pastor) has left me a spark of hope. I have my “daily bookmarks” folder which houses the websites that I visit…well, obviously daily. The Boston Globe has a spot called “The Big Picture” which, being the fan of photography that I am, I absolutely love. Amazingly, that small flicker of a flame inside me jumped a little in seeing pictures from around the world as other countries celebrated Easter.
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/04/holy_week.html
