Happy Easter!Memories of Easter Sunday and Easter Monday, real holidays (holy days) when everything is transformed, finally everything comes together and all the waiting is worth it. Childhood lessons in death and resurrection, remembered with much gratitude.
The day dawned bright and early on Easter Day, when everything was made new. The long waiting was over and the clean house on Serlby Rise felt warm and welcoming.
On the polished, dark wood sideboard stood a line of chocolate eggs, wrapped in bright foil and adorned with satin bows.
Why don’t Easter eggs have bows around them anymore?
A special treat was one from my godmother, which had my name iced onto the chocolate. How magical was that?
Breakfast was boiled eggs. We all recognised our own egg because dad had drawn cartoons of our faces on them!
Later, we would eat roast dinner and for tea there’d be cakes which mam had baked. That day was a feast day, a real holiday (holy day), for Jesus was alive and everything was made new.
For me, even better than chocolate eggs, personalised boiled eggs, roast dinner and cakes were my new shoes. Easter day was the day I wore my new brown sandals with their lovely leathery smell, shiny buckles and crepe soles. Whatever the weather, this was the day for summer shoes, which I would carry on wearing until September.
I’d known about them for weeks and would open their box, unwrap the tissue paper and delight in their beautiful newness.
When we’d eaten our breakfast, and were washed and dressed as smartly as possible, mam took me to church. There, a miracle had occurred. On Good Friday, I’d been glad to leave the dark, sad, tomblike space to get out into the sunshine, but on Easter Day we walked into dazzling light. The scent of flowers and beeswax hit us first and then the sight of Arum lilies, candlelight and polished wood, brass and silver.
Everything was clean, fresh and bright. The contrast couldn’t have been starker and that childhood lesson has taught me more about death and resurrection than anything I learnt at theological college.
I am so grateful to the women (I assume they were all women) who worked so hard in church to make Easter so real and meaningful.
In our house, the holiday (holy day) didn’t end at bedtime on Easter Sunday. Easter Monday was a day for packing up a picnic and getting into the countryside. It felt and still feels like a very welcome rule that we have to be outside, enjoying spring and new life, whatever the weather and happily for me, it always involved Hot Cross Buns. That’s a rule I’m happy to carry on keeping!
That’s what I’ll be doing this Easter Monday.
What about you? What memories do you have of Easter?
However you celebrate Easter and whatever it means to you, have a very happy and blessed time.
Roller coaster memories of the first Covid – 19 lockdown in England, with shock, anger, fear, worry, kindness, sadness, gratitude and admiration.
You can’t do that!
Once, there was a vicar of a group of English villages with eleven churches who shouted at the radio “You can’t do that!” she wasn’t prone to shouting at newscasters, so why yell that day? The reporter had announced plans to forbid everyone over seventy years old from going outside. It wasn’t a dystopian nightmare; it was real life unfolding in March 2020. The deadly Covid 19 virus invasion was underway. We needed a battle plan.
Lockdown.
Seventy-year-olds weren’t banned from leaving their homes, but on March 23rd at 8:30pm a full lockdown was announced by Prime Minister Boris Johnson. We had to stay home immediately, even though lockdown didn’t take full effect till March 26th, which led this vicar into lasting confusion.
Rules about church took time to clarify. Custodians of church keys dashed to and from their beloved buildings, unlocking and locking doors with each changing instruction. Weekday services were set up then cancelled following the decree that church lockdown wasn’t just for Sundays.
The vicar, along with everyone else had to reinvent her life. Church would carry on, but not as anyone knew it. Overnight, she went from being surrounded by people morning, afternoon and evening, to wondering how to maintain contact, care and worship.
Kindness.
Straightaway, kind, encouraging messages flowed to her. Friends posted her chocolate as soon as churches were closed. Another friend promised a weekly Sunday afternoon phone call and kept that promise. Jolly John Rutter music arrived, sent from a churchwarden. The doorstep became a place of gifts; eggs, beer, flowers …
One day a group of ducklings arrived at the front door. They’d got separated from mother duck and the kindly, traffic free road allowed them to waddle across safely.
You Tube is for everyone!
Classed as a key worker, she needed and wanted to keep going. The villages needed a vicar. With the help and encouragement of her husband and son (ie, you’ve got to do this, you haven’t got any choice!) she set up a You Tube channel and published films of services from her study, along with hopeful messages, children’s stories and Easter activities. Yes, if you search You Tube hard enough, you will find a video of her demonstrating how to make a Palm Cross from paper!
Along with everyone else, she was hurtled out of every comfort zone.
Unmute!
This vicar had never used any video calling system, but Zoom became a lifeline for meetings, evening prayer, Bible study and entertainment.
She looked forward to weekly family quizzes, friendly get togethers and Pilates classes. In the summer, she celebrated their ruby wedding anniversary on a family zoom to which everyone wore the grandest hats they could find!
Working via video, zoom and telephone was hard work. Conversations were not shared in the same way; the vicar couldn’t read the room or sense how someone was by the way they arrived or where they sat. She hopes that those things aren’t lost now that we’ve adopted online meetings as normal.
Sadness and anxiety.
Covid 19 brought with it disease and death, isolation and fear and this vicar felt shock, sadness and anxiety.
My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart. Psalm 73
What was sad?
Funerals where she hadn’t been able to visit the family and which were attended by very few people, sitting far apart and not being able to talk before or after the service.
Postponed weddings. Who wanted to get married with only three people in attendance?
Talking to a man on the phone while he sat in the hospital car park where his wife was dying. That was the closest he could get.
Very vulnerable people living alone while their health, mobility and confidence declined.
Awareness of so much suffering.
She was anxious about her children, who were all key workers.
She was helped by this verse from psalm 73, which she made her Covid motto:
“My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart.”
Awesome admiration.
The vicar was bowled over by the wonderful church and community spirit. Straight away, things got organised.
Village coordinators made sure that everyone was in contact.
Shopping and prescriptions were delivered.
Pubs delivered meals on wheels.
Mothering Sunday flowers and cards appeared on doorsteps.
Church craft and story kits were delivered to children.
Hospital scrubs were sewn.
Easter gardens and decorations appeared in churchyards.
Countless phone calls were made.
Gratitude.
This vicar knew she had it easy. She lived in a vicarage with a big garden. The weather was beautiful in those early lockdown weeks, and she had plenty of good, green places to walk. In the Vicarage garden was an apple tree and she would arrange drinks and dinner dates at “Ye Olde Apple Tree!”
No prizes for guessing that this vicar is me. It’s been quite emotional and difficult to write this. I wonder if we’ve even begun to realise the effect that lockdown had on us.
I want to express my sincere thanks and admiration for The East Trent Group of Churches, who kept church alive and cared for so many people with cheerfulness and creativity.
I’ve only talked about the early weeks of lockdown; there is so much more I can say about what happened later on!
Thank you also to my family and friends, who’d have thought we’d live through that?
Now, in retirement, I wonder what I would volunteer to do if it happened again? If I’m allowed out that is! What are your thoughts and memories of lockdown?
Where shall we wander next?
Wander well,
Mandy.
Things I love:
Warm spring weather.
Ducklings.
Open churches.
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Childhood memories of Sunday School in the Christian season of Lent.
The photographs were taken in the first week of March.
I spotted this at Harwick Hall (Derbyshire) Sculpture trail.
Walking to Church.
The afternoon was chilly and the streets were quiet when I walked to the end of my road, past the phone box, across Gordon Road, up Hudson Street, past the Post box and turned right along Blue Bell Hill to St Bartholomew’s Church, which stood on a hill. Indeed, St Bartholomew’s Road, which led from Gordon Road to St Ann’s Well Road, is called Donkey Hill by anyone who knows it, because it is so steep. Still, living on Serlby Rise, I’d already gained height, so it was an easy walk.
It was a well-worn route for me and on Sunday afternoons I sensed the lonely quietness of it all. Shops were closed and no one was playing out. There certainly weren’t crowds flocking to church, but I walked on, clutching my penny for the collection, held safely in my glove.
Trees grew in the churchyard.
Arriving.
As always, I could see one light shining through a window when I got near to the heavy, open church door and the first thing I did when I walked into the dim, musty building was turn towards that light and kneel down. That candle, which was never allowed to go out, told us that Jesus was there, in the form of a communion wafer which had been consecrated by the priest. I was taught to reverence that presence from a young age.
This belief takes this Bible verse seriously:
Jesus took bread, and when he had said the blessing, he broke it and gave it to the disciples “take and eat” he said, “this is my body.” Matthew’s Gospel chapter 26, verse 26. New Jerusalem Bible.
But is Jesus present just in the blessed bread or does it have to be shared and eaten? That’s a topic for another sort of blog!! What do you think?
When I reached the central aisle of the church, I bowed towards the altar before finding my seat. Once, I got in trouble for going near to the altar, because only the priest was allowed there. I don’t suppose any woman, never mind child, ever crossed the forbidden line in St Bartholomew’s!
Sunday School teachers.
I will be forever grateful to my Sunday School teachers, a small gang of ladies whom I thought were ancient, but they were probably about forty! They’d known me since I was born and some of them kept a close, caring eye on me into early adulthood. They also reprimanded me for refusing to take off my gloves to write, but that building was cold!!
Still, for most of the year, Sunday School wasn’t my favourite part of church. I preferred the rare occasions when I went with my mam to “proper church” when I didn’t understand what was happening, but I wanted to. I remember everyone singing a hymn about angels and wishing I could read all the words in the hymn book and the vicar in the pulpit saying that Jesus died to save us from our sins. What did that mean? I still don’t know, and apologies to my evangelical friends, but I don’t believe I deserve to be tortured to death and should be glad that Jesus took my punishment! There are lots of theories about atonement, which means being made one with God, being put right with God and for me, Jesus absorbed all of human life, the best and worst, bits and took them into God, so now nothing can separate us.
March flowers promise new life.
Anyway, back to Sunday School.
Witches and Giants.
There was one time of year when Sunday School was my favourite thing and that’s why I’m remembering it now.
Lent is the forty days of preparation for Easter. I don’t remember giving up any treat for Lent as a child, but I remember the lessons I learnt.
In Lent, the vicar at church took Sunday School and one year he told us stories about witches and another year stories about giants. Wonder of wonders, he gave us all a sticker for each story we heard, to fix into the right place on a card!
I don’t remember any names of the witches and giants or what they did, but I do remember someone going on a journey and encountering dangerous, tricky characters along the way who tried to thwart them and make them give up.
Lent is a journey.
I am thankful for those stories which sparked my imagination and grew resilience in my young life.
Some journeys are hard.
I love the purple season of Lent, with its challenges, its lengthening spring days and promise of Easter.
Wandering Through The Land Of Nod. 