Lights in the dark

On Easter I woke to the dark disorientation of 2 a.m., pulled on some clothes and got ready for church. My friend Zoryana and her uncle met me outside. The moon was distended and red, and my street, weirdly awake, a row of yellow windows. We walked a long time, it seemed, before we heard full-throated singing.

Zoryana gave me a scarf to cover my head, which I kept tugging on agitatedly as it fell off. (“Very nice hair,” she said, knotting the scarf again for me, “but very slippery.”) We made our slow way into the church’s small sanctuary, which was cramped with people; the walls crammed with gold paintings of Mary, Christ and the saints, and brass fixtures holding candles. Before the crowd I made out life-size, painted wooden figures representing the crucifixion. The priest’s singing voice, intoning a prayer, reverberated. A choir picked up the response – women draped in white shawls.

Afterwards we joined a line of people curving from the building around its lawn. Everyone was presenting their baskets of food to be blessed – eggs, sausage, and the traditional Easter cake: a cylindrical, rainbow-sprinkled affair, like an elongated cupcake. Also like a penis. The people placed candles through the cakes, and soon the lawn was a ring of small lights. Cold, on a sharp edge of caffeinated alertness, I watched the warm pink glow of palms as they cupped the flames to keep from going out.

When the prayers ended, the priest walked around the long line, ringing bells. A second time, he circled with a basin of holy water, dashing it into faces. It was cold and sprayed my glasses, and had a sweet aroma I couldn’t place. We kissed each other three times on the cheek and exchanged, Kristos voskrees – Voyeestymu voskrees! (Christ is risen; truly he has risen.)

Darkness and light – it’s not surprising to see such primal themes in any culture’s traditions. And yet I was surprised by how much this service affected me – how these small lights could strike in me so much joy.

I remember a lot of joy in our Easters growing up, the hymns, the white-draped cross. But more than this, I remember my near-hysterical sense of relief. The Good Friday service was always dramatic, and to me, frightening. Twelve candles lined the altar. As someone read the Bible, and as each disciple abandoned Jesus, the candles were gradually removed.

Sitting in the dark stretched out eternally. It isolated one completely. I was 11 or 12, but I am sure I understood – with a clarity very exacting, and very cold – what the world was with God dead. It was death.

In his writings on the Resurrection, Joseph Campbell emphasizes the metaphorical importance of Jesus joining with, at once, all humanity and all divinity. “We, similarly, are to identify with the eternal life within us,” he said in one interview. “The symbol [of the cross] at the same time tells us of God’s willing acceptance of the cross – that is to say, participation in the trials and sorrows of human life in the world. So that He is here within us – not by way of a fall or a mistake, but with rapture and joy.” 

The cross, he says, is not simply a symbol of divinity. It is a true crossing: God fusing with humanity, humanity with the divine.

Somewhere in my adolescence, when I would try to think of God, I found myself locked in Good Friday, in the solitary dark of that sanctuary. What alienates us from God – and I write this still with all my agnostic doubt and cold intellectualism – is that we believe ourselves separate from the world, and from each other. To see ourselves in others reflected, connected by the same animating energy, is to see the God in us.  

Dear Reader, I hope you don’t find this pseudo-profound religious rhapsodizing inappropriate in a blog. But thinking about this soothes my own alienation, so I thank you for bearing with it.

The eastern sky began to lighten as we walked home. Zoryana and I talked about the symbols and rituals of Easter, how they were taken and re-worked from pagan tradition. The penis cake, it turns out, is intentionally phallic – yet another symbol of fertility at this time of bountiful baby animals. Zoryana also told me that many saints are actually pagan gods in disguise, so as to ease over the transition to Christianity. “But as for me,” she said simply, “it is always the same God.”