| 4. | belonging characteristically (usually fol. by to): an expression peculiar to Canadians. |
| 5. | belonging exclusively to some person, group, or thing: the peculiar properties of a drug. |
Anyway, this is holy week in the Greek Orthodox Church, which despite assimilating to the commonly used Gregorian calendar in order to have Christmas on the 25th of December, still insists on using that old standby, the Julian calendar, to calculate Easter services. The result is an Easter that is always 1-4 weeks later than American Easter, giving me a great source of confused pride as a child.
I am not a practicing Orthodox Greek. I am not a practicing Greek in most senses that don't have to do with food, which to its credit, does count for a lot. I am not even fully Greek. But mostly, I am not fully religious, and this is a quandary when it comes to holy week, because, growing up, it was pretty special. There are services every night and we went to all of them; it was one of the few times in the year that anyone from the congregation did readings, and my sister and I were often honored with this task, trotting up to the front of the church to use our best diction in the name of God. On Good Friday there are services all day long, and we would get out of school especially to attend, joining all the little old ladies in decorating the epitaphion with hundreds of carnations while Father Nick shushed us and jangled the censor so that tufts of sweet smoke enshrouded the almost-life-size cutout of Jesus on his cross. In the evening, we marched around the church singing a beautiful dirge, we went to sleep with heavy hearts.
And then Saturday, the somber baking of the braided bread, the deep-red dying of dozens of eggs, going to sleep in our slips and tights with our hair already done so that my mother could wake us up before the midnight service, slip our dresses and hats on and prod us sleepily to the car. Or, when we got older, if we were lucky, Mamma would do our hair late at night before we left and we'd get to catch a few clandestine sketches on Saturday Night Live. The quiet, dark drive to church, the service full of mystery and candlelight while we sang in the choir and tried (unsuccessfully for my sister one year) not to let our perfectly curled, waist-length hair catch fire. Our hunger from fasting all evening was teased by the garlicky smell of lamb from the kitchen directly below the altar for the dinner we would all eat at 1am. And after all that, exhausted sleep followed by Easter Sunday afternoons, with family and egg hunts, easter baskets and more lamb, and the game with the red eggs that bestowed upon one child good luck for the entire year.
I miss my family from this era - the grandparents and aunts who are gone. I miss the ceremony of it all, and I miss the unquestioning that allowed it such weight. It is no wonder that I feel odd this week; more lacking in purpose than usual with none of my other plans seeming to fit. Not even the one involving the circus - another oddity of this week that shall have to wait for the next posting.
Beautiful!
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, I love the description of going to bed, nearly ready for later services, and then your Mom waking you up after a few hours' sleep to go out for what sounds like a really magical sort of surreal event.
ReplyDeleteI never had any of the religious parts of what you're talking about while I was growing up - I didn't know what Easter was celebrating, besides eggs and candy, until maybe 4 years ago - but there was a definite feeling and tone to the traditions that now have really fallen away. A lot of them had to do with being small, when everything else seems so big, and that, in and of itself, lends a certain magic to many things, I think.
The more I think about those things, the same way you do, the more I conclude that there are obviously reasons for a lot of the traditions, but it becomes hard to just celebrate something blindly when you don't necessarily agree with the roots of it. I think it's why traditions change from generation to generation a bit - we take the elements that do work for us and we make them our own. It takes a while to do, and it's probably never quite as fun as when we were 5 years-old, but I like to think that we work to find what's personally significant along the way.
I think we crave community and continuity. I've never been part of a faith at all, but I was very sad when my friends stopped going on yearly new years and thanksgiving trips.
ReplyDeleteI've gotten into chrimblemas on orders of Sam, and I think it's pretty cool.
I love this!
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