Thursday, April 13, 2006
Holy week hiatus.
The events Christians commemorate this week are deeply personal to me. They also happen to be the parts of my religious life that have never felt integrated — or perhaps integratable — into my being a Unitarian Universalist. (This is a sociological claim, not a theological one.) And because my wife is Episcopalian, I have largely taken to celebrating Holy Week with her. Tonight I'll attend the Maundy Thursday service at King's Chapel; tomorrow Mrs Philocrites and I will attend the Veneration of the Cross liturgy at the chapel of the Society of St John the Evangelist (the Episcopal monastery in Harvard Square); and early Sunday morning we'll be back at SSJE (if we're not absolutely exhausted) for the pre-dawn Easter vigil. Later Sunday morning, I'll attend her congregation's festival eucharist and then help out with the Sunday school's Easter egg hunt. Then dinner, which we'll have spent much of Saturday preparing.
Which is to say that you shouldn't expect to hear much from me until Monday.
Copyright © 2006 by Philocrites | Posted 13 April 2006 at 7:45 AM
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Philocrites
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Commentary by Chris Walton on Unitarian Universalism, liberal Christianity, American religion, and liberal culture. Contact me.
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5 comments:
arulba:
April 14, 2006 03:37 AM | Permalink for this comment
Easter is the only celebration that I feel our UU church cannot mimic no matter how hard it tries. Our church adopted the flower ceremony based upon a very old Moravian tradition. I come from a family of Moravians and Moravian ministers. But it still doesn't cut it for me. So we go to the Methodist Church every year starting with Ash Wednesday, usually attend Maundy Thursday services although we didn't this year. But we are always there for Easter service. I used to be a member of the Methodist Church. But now I am a UU but consider myself to be a friend of a really cool little panentheistic, creation spirituality, reconciling Methodist community that is just a tad too far for us to attend every Sunday. The UU Church is great the rest of the year.
Philocrites:
April 14, 2006 07:47 AM | Permalink for this comment
How many of us there must be! And yet even as some of us slip out the doors for a week of unmistakably Christian worship, other people make their once-a-year appearance in a UU church precisely because they can't imagine going anywhere else.
Maybe I'll offer a post-Easter roll call and ask how many people went out and how many others came in just for Easter.
Peter Ruark:
April 14, 2006 10:53 AM | Permalink for this comment
I see my UU church has a sermon titled "Easter" this Sunday. One thing you can say about the UU on Easter is, if your church does observe it at all, you never quite know what you're going to get and it can be very interesting!
So I'm debating whether to a) celebrate adventure by going to my UU church and seeing what happens, b) celebrate family unity by going with my wife just this once to her theologically conservative "contemporary" church and put up with a "contemporary" Easter with big screens, Powerpoint visuals and loud music, or c) celebrate tradition by visiting one of the local mainline churches for the first time in order to experience Easter the way I grew up with.
Ethan:
April 14, 2006 01:07 PM | Permalink for this comment
I have my own feelings on UU Easter which lead me to be the opposite of those folks that only attend church on Easter and Christmas.
kim:
April 15, 2006 12:39 AM | Permalink for this comment
It's the Tradition thing, isn't it?
I was raised Unitarian (and then UU). We did the Flower Communion every Easter when I was a kid. I love it. The church I've been going to for about 15 years has been doing it at the end of the year (May-June) for years, but this year it's at Easter! I'm so glad! I even volunteered to be worship associate for it because I feel the Flower Communion BELONGS at Easter. It always felt awkward later in the year.
It really is whatever you grew up with. The "smells and bells" stuff repells me.
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