Christos Anesti!

Tonight I will be attending the Orthodox service of Pascha which is known as "Easter" in the Western church.  It is a service that starts at 11:30pm and finishes around 2:30am after which there is a huge feast full of joy in celebration of the miracle of the Resurrection (or maybe the miracle is that God died in the first place!).  It's all very hard to get the head and heart around.

Sometimes the feasting stretches into the wee hours of Sunday morning because no one wants to go home, and when you do, the air is still and you can hear the occasional bird chirp as the sky begins to glow in the East.  It is the culmination of an entire year of fasts and feasts that sanctifies time and leads to this moment of experiencing time outside of time.

There is nothing else in my life that is quite like it and the thought that comes to mind today while waiting patiently for the evening to come is that it is something like those cathartic moments in a really good movie, book, play, or musical.  In those moments there are things that swell and things that contract, but mostly there is a deep down sense that what is most real is infinitely deeper than what we can know or fully perceive.


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