The weather doesn’t always cooperate for holidays. Easter is, at heart, a celebration of spring—life after death. Around here this holiday has been accompanied by fits and starts in warmer weather and instead of warmer it’s actually colder again. Just a week ago there was snow in the air. Life’s that way; you don’t always know what to expect. I guess I’m still in hibernation mode. No matter the season, there never seems to be enough time to sleep. As a youth I always attended sunrise services on Easter. These days I regularly rise before the sun, so as long as I’m capable it’s like every day is Easter. But with work. Even on what many recognize as Easter—which overlaps with Passover this year—the Orthodox feel we have it too early, what with the Julian calendar still being in effect. It’s all a matter of how we look at time.
As much as I hate mowing, I admire the exuberance of grass. It’s ready to welcome the longer days by stretching toward the sun. Drinking in the plenteous rain. The dandelions have already begun to spread, opening their yellow eyes to all and sundry passing insects. Easter is a time to reflect on life returning after winter. And I can’t help but think of those in the southern hemisphere for which Easter falls in the autumn. The theology fails to match the seasons as life springs up just as winter is about to set in. The Christian viewpoint is a northern one, keyed to our seasons. The weather doesn’t always observe the prevailing theology.
Around here Good Friday was a fine, sunny day. Like most of the fine, sunny days it was a work day. Now it’s a chillier Easter, the Saturday between being a mix with some rain. When I was young—eagerly awaking for sunrise services, which I often had a hand in designing—I marveled at how the weather often seemed to cooperate. Now as I think back, I remember coming out of Good Friday services into the incongruous sunshine and finding many an Easter still bearing an unseasonal chill. Weather is, of course, a local and global phenomenon. One person’s chilly Easter is too hot for someone further away. And for yet others the onset of autumn. Globalism has taught us to look further, to think in terms of how others might be experiencing this world. Easter seems an appropriate time to do just that.