I remember: Easter edition

The empty tomb, Headington Quarry Church, Oxford

I remember walking to Port Meadow with Seth and Kayla before dawn on a gray Oxford morning, carrying communion bread and grape juice for our sunrise service. I remember sharing communion, and later pieces of a gigantic Cadbury chocolate bar, with thirty of my fellow American students and the professors who lived with and loved and shepherded us.

I remember hunting plastic eggs in our living room every year, running around in ruffly church dresses and white tights, breaking each egg open to find candy or a penny or a dime inside. I remember Dad’s glee at watching us search out every hiding place, and two baskets sitting on the fireplace – mine yellow, Betsy’s pink – with green stripes on their handles, filled with crackly Easter grass and goodies Mom had picked out especially for us.

I remember Mom hanging plastic eggs on the slender Chinese willow in our front yard, colorful harbingers of Easter bobbing and swaying in the West Texas breezes.

I remember ham glazed with brown sugar, fluffy mashed potatoes with lots of butter, hot rolls from the oven and fresh green beans, passing dishes around the table with the three people I loved most.

I remember dark stage makeup and racks full of costumes and long hallways full of people mumbling their lines or studying the words to a dozen songs, the story arcing from Bethlehem to John the Baptist to Galilee, to Jerusalem to Golgotha and finally the empty tomb. I remember weeks of rehearsal, rehearsing in jeans and then in costume, memorizing every word to every song.

I remember my dad changing roles every year, from disciple to thief to wise man to Simeon, holding the baby Jesus and singing:  I have seen your glory. I remember watching Jesus perform miracles and break bread with His disciples and then hang from the cross (and gasping in shock, once, as he nearly fell off the cross). I remember the soldiers’ yells and Mary’s tears and the centurion’s quiet confession: “Surely this man was the Son of God.”

I remember Pastor Gary, tall in a light gray suit, raising his arms to the congregation and saying in his quiet, gentle voice, “He is risen!” And the thunder of voices answering back, “He is risen indeed.” And then the choir bursting out in the Hallelujah Chorus, because they could not keep silent any more.

I remember Val singing “Arise, My Love” in the dim Highland auditorium, his tenor voice soaring on the last notes like the joy of Easter itself, feeling it throb through my soul and nerves and fingertips: The grave no longer has a hold on you.

I remember a quiet Holy Saturday in East Oxford, and opening my window at twenty to midnight to hear a joyful cacophony of church bells ringing through an indigo sky.

I remember marching from Folly Bridge up to St Aldates, holding yellow and green balloons aloft and singing, with fifty or more others, at the top of my lungs, not caring who saw us because on this day we are fools for Christ, fools for Him who has defeated death once and for all.

I remember visiting Headington Quarry Church, where C.S. Lewis is buried, and looking at the lush green grass and the tulips and daffodils blowing over the graves, and thinking: Death does not have the last word here.

The graveyard at Headington Quarry Church

Today I remember the triumph, so long ago, of life over death, and I give thanks.

He is risen, indeed.

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