As I write this reflection, it’s late morning on April 15. A fresh pour of coffee sits to my left — as does Queen Fiona, comfortably napping on her pillow — and to my right, an open window admits the hums and chirps of a serene spring Saturday on a quiet side street in the heart of Grand Rapids, Michigan. As if by the product of elven magic, the trees have budded seemingly overnight; in fact, several trees across the street already appear to be mostly leafed. It’s peaceful, which means it’s a good time to write.
Last night was not peaceful. I just couldn’t get comfortable, so I kept waking up and at one point, I even decamped to the couch. Right around 4 a.m., when the thunderstorm rolled past. During the stretches of wakefulness last night, a few thoughts about life, Easter and everything bubbled within the soft grey goo betwixt my earholes.
Allow me to share.

Easter Past

At some point, the “Easter” of my childhood transformed from a family-themed chocolate festival into a religious duty. This ghost of memory asserted itself for the first time about a week ago, after I had mentioned to my friend Patrick that I had written a short essay that will be included in the forthcoming book provisionally titled Staying Catholic When You’ve Been Hurt in the Church, edited by Eve Tushnet and published through Wipf+Stock’s Cascade Press. A central motif in that essay, which addressed my experience in the diocesan vocations program in the early 2000s, focused on one central event: A brief moment of spiritual clarity obtained, interestingly, around noon on Good Friday, 2000, at the Legion of Christ novitiate in Cheshire, Connecticut.
That experience proved to be a pivot point of sorts. Before it, Easter was more of a family event: There’d be a luscious feast and chocolate bunnies and happy memories. And, yes, Easter Mass — but a church service was a small price to pay for all the fun and food.
After Cheshire, and as I got more deeply involved in the religious discipline of the Church, the “family stuff” yielded to spiritual renewal. I actually looked forward to Lent and its period of reflection and rejuvenation. I did retreats. I went to penance services. I prayed the Stations of the Cross. The Triduum presented a busy yet fulfilling experience: Although as chief sacristan and parochial master of ceremonies for my parish I was constantly on the go, I found my centering moments in the little places. Like the period of Eucharistic adoration on Thursday night, or the chance to take a pew with my breviary while the decorators planned where they were going to place the lilies. Or just sitting by the tabernacle after the 11:30 Mass on Easter Sunday, the church empty and everyone gone, to just be.

Easter Present

Yet it barely registered that this week was Holy Week.
The ghost of Easter Present whispers — barely audibly — that a lot of stuff changed in 2008, and over that year, religious discipline took a mighty fall. The nine-year anniversary of that transition draws nigh.
Divide 2008 into thirds. Late winter and early spring saw me twitchy. I wanted a change. That’s the period when I first started thinking about long-term life goals, and even achieved some by earning my open-water dive certification. But it wasn’t enough, so I began to think more actively about my social network. The late-spring-to-late-summer period witnessed a veritable explosion of new friends, new experiences and a wildly chaotic summer-long encounter with love, sex and dating.
The allure of hedonism, the restlessness of my early 30s and a changing portfolio of habits and goals pulled me away from the Church and toward a radically different lifestyle. By the end of the year, I had stopped regular religious observation. It wasn’t deliberate, and it wasn’t even so much a loss of faith — more like a paradigm shifting without a clutch. I drew more and more comfort from the (admittedly misguided) belief that I could have my cake and eat it, too, by simply invoking St. Augustine’s logic of “Lord, make me holy … but not yet.”
So this is the world I currently inhabit: Not faithless, not anti-Church, but largely absent from the public celebrations of the Church. Untethered, perhaps.

Easter Future

The ghost of Easter Future asks: What path may a person take to remain faithful, if that path isn’t perfectly consistent with the disciplinary norms of the Church? I suspect I’m being presented with a trick question, because the orthodox answer is delightfully concise.
It’s partially the Augustine factor, and partially a function of asserting a quasi-gnostic, quasi-individualistic ethos to justify one’s disengagement from the ordinary discipline of the Church. You know the drill: “I’m smarter than the average bear, therefore the rituals that guide the rubes are beneath me; after all, I have access to a higher understanding of Truth.”
The funny thing is, I love ritual. Yet in all of my travels across the diocese, I have yet to find a priest who (a) does ritual well, and (b) offers homilies that aren’t either solipsistic or trite or both. So an essential part of the Mass is missing, and I must supply it for myself. The temptation is to say that I can supply it on my own time.
So the ghost challenges me to think about Easter Future:

• By putting aside a smarmy over-reliance on Augustinian thinking.
• By putting aside the arrogance that cleaves a person from the daily life of the Church.
• By re-orienting life’s burdens to ensure adequate time for spiritual growth.

I will consider this challenge.

Sundry Updates

Enough about Easter. Here are other things of note:

1. Next weekend I’ll speak at the Get Published! conference in Holland. Attendance is free; the event is coordinated by MiFiWriters. Should be a ton of fun; I’m sitting on one panel and leading another (on query letters). Last year’s event was great.
2. I’m also privileged to speak at the UntitledTown Book and Author Festival in Green Bay, Wisconsin in a few weeks. I’ll be leading a discussion about how aspiring authors should get started with small presses and literary journals. Lots of fabulous speakers lined up for the three-day event, including Margaret Atwood.
3. And twice in the next month I’ll be off to the Chicagoland area, once for our quarterly NAHQ board meetings and once to speak about health data analytics to the Illinois Association for Healthcare Quality at that group’s annual educational conference.
4. Lots going on at the Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters, not least of which is a massive renovation to our website. As board treasurer, I’ve been focused on that piece of the adjustment, although many more exciting changes will be announced very soon.
5. I’ve been plugging away at Caffeinated Press. Working through a handful of manuscripts, which is great, but sweet mother of potatoes it’s been a slog. Partially because my attention has been divided a thousand ways from Sunday.
6. Looks like another Vegas trip is on the horizon.
7. I’m pleased to report that Ziggy the Cat — one of the two neighborhood felines who frequent Jason’s outdoor Café de Meowmix — appears to be doing much better. She’s gaining weight and her fur loss has reversed. I think she was abandoned last summer. I’ve been looking out for her. Sweet kitty, although a bit of a bully to the other café patrons.
8. Got to enjoy a wonderful “day off” a few weeks ago. My friend AmyJo hosted an all-day marathon of the extended edition of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. After 11.5 hours, several cocktails and a revolving-door of guests … it was great.

All for now.