Happy Easter

The dawn came purpling o'er the sky-y,

and alleluias rang the air.

The earth held glorious jubilee,

Hell gnashed its teeth in fierce despair.

 

Al-le-LU-ia, al-le-LU-ia,

Al-le, al-le, al-le-lu-ia.

Al-le-LU-ia, al-le-LU-ia,

Al-le, al-le-eh-lu-uu-ia.

 

This, sung enthusiastically and triumphantly by the "choir" made up of girls from the Big Room (grades 5 through 8) of our two-room Catholic school, is what assaulted the ears of the congregants at the 10 a.m. Easter Sunday Mass in the early 1950s. It can't have been a pleasant experience, listening to those raw, untrained alto voices raucously competing with the all-stops-open organ played by Lucille Clifford.

 

And I wish someone would explain why this cheesy song with its over-the-top potboiler melody has stuck in my mind ever since. In fact, today being Easter, I actually awoke this morning with it running through my head. I haven't sung it since 1954 but it's still taking up valuable space that I could use for more pertinent information. Nonetheless, here I am with Easter on the brain.

 

Other than this free-floating musical memory, my celebration of Easter is secular to the point of invisibility. Still, bits of Catholic ritual around the Holy Week surface from time to time. On Good Friday we spent the hours from noon to 3 at church. During that three-hour period the priest followed the fourteen stations of the cross to remind us of the sufferings of Christ. Then, at the end of the service, the statues and pictures were concealed behind drapings of dark purple velvet to symbolize the solemnity and sorrow of the day.

 

My engagement with this symbolism disappeared long ago. But one little bit of the chant has stayed with me, as much an ear-worm as that triumphal Easter morning song. In our church the fourteen stations were painted sculptural pictures, three-dimensionally realistic and affixed, seven to a side, to the walls of the church. As he made his way from picture to picture, Father Kienly chanted the required Latin words, assisted by the congregation when required. The "chorus", so to speak, of this chant was "O-re-eh-mus. Flec-TA-mus GEN-u-a." Then, after a pause while the priest knelt: "LE-va-a-te." Let us pray. Let us kneel. And then, Arise! 

 

Whether it was the catchy intonation of this chant or the fact that I participated in the ritual for some ten years (and these lines were repeated fourteen times every years), it will not leave my head. Sometimes all I can remember is the "Levate." In fact, this morning I, the least competent Internet researcher imaginable, actually Googled it successfully to find today's missing word ("Oremus"). So I'm good for the next year, I think.

 

The current secular nature of what used to be the saddest day in Christendom was brought home to me this year. Toronto offered an Easter egg hunt for the city's children on the Toronto Islands, a five-minute ferry ride from downtown Toronto. But in order to accommodate the presumably thousands of children and their parents who would want to hunt for these (again, presumably) chocolate eggs, the city opted to offer the hunt not just on Easter Sunday, the traditional day for this; and not just on Easter Saturday, unconventional but understandable. But on Good Friday. On Good Friday, an egg hunt?

 

Either the concept of the death and resurrection means something to you, in which case you aren't going to be hunting for eggs on Good Friday—or the Easter legend means nothing to you, in which case why are you out hunting eggs? The modern world is a mystery to me.

 

However, if you want to celebrate the change of seasons and the actual advent of Spring, I offer this:

Spring has sprung,

the grass has riz.

I wonder where the flowers is.

 

I have no grass, so I can't comment on that. But my garden is a blue carpet of scilla, the tiny bulbs that each year magically cover more and more of the space. My flowers has riz. Spring is here. 

 

 

Copyright © 2017 Ann Tudor
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