Easter and the Grand Canyon

Katherine here. April 8, 2012. Happy Easter. Enjoy Passover. Embrace the holiday of your choice (Baseball fits here somewhere) and celebrate with devotion and joy. Lots of that going on around here.

I'm just now beginning to ease into anything like an appropriate Easter-like attitude and I suspect most folks make their peace with Easter long before they are sojourning through their sixties. I've always been a late bloomer though.

My history with Easter could probably be turned into a "poignant" or "tortured" memoir. I never read books that reviews label as "poignant" or "tortured," but they seem to make their authors famous and wealthy celebrities. For me to enter the book tour, I would have to exaggerate more than even I am capable of and I would have to fictionalize the actual churches I attended. None of my Easter history is Catholic and it seems like most "poignant" and "tortured" memoirs tell the history of Catholic childhoods. My Easter history and current seeming comfort with Easter seems finally worth one small Easter morning post. This is it.

My early religious instruction was with the Congregationalists. I went to Sunday school and disappointed rarely. I'm a good student. I wasn't perfect though.

One story captures it all. We were coloring as instructed by the Sunday School teacher (her defining quality was a highly hair-sprayed, very blond, flip hair-do). I saw her every Sunday for at least seven years and that is the only characteristic I can bring back.

Every Sunday had a pattern. She read a Biblical passage. She explained it. We colored it. We drank Kool-Aid and ate cookies while we colored. I liked it. Given my general random personality, I oddly had a coloring system. I liked to use the pointy crayons the best. My hands are large and controlling small things has been difficult always. The tinier the point of the crayon, the better chance I had of keeping it inside the lines which was hugely important both at Church and at school in those days. I wanted to please. I wanted to stay inside the lines. Using the pointiest crayons available helped me please people. One of the drawbacks of the pointy crayon system is that traditional colors have generally been worn down and therefore rarely get use in the pointy approach. It was a hard lesson to learn.

There was an Easter morning when I was probably in second grade and I was lining up my handful of crayons by virtue of their pointyness and facing a dittoed portrait of Jesus on the Cross. The pointy crayon I began with was violet. It has always been a color I like and I remember being pleased the crayon I'd begin with was one of my favorites. I colored Jesus's hair violet. I carefully drew dark violet wavy lines to highlight individual hair patterns over the lightly shaded hair colored underneath. Olive green streaks of halo-light illuminated Jesus's head.

The teacher was making her rounds and wowing out over colorings with appropriate Christian love. Until she saw mine. It was Easter she told me. Jesus with PURPLE hair!! JESUS WAS BLOND!! I would go to hell. She mentioned the hell part repeatedly. Didn't I know halos were yellow. I was sent to the corner. My Kool-Aid and cookies were confiscated. A note was left for the pastor. I stayed after. My mother was informed. I cried a lot. Message learned: Religion tops Art. My colorings were quite traditional after that. I was a good girl and I learned my lessons well. Funny though, I still love violet and olive green together. Check out the walls of my house sometime.

There were many Easters I only remember in terms of minor disappointments. Mom would make me special dresses. I would get frilly spring hats, gloves, and special spring shoes. Once she bought me some black patents and a pale green straw hat with black ribbons I'm still trying to replace. Mom would have Easter parties and there would be plans to have rousing egg hunts and BBQs and I always looked forward to watermelons that she scooped out and filled with watermelon pieces (no seeds!) and strawberries.

Many years it snowed. Mom would not let me wear the pretty clothes. The egg hunts were in the house where it was easy to find them and then the house was filled with an awful over-cooked egg smell. No BBQs. Hamburger Spaghetti instead. Crowds of people in our little house and my dad hating it. He didn't go to church and hated big gatherings inside our house and he just hated Easter and religion for reasons I didn't understand until much later in my life.

We stopped being Congregationalists when I was making the move from Sunday school to sitting with the Congregation and being a grown-up in the Church. It was our form of confirmation, but I didn't learn that term until much later. I think most churches have this ritualized and I was just the wrong candidate for the ritual in our church. In order to earn your Bible and enter the congregation you had to recite all the names of the books of the Bible in order and in front of everybody during Easter Sunday service. It was going to be tough for me--I was pretty shy then and memorization was tough (the times tables had almost killed me).

The same Sunday school teacher had followed our group all through our grade school years and I colored appropriately for the rest of my coloring tenure there. Jesus was always blond and his halos were always yellow. When confirmation neared, she drilled us and made us repeat the names of the books in the Bible with rigor. Mom drilled me. Even Dad drilled me. I practiced constantly, but I continuously struggled with Galatians (later on I would struggle with Paul and his epistles for other reasons). Mom suggested I remember it by saying "galoshes" because it sounded a little bit like Galatians and that helped. During practices I could do the names correctly. Even Galatians.

On the confirmation Easter Sunday, I went last because we were ordered alphabetically. The other six or seven in front of me did fine and were presented with Bibles and welcomed to the congregation individually. I blew it. I said "galoshes" instead of Galatians as I zoomed through the New Testament book names. The congregation laughed, but the pastor didn't. He said I had come close and maybe I could earn my Bible and enter the congregation the next year. It was a pretty awful moment.

We never went back to the Congregationalist Church and Mom gave me a Bible the next Sunday with the words of Jesus printed in red. That came in handy. It wasn't long before we were Methodists.

My happiest childhood Easter was at the Grand Canyon when I was eleven. Fourth grade I think. We were returning from Las Vegas from my family's first vacation. Mom thought we should stop and see the Grand Canyon because she believed it was possible we'd never travel again and it was kind of on the way home and she believed if we woke up Easter morning there, our Easter wouldn't be just hours of driving back to Denver. Though Dad relished the idea of an Easter driving with no restaurants open to create stops, he relented and we arrived at the Grand Canyon late at night and barely had time to eat at The Bright Angel where we stayed--nice cabins on the South rim. It was very dark at the Grand Canyon.

Easter morning there was a revelation. It had nothing to do with the view though. We had our first Easter with foil covered chocolate eggs hidden all through and around the cozy cabin. I loved them so much. I received a stuffed kitten I liked and my brother got a remote control helicopter that was truly wonderful. We had a nice breakfast at the lodge. It was the happiest Easter morning my family had ever spent I think. There wasn't church, but nothing was tense either. It was nice.

With the canyon right there, however, we did not go look. Dad needed to get going. No more relenting--he had work soon. We drove away and stopped at two turn-outs and oohed and ahhed. The Griswolds might have seen more of the Grand Canyon than we did. I vowed I would go back. I had a good feeling about the place.

I'm writing this because two weeks ago, Jim and I went to the Grand Canyon. I finally went back. We arrived in the daytime and we walked the 14 miles of the South rim the two days we were there. We stayed and ate at the historic El Tovar which has the most amazing location ever. I didn't go down the Bright Angel Trail or the other trail that heads down. I don't do well with anything involving sheer drops and it was mid-March and lots of ice in places still. I'm a wuss.

There were moments when the crowd by the lip of the canyon and the idiotic young males going out on ledges to get themselves photographed and the crappy food at the El Tovar (they served sticks of that fake crab stuff and called it "Fried Calamari") were disillusioning. The next morning, however, when it's just you and the light and the universe and such expanse and such time glaring at you--well, it's just hard to be disillusioned.

That's my Easter message, my Passover message, my spring message, my today message. The world is disillusionment. Just making it through the news seems a heroic feat sometimes. It would take Christ himself to take on all the sorrow on FaceBook in one day alone. "Sorrow floats." I've spent too much time looking for those disillusionments recently and it's amazing how the bare bones of nature--the Grand Canyon, the Grand Tetons, the Napoli Coast--can wipe them away for me.

Today is Easter. Do what you do to escape disillusionment for a bit and remember we are all part of some whole. We are all God, we are all Jesus, we are all the Buddha, we are all Allah, we are all Nature, we are all the Whole.