In the days after every Holy Week and Easter, and other major points in the church year, I always take the time to write down some reflections– things that went well, ideas I want to try next year, comments from my choir members and parishioners, and so on. Some of these reflections are more housekeeping-type issues (“need one more hymn at communion”) and others are bigger picture. What struck me about Holy Week and Easter this year is that it wasn’t Easter morning that had center stage as I was reflecting. You’d think after six weeks of preparation for this big resurrection event, Easter morning would get top billing in my memory’s highlights reel.
Instead, I kept–and keep– coming back to our Good Friday 7pm service, in which Chris Stewart stood to read one of his Disabled Psalms. If you don’t know Chris, he is a parishioner who suffered a traumatic brain injury in 2022 which left him with permanent disabilities. In his Disabled Psalms, Chris reflects on his own suffering and his changing relationship with God. I went into our Good Friday service knowing it would be special but not realizing it would be transformative. As a culture–and I am certainly steeped in the culture–we tend towards wanting to offer the disabled either help or pity. As someone who doesn’t identify as disabled, I realize now that I went into that service seeing myself merely as a supportive fellow parishioner. (And, certainly, who doesn’t need support! We’re all glad for encouragement now and then.) What I didn’t expect was to be changed. As I was listening, my stature shifted from cheerleader, to something akin to embarrassment or discomfort, to total fascination, and finally awe. I knew in my bones that God was in that space.My post-Easter reflections have remained stuck at Good Friday. I suppose some part of me wants to feel like, as a church musician, I should have been able to make Easter a bigger show, not to overshadow Chris, of course, but out of respect for what is supposedly the biggest holiday in the Church Year. It’s fitting, though, that God should shatter my expectations, just as Jesus did when he greeted his friends outside the tomb, on the road to Emmaus, and in the upper room. They, too, were expecting a big show. Their expectations were, if Jesus were the true Messiah, he would come back in full splendor and glory, a perfect specimen of manhood, ready to uplift his followers and vanquish their enemies. Instead, he greeted them as a mere human–as unremarkable as your average gardener–with the scars from his crucifixion still on his hands and feet.
What I love about these stories is that it is through vulnerability, not in spite of it, that Jesus greets us. Our instinct is often to look away from the suffering of others, or to tell people we’re fine even if we’re not. Jesus’s challenge to us is to do exactly the opposite, and he doesn’t speak to us from some sort of it’s-the-right-thing-to-do moral high ground but because he loves us and knows that it is, paradoxically, by looking suffering and death in the eyes that we find life’s meaning and our deepest connection to God and to one another. Every day we have a thousand opportunities to see Jesus right in front of us, and to follow him confidently down the bright paths as well as the dark ones, confident in God’s constant love and presence. Because we are Easter people, we know light and love are always at the end.
- Ginny Chilton, Supervisor of Children's & Youth Minsitries, Minister of Music
