A Wonderful Easter

Growing up, Easter service at Metropolitan United Methodist Church was a yearly tradition. We'd get up early, search for our Easter baskets, get dressed in our nice new clothes (I loved getting Easter dresses!) and head to church for a pancake breakfast with my grandparents. My grandparents have almost always attended Metropolitan, even before they were married. Grandma played in the bell choir, which always performed during worship, and Grandpa has been the bell choir director for over thirty years. Now he also directs the youth bell choir and is well-loved by everyone. At Grandma's funeral, which was fittingly held in the same sanctuary in which she married Grandpa, young couples from the church shared how the patriarch and matriarch of the Eccles family have been role models for their marriage.

At Easter breakfast, we'd wolf down pancakes and sausage, all the while being introduced to scores of people who knew my father from his youth. After breakfast, Dad would wander around the huge, old church with us, taking us to all the places he used to explore as a child. He told us stories of sneaking out of Sunday service to climb the stairs to the bell tower - or Deadly Tower, as he calls it - and lamented when the church changed the locks, negating the sweeping access Grandpa's set of skeleton keys gave us.

While Dad would sometimes help us slip quietly out for some more adventures, most years we'd have to sit through the whole, agonizingly long service. Old Rev. Quick's "Good News from the Graveyard" sermon made little sense to a kid, and even an adolescent, whose main concern was how to quietly unwrap the Easter candy she'd stashed in her pretty Easter purse. And there was little hope of hiding or appearing visibly distracted: the Eccles clan always sits front and center in the balcony, and we're usually the only people up there besides the bell choir.

As I got older and actually began to understand the Christian faith and the ramifications of the crucifixion and the resurrection - which, I am almost ashamed to say, did not happen until college - I was still less-than-moved by Easter service at Metropolitan. After the the energetic, expressive worship services at Alma and our subsequent church homes, the traditional Methodist service, with its impossible hymns and piercing soprano solo of "Alleluia," made me fidget in the wooden pews and wish I still had a cache of candy in my purse. The unfortunate "pastor drought," which produced a short but painful string of truly awful ministers with uninspired Easter sermons (and questionable ethics), didn't help, either.

So I love our Easter tradition for the familial ties we have to Metropolitan, for the architectural beauty of the old church and for the memories it awakens, but in I've been feeling like this isn't always the best way for Mitch and me to celebrate the most holy of Christian holidays. This year was pretty good - a better pastor and an amazing organist who performed a sanctuary-shaking arrangement of Tocatta Organ Symphony No.5 - but I'm glad that we've struck a balance and will be attending Metropolitan every other year, giving us a chance to form our own traditions and find ways to truly experience the weight of all Jesus sacrificed for us.