An Experience of Being Alive
Leaving the culture of anxiety & learning to live with grace (Plus a recipe!)
At Easter Mass this past Sunday, I knelt in the pew with my 2 year-old son beside me, admiring the heaps of daffodils, tulips, and hyacinth surrounding the altar, and remembered that yet another Lenten season had slipped through my hands; another season where I wanted to be more observant of each week and holy day, living in accordance with them, and I wasn’t.
The next day, Easter Monday, known as Pasquetta (“little Easter”) among Southern Italians, I sat down on the couch after putting my son to bed, feeling drained after a busy week topped with a busy holiday weekend, and suddenly a thought floated into my mind: It never ends. You keep thinking it’s going to end, and you can just rest, but it doesn’t. It won’t.
I once heard someone say that Christmas is often disappointing because we’re trying to recreate it as it never was—some memory from our childhood, by now smudged with the heady blur of movies, songs, and the corrosive nature of time. They say the more we revisit a memory, the more it changes, and the less we recall the way it actually was. With each thought of it, we obscure the image, the way sun fades old photographs.