Easter Celebrations
It's been a pretty wild Easter so far. Five of Eric Scheske's seven children were up at 6:30 this morning, biting at the candy bit to search for their baskets. They came to Eric's study, where he contained them until he could check on his wife, who was tending to the four-day-old Tess, who was chomping at a different bit. After extricating her from Tess, they started the search.
It went well, at least 4/5s of it did. Meg (aged four) informed Eric that she needed help–after literally two seconds of looking around her. When the help didn't come, she cried. She ended up in her bedroom while her four olders searched and her two youngers slept. After breakfast and many tears, she finally got a grip and searched, found, and commenced to destroy with her teeth. While she did that, Max (19 months old) found his basket and gorged himself with chocolate until it dripped from his mouth and onto his church clothes.
Then to Mass. We typically go to the Saturday night Easter Vigil, but Max would try to kill us during the course of the ninety-plus minutes, so we opted for the ordinary Sunday morning Mass. A mistake. Holy smokes! Actually, no smoke or incense or even many candles. Just a lot of stuff. We waited for the pony show, but none came. The people who planned the Mass must have been disappointed; it eventually ended–after ninety minutes and a thrown-out back from wrestling with Max in the pew.
Marshall McLuhan lamented in 1972: the Mass is getting "longer, limper, lumpier." It hasn't gotten any better since. Oh, we yearn for the forty-minute Masses that tradition offered up! For those who want more, let us go to weekday Masses, which are always quiet and reverential. The lengthy and lumpy Mass is for the lukewarm Catholics, we're convinced. The goal seems to be to cram a week's worth of religion into one big effort. Such a thing can't be done in forty minutes, so we lengthen it by twenty minutes. That'll do it! Weekday Masses, spiritual reading, and praying during the week isn't quite so necessary.
Now it's nap time. Everyone is down, as was Eric, until his 12-year-old nephew trotted over from next door, looking for cream cheese, just as the saliva started dripping from Eric's mouth. Eric obliged, and is now wide awake. This post is the result. You, the reader, may thank his nephew or curse him, whatever the case may be.
We hope the rest of your Easter day is blessed. We will return to our normal programming later this evening or tomorrow morning, depending how long the festivities continue at Eric's parents' house.
