This should air tomorrow morning (Friday) on NPR's "Morning Edition." I actually wrote it the day after Western Easter, and pictured it running much sooner (so the "it's so long to wait!" theme would make more sense) but my impression is that ME is a pretty frantic operation, with news and editorial prep going on 24 hrs a day. A little commentary like this is pretty much an afterthought. I hope it gives some listeners after-thoughts.
This is only the 2nd piece I've recorded for Morning Edition and I'm still getting-to-know-you with their style. I got a surprise in the editing process. If you're interested, I'll add more info after the piece. You may have heard that Beliefnet has gone bankrupt--Chapter 11, actually, and I think it's a temporary situation. The site has great traffic and keeps winning awards, but it suffers from the common problem that people don't know yet how to make web advertising work. (When there are weight-loss ads between every 2 paragraphs of a John Tavener interview, its the wrong solution.) Anyway, they could no longer assigne new pieces and so I lost a gig, so have been posting to this list much less often. Instead I've been traveling, speaking, and writing longer pieces, and also been working on a "collected works" series for Conciliar Press. They'll be bringing out 4 volumes of my essays on different topics, Gender, Culture, Ethics, and Faith. The first one is due out in the fall, I think, and titled "Gender: Men, Women, Sex, Feminism." I'm also talking with Paraclete Press about a book focusing in depth on a few extraordinary icons, giving both some history / theology, and some prayer / devotional reflection. Sort of like Henri Nouwen's wonderful 1987 book, "Behold the Beauty of the Lord." I've been giving a speech here & there the last few months titled "The Eyes of an Icon" and people like it a lot, even more than I expected. At one college they were saying "when will this be a book?" and that's what started the idea. A friend is also talking to me about co-writing a book based on observations during visits to shopping malls. I wonder if I'm the right author for this, if there's an audience for this book anyway, if co-writing a book is ever a good idea--but I have to admit it sounds like fun. Have any advice for me? Here's the NPR piece. Have a very blessed Pascha! If you haven't visited an Orthodox church before, now is a good time. There are (most places) one service tonight (Thursday), three services tomorrow, one Saturday morning, and the blowout Pascha service begins at 11:30 Saturday night. The most beautiful services of the year. Enjoy, and rejoice! *** Every couple of years this happens. It's like living in the Twilight Zone. For weeks, everywhere I went, there were fluffy chicks and bunny-baskets, and the grocery store was stacked with bags of pastel M & Ms. It was all about Easter--and now it's done. But not for me. My church is Eastern Orthodox, and we still observe Easter on the old calendar, the one devised by Julius Caesar. The new calendar, devised by Pope Gregory in the 16th century, still looks like a crazy new innovation to us. Some years, the cycles overlap and we have Easter on the same day, like last year. But this year we're way, way behind. We won't have Easter--actually, we call it "Pascha"--until May the fifth. Five long weeks later. No big deal, maybe, except that we have a pretty rigorous Lent. During all these weeks, the challenge is to fast from meat, fish, cheese, and milk. Essentially, we follow a vegan diet. We have many, many extra church services, and both public and private prayers are flavored with sober repentance. It's great, of course--spiritually, it's just what the doctor ordered. But it's strange to do it when the rest of the world has already said, "Hooray! It's Easter! Have some ham!" We're out of step in time, kind of like when you forget to set your watch forward, and show up for an appointment an hour late. But this goes on for weeks. There are advantages to having Easter late, of course--you can get candy half-price. But perhaps another advantage is the feeling of being out of synch with the world. Everybody else treats the holiest day of my religious year, the day of Jesus' Resurrection, as if it were all about cartoon bunnies and chocolate. Maybe that's an appointment I don't need to keep. I slip into the darkened church and see candles flickering on the faces of icons, smell the incense that weaves around me, join in chanting ancient prayers that have been said by Christians for millennia. We step into a place that transcends time--a place we're all bound for one day. I'm living in a different time, all right. Sometimes that doesn't seem like such a bad thing. *** I had the idea for this piece when my daughter Megan said something just before Western Easter: "It's so strange that everyone is wishing me Happy Easter, when it doesn't apply to us. It makes me understand better what life must be like for non-Christians all the time." So when I wrote this piece I was heading toward this paragraph, which came right after the "Have some ham!" line: <<There are a lot of ways to feel marginalized in this culture, and many of them have to do with religion. A lot of folks would be insulted by the invitation, "Have some ham!" no matter what the time of year. But the situation of us Eastern Orthodox Christians is particularly strange, because we're dislocated in *time.* The closest you've come to this, probably, is when you forgot to set your watch forward, and showed up for a lunch appointment an hour late. >> For me, that was the point of the piece, the turnaround graf where the topic got restated in a new and hopefully fresh way. When I got the edit back from the editor, that graf was GONE. I didn't even argue. (I tried that last time--they're just too busy, and it wasn't like this was a point of conscience, just taste.) I have to trustwalk that she knows what works and what doesn't for her audience, and I don't. Still, it surprised me, because I thought of that as the graf that made the piece interesting, that took it to the next level. To her it must have been deadweight. Go figure! ******** Frederica Mathewes-Green www.frederica.com
