Plastic Eggs and Quiet Churches

The part of Easter that has always made the most sense to me begins outside.

In the long, cold, dark winter—when we know spring will arrive, yet it feels almost impossible to imagine—

The light begins to shift.

The ground starts to soften (in Maine, mud season begins).

Buds appear one day, dotting bare trees.

That first almost-warm day catches you off guard—

When, by the afternoon, you no longer need the winter coat, scarf, and gloves you put on that morning.

It’s the perfect visual definition of hope—Easter’s message.

When my children and their many cousins were little, we would all go to New Jersey, to my brother and sister-in-law’s home. She loved Easter—so much so that she claimed it as her holiday to host.

She told me that, all year long, she would collect little, unnecessary plastic objects that would eventually fill well over a hundred brightly colored plastic eggs—along with chocolate wrapped in shiny foil.

The night before Easter, after the last child was sound asleep, those eggs rose from the basement. They were filled and hidden by us parents—the Easter elves who, by eleven o’clock at night, had grown a little too tipsy on one too many Bacardi & Cokes my brother-in-law is famous for making.

The next morning, all of us elves had changed back into aunts and uncles, sipping multiple cups of coffee, watching the kids go wild in the backyard with their empty baskets to fill. Then we’d get ready for church—some of us, perhaps, still quietly hungover in our Sunday best.

There was something undeniably joyful about Easter in New Jersey.

My sister-in-law is a fabulous cook. All weekend, she prepared beautiful meals, and after church, we gathered around her dining room table, set with fine china and glassware on a freshly ironed white linen tablecloth.

And yet, since childhood, I have had a hard time with Easter.

To acknowledge Jesus’ brutal death—and then, three days later, shift to celebrating his resurrection—I couldn’t quite hold both of those things at the same time.

One New Jersey spring, when the air felt almost tropical to this Down East Mainer, and the colors outside matched the brightly colored plastic eggs, my mother and I took a detour to the church the day before Easter.

It was empty and so quiet. It felt like we had to whisper, even though we were the only ones there.

We sat in one of the middle pews.

She told me about the tradition—the way everything becomes dark and somber on Good Friday and Holy Saturday. The chalices are covered with cloth. The altar is bare. And then, on Easter morning, the cloths are lifted, and the church becomes fully alive again with flowers and joyful banners that read, He is risen.

In all my years of Catholic school and Mass every Sunday of my childhood, I don’t think I had ever truly noticed this.

But I could feel it.

I loved the symbolism the Catholic Church carries, as much as my mother did. To me, it was like a secret to figure out. Or a metaphor.

My mother was a devout Catholic, shaped by the nuns who taught her through grammar school, high school, and college. She believed one of her most important roles as a mother was to teach us that life has its ups and downs—and that faith will be with us during the hard moments, as well as rejoice with us in the best.

But I had her.

Someone I could see and feel.

Someone I could hug and be hugged by.

Someone I already loved so much.

It was easy for me to believe in her.

Growing up in a large family, having her all to myself in the quiet of that church—where everything is reduced to the foundation of our faith—

listening,

trying to understand what it means to be Catholic,

feeling the closest to her faith—and as close as I could get to mine in that moment—

it is still a precious memory of this season, some twenty years later.

A moment when the world slowed right down, and it was just my mother and me, sitting inside the very faith she had always tried to give her six children.

I have learned to hold sorrow and celebration in my own life—through loss, through fear, through moments when God was the only thing left to hold onto.

And I get that Jesus’ brutal death tells us that even in the most tragic deaths, love and light and joy still exist.

That we may not see it or believe it right away, but it is there. It does not leave.

That something greater than us holds all the reasons for the darkness we endure, and the lightness we let in.

And that, somehow, we are safe within it.

In the midst of all the plastic and happy hype, I believe I’m not the only one who struggles with the very foundation of this faith.

But it can still be found—

in the gently returning light after a long winter,

in the gathering of people,

and in the memory of sitting beside someone we love.

It is enough to notice that, every spring, life and light appear again

in whatever way we see or feel it.

In the quiet of the morning light, it is all the same story.