Easter joy

Because we're not doing Eucharists online, our church left the Easter Vigil as vigil, candle lit with lots of stories, saving the light of Easter - otherwise rushing in midway through the Vigil with bells and lights and flowers and brass and Handel's Halleluia Chorus - for the Sunday morning service. This made the triduum into something more like a 3+1, but even though the Sunday service, too, was without a Eucharist (and bells and flowers and brass and Handel), I didn't mind. The light, which we'd seen fading across several dozen living rooms, was now here in full force. The community created through these four days' gathering in zoom galleries, of a Thursday evening, a midday Friday, a Saturday evening and this Sunday morning, is something real and special. Each in their own "house church" (that's ours, below, third balcony from the top) we ache to be fully together, and together fully with the world, but Easter's promise replenishes our hopes. He is risen, and goes before us.