Originally published April 7, 2006

From the fourth century until today, Christians have created things to do together, rituals, in order to experience for themselves the great simplicity of redemption. These rituals are meant to recur, they are the stones of an archway which, once built, is there to use, to go in and out by prayer and so to find pasture. We do not want to be rebuilding a different-shaped arch, however entrancing, but to use what we have, what we are used to, in order to enter into the real business of prayer. So the ceremonies of Holy Week, beginning with Palm Sunday, are there to be used, and this is a physical matter, a use of the body, so that all of ourselves will know. Intellectual apprehension of truth is all very well, and indeed for some it is enough; but for most of us, we live in a half-light, neither awake nor asleep, wanting to understand but not quite able to think it through; we need to be there to act it out, to participate. This is in no way an alternative or lesser kind of theologizing; by both ways we come to the central theme of redemption, the flesh-taking of Christ in which he returns to the Father and takes us unto the dynamic life of the Trinity which is the ultimate procession, and it is by physical processions that we can learn to become part of that reality.

The last days of Holy Week provide a simple way of allowing the body, the flesh, to learn theological truth by doing and being in earthly processions. Palm Sunday’s procession is about how to do the basic human thing — to walk, to take one step, just to be able to do the next step, and to remain with that doing, not seeing a much quicker way to get there by a bus, a train, a ship, a plane, which are quicker than our feet; we are always dashing through in order to be somewhere else, and when we are there then we think we will begin. But the procession is a slow, corporate event, the pace set by the weakest and slowest. Like growing, a procession is something done for its own sake, and in doing it we are becoming what we are not, going by a way we do not understand, for a purpose that is God’s, not ours, in ways that are too simple for our sight. We will never of course be ready on earth for the full “procession” which is the dynamism of the life of love which is the Trinity, since we are broken human beings, with limited sight; but given our consent, God can lead us by the flesh he created, to understand and apprehend the image of God which he placed within us. All that is needed is to give a minute assent, however impatient and grudging, and then just to do it. A procession can be seen as a sacrament, “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.” In the same way that we read through the letter of the Scriptures to the inner truth, so we understand more by walking than we know; it is the work and gift of God.

Meditation upon the processions of Holy Week is rightly undertaken at its commencement. In the early church, for the first three days of Holy Week, on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, the custom was to have only plain readings from Scripture; later, what was read each day were the separate accounts of the Passion. Then as now, these were days of stillness and silence when all were to be prepared, emptied, turned towards the Saviour’s great work. After the signs we gave ourselves during Lent of being ready to become empty by giving things up and therefore more free, now that desire will be put to the test. There is nothing now to be done or thought. It is the end of Lent, the pause before the great mystery of Redemption. In this pause, it is possible to reflect on these three processions, on Palm Sunday, Good Friday and Easter night, as ways into the great procession which is the life of Trinity, and this is not just for ourselves here and now. First we walk with so many others from the past, joined with them by our present actions. We receive life from the hands of the dead to live it out ourselves and pass it on to others, and that is true tradition. We are walking with our friends. And second, we do not do this for ourselves only, but for the whole of creation; insofar as one small portion of humanity which is us assents to the love of God, so the whole of creation becomes part of redeeming work.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: For Eastern Orthodox Christians this is Great Lent, the 40-day period of strict fasting leading up to Easter. The Orthodox are supposed to observe fasts of one kind or another nearly all year; no meat on some days, no dairy or oil on others. Their calendars serve as reminders. The discipline of fasting is supposed to help focus the mind on God and bring the person fasting closer to God. Catherine Mandell of Clearfield, Pennsylvania talked with us about her family’s fasts.

CATHERINE MANDELL: The church generally gives us a calendar to help us track those days that we are to fast and which days we’re allowed not to fast. We have several others fasting periods during the year. If you take all those days together you are fasting for more than half the year.

The fasts vary in strictness. Great Lent is obviously the most strict of the fasts because it is the biggest feast that we’re preparing for—for Easter. We fast Wednesdays and Fridays during the regular parts of the year. We don’t eat meat. We don’t eat dairy products. We don’t eat eggs. We don’t eat fish, anything animal-related. We don’t cook with oil at all on the days that we fast from oil. We tend to abstain from alcoholic beverages and wine.

If you are an able-bodied person and you are healthy, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to fast. That being said, if you are aged or infirm, if you have some kind of illness, then you need to make adjustments in your diet.

I was born Orthodox. I don’t have any memories of not fasting from meat. We didn’t fast from dairy products or fish. When my husband and I were married, we decided that we wanted to be a little more strict, that we wanted to follow the church’s teaching that we would fast from meat and dairy and oil, so my children have no recollection of not fasting, ever.

It was very difficult at first. We ate a lot of spaghetti and tomato sauce, and we ate a lot of split pea soup, because basically those were the things I knew that I could make that tasted good, to make it more interesting. I pulled from different cultural and ethnic types of foods—Indian curries, Asian stir fries, or Middle-Eastern cuisines—to try to make food that was more tasty, more diverse, so that you’re not eating the same thing day after day and getting so frustrated and so bored with fasting foods.

ZACH MANDELL: It’s amazing when you have the resources. I mean you could make something different every day, and you wouldn’t get bored with anything. At school it’s a little trying, but I make do as best as I can.

CATHERINE MANDELL: You get so many questions about fasting when you’re an Orthodox Christian because we’re so strict with our fasting in comparison to the other churches. Fasting is not about deprivation. It’s not about suffering. It’s something that you make a choice to do that you’re supposed to do in freedom and joy so that you can get ready for the resurrection of Christ. You do it for yourself, you know, and the Bible even says fast in secret, and if for some reason you break the fast because you’ve gone somewhere and you’ve been served something, instead of proclaiming yourself as fasting you humbly eat what is served to you. Then you fast twice as hard in secret.

During Lent we don’t only want to fast from food. You fast with your mouth and your ears. You hold council with your tongue, so that you’re fasting from gossip and slander. You don’t have sex during Great Lent because you’re abstaining from the passions of the flesh. You do more acts of charity, and you spend more time in prayer. You spend more time in reading the Scripture. because that’s what makes the fast. It’s not just what you eat. It’s how much you’re eating. It’s a concept called “right eating,” eating the right foods at the right times in the right amounts for the right reason, how to correct yourself and what you need to do to get to the celebration of the resurrection, because ultimately you’re working toward getting into the kingdom of heaven.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: About 20 miles outside Port-au-Prince, Leogane was near the epicenter of January’s catastrophic quake. Roughly 80 percent of this city was destroyed. But at the Lamb Center Ministries Children’s Home, they’re still singing about joy. There doesn’t seem a lot to be joyful about. The orphanage’s main building was completely destroyed in the earthquake. Several staff members were killed in the collapse, although all of the 260 orphans who lived in the compound did survive. Now the children are sleeping in a tent city nearby, and they come here for activities during the daytime. Pastor Jeanot Deceus, who leads the ministry, is having a difficult time finding regular sources of food and water. He says he has faith that God will help them. He told me, despite it all, he still sees hope everyday.

PASTOR JEANOT DECEUS (Lamb Center Ministries Children’s Home, speaking through translator): All of the kids is the hope of the country.

LAWTON: The kids are the hope of the country.

DECEUS: Yeah.

LAWTON: It’s been almost three months since what people here call “le tremblement de terre”—the trembling of the Earth. The evidence of destruction and death is still almost everywhere. But the traditional Easter message is that death doesn’t have the ultimate victory, and this Easter season many Christians who live here, and those who are working here, say they are clinging to glimpses of hope that resurrection will still come.

Hope can be easy to miss in this massive tent camp of displaced people that has sprung up at the former Petionville Country Club. Some 40,000 homeless Haitians now live at the bottom of the hilly area that was once a golf course for the wealthy, and that’s just a fraction of the estimated half a million Haitians who still don’t have adequate shelter.

Catholic Relief Services (CRS) is helping lead humanitarian efforts on the ground. CRS camp coordinator Niek de Goeij says getting food and water to the people has been a logistical nightmare.

NIEK DE GOEIJ (Catholic Relief Services): This is about as complicated as a food distribution can get in terms of logistics. It took us a good two days to figure out how to do it, and I think now we’ve got it down.

LAWTON: Because of the camp’s terrain, big delivery trucks can’t get in. They drive as far as they can, and then the supplies are transferred to smaller pickup trucks, which can maneuver their way further into the camp. When the pickup trucks get as far as they can, workers take the bags of food by wheelbarrow to the waiting families below. They can deliver USAID-donated cooking oil, flour, peas, and bulgur to about 7,000 people a day. Over several days, they provide everyone in the camp food rations that should last for a month.

DE GOEIJ: The calculation is for a family of six a little less than 2,000 calories per person per day for 30 days. It’s not a full ration. People need to complement it with some protein and vegetables, but at least it gives them a good calorie base.

LAWTON: While a camp DJ gives instructions and offers entertainment, thousands of people, mostly women, wait in line for hours in the blazing sun to get their rations. The camp has the women receive the rations, de Goeij says, because they’re less aggressive than the men and less likely to start food riots. The camp also offers medical services, provided mostly by volunteer doctors from the US and other countries. Conditions are not ideal by any means, but still it’s considered one of the most successful camps in Haiti, and people here are grateful for it.

This woman told me, “We don’t have a good government, so it was a grace from God that the other nations came to help us.”

CRS and other relief groups are also working on long-term recovery plans. But it’s hard to get to that when meeting immediate needs is still such a huge undertaking. The magnitude of it all can be overwhelming, but de Goeij says, for him, hope gets defined in the small moments.

DE GOEIJ: Just the other day, there was a man who lost his leg during the earthquake, a recent amputee. He couldn’t stand in line, he’s the head of his household, he doesn’t have a wife, and, you know, we can pick him out of the line, and we can help him through the system, and five minutes later he walks off with a food ration, and people with a wheelbarrow helped him with that. Those are very little things, but…

LAWTON: He says he tries to focus on what has been accomplished, not on what still needs to be done.

DE GOEIJ: I come home at night, and I’m grumpy, and I’m crabby, and then I have a colleague slapping me on the shoulder and saying, you know, whatever happened today, 7,000 people are eating tonight because of the work that you did today. That helps.

LAWTON: At Hopital Adventiste d’Haiti, the Adventist Hospital in the suburb of Carrefour, issues of life and death are still very much at the fore. The hospital was built in 1978, but it had struggled in recent years until being adopted by Adventist Health International and the Loma Linda University School of Medicine. Within days of the quake, Adventist doctors came rushing in from the US and around the world. There’s been an outpouring of donations, and the hospital has now become one of the best facilities in the country.

ANDREW HAGLUND (Hopital Adventiste d’Haiti): Unfortunately, we’re still dealing with quake-related trauma that has yet to be cared for. We’re doing orthopedic surgery right now downstairs on cases that have not been treated—fractured hip, fractured femur, so in addition there’s lots and lots of follow-up care.

LAWTON: Loma Linda assistant professor Andrew Haglund is the acting hospital administrator. He arrived six days after the quake and is not sure how long he’ll stay.

HAGLUND: It’s very, very difficult. You’re seeing things and exposed to things that you would never see at home, and I think we start the day with prayer, and we end the day with prayer and pray all day long for the safety and for the healing of this nation.

LAWTON: With all the earthquake-related orthopedic injuries and amputations, the hospital is specializing in prosthetics and rehabilitation, and the Americans are training Haitian doctors to carry that work into the future.

HAGLUND: That’s where I see the hope—that we can make a difference and that hopefully we are bringing light to this nation where hope is rare.

LAWTON: The faith-based medical ministry Cure International has been supporting work at the hospital and helping to coordinate volunteer medical teams. Phil Hudson is directing Cure International’s efforts here. He too, defines hope by each person who is helped.

PHIL HUDSON (Cure International): And you say regardless of this list, regardless of I’ve got 20 hours of work to do tomorrow plus whatever comes up tomorrow, it all comes back to this child is good, and they’ve been touched by the love of God, even if no one ever says anything to them about God, and that’s what does it for me.

LAWTON: Hudson worries that American concern about Haiti is already starting to wane.

HUDSON: It’s a shame for our country to allow something like this to exist in our hemisphere so close to our shores and it’s been a shame for years, and if we don’t stay with it it’ll be a big blot on us.

LAWTON: But he’s determined to see that new life does come.

HUDSON: If we only leave Haiti the way that it was before the earthquake we will not have done a good job, and so everything that we’re doing needs to be for the long term, and I am hopeful that we can leave things better than they were before.

LAWTON: The Haiti Gospel Mission Community Church is about 45 minutes outside Port-au-Prince. The building did sustain some damage in the earthquake, although not severe. Church leaders say they’re not only repairing the damage, they’re going to make the church even stronger and more beautiful than it was before.

Pastor Elison Bien-Aime says the earthquake has actually strengthened people’s faith.

PASTOR ELISON BIEN-AIME (Haiti Gospel Mission Community Church): We see, we can see in the visages…

LAWTON: …in the faces…

BIEN-AIME: …in the faces of the Haitian people the “esperance,” the hope, because when we talk with them all people swear you, “I live because Jesus loves me.”

LAWTON: Pastor Elison says the support from around the world has helped his people see a new vision for their nation.

BIEN-AIME: They feel the Lord has a dream for this country, and then we are not sad.

LAWTON: And some signs of the new vision are already starting to take shape. As the choir practices on Monday morning, the sounds of construction are in the background.

I’m Kim Lawton in Haiti.

Originally broadcast March 14, 2008

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Easter or Pascha is this weekend (April 4) for both Western and Eastern Orthodox Christians. Because of differing church calendars, the two branches of Christianity often celebrate Easter on different dates. But as Kim Lawton reports, their celebrations reflect shared beliefs about the Christian faith.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: During Holy Week, churches around the world echo the familiar refrain that proclaims a central tenet of Christianity: Jesus Christ was crucified, died, and was buried, but three days later he rose from the dead. Eastern Orthodox and Western Christians alike say celebration of the Resurrection is the most important event on the church calendar.

MS. FREDERICA MATHEWES-GREEN (Holy Cross Antiochian Orthodox Church): This is the victory of Jesus Christ over sin, over death. It’s what sets us free. In comparison, Christmas is not that important. We like Christmas. Everybody does. But the whole point of our salvation is embodied on Pascha.

WALT WANGERIN JR (Author, “Paul: A Novel”): This is the very center of what we believe, of who we are, of what our identity is, of why we continue to return to the Lord in joy. Without Easter, there is no church.

LAWTON: More often than not, Eastern Orthodox and Western Christians celebrate the Resurrection on different days. But a growing number of American church leaders say this should change.

FATHER RON ROBERSON (National Conference of Catholic Bishops): The credibility of the Christian message really gets compromised when people on the outside see that we can’t even agree on when to celebrate the central mystery of our faith.

LAWTON: Conflicts over the celebration of the Resurrection stretch back to the beginning days of Christianity. Early church leaders wanted all Christians to celebrate the Resurrection on the same day, after the Jewish Passover. To that end, a council of bishops in the fourth century decreed that Easter would fall on the first Sunday after the first full moon, after the spring equinox. But as the Roman Empire divided between the Greek-speaking East and the Latin-speaking West, the church world also split. When Westerners adopted the new Gregorian calendar in the 16th century, the East kept the Julian calendar. Since the two calendars have differing dates for the equinox and full moon, in most years Easter falls on different Sundays.

LAWTON: During Holy Week, churches mark their beliefs with special services. In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, these services are especially numerous and lengthy. One unique observance is the service of holy unction on Wednesday night.

MS. MATHEWES-GREEN: At the conclusion of this service, the members of the church line up and come forward for anointing, for healing. In the Orthodox Church, we still have a lively belief that Jesus heal, that we need healing of our souls and our bodies.

LAWTON: On Holy or Good Friday, Christians remember the Crucifixion. According to many theologians, of all the traditions Roman Catholics tend to give special emphasis on the suffering and death of Jesus. Through the Stations of the Cross, or in dramatic productions, Catholics often reenact the journey to the Crucifixion.

Some Protestants gather Friday evening in a solemn worship service that remembers the Crucifixion through the taking of Communion.

Catholics and many Protestants traditionally strip their altars bare. Statues and crosses are covered in purple or black cloths, the shrouds of death.

In Eastern Orthodox churches, a shroud showing Christ’s body is actually carried in a funeral procession around the church and then laid in a tomb adorned with flowers.

MR. WANGERIN: What should be experienced on that day by these very specific traditions is the sense that the Lord died. There is, and there ought to be, a sense of mourning at this point, the mourning that the disciples felt when Jesus gave up the ghost and breathed his last.

LAWTON: Eastern Orthodox and growing numbers of Catholics and Protestants begin celebrating the triumph of the Resurrection Saturday night, before midnight.

FATHER ROBERSON: It is the celebration of darkness and light. The church starts in the darkness, and there is that light of a single candle, which then is spread out all through the congregation. It is a real celebration of the hope and the meaning that the Resurrection of Christ brings to our lives.

LAWTON: In many Orthodox traditions, the service spills out into the street, processing outside the church.

MS. MATHEWES-GREEN: We sing over and over “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling death by death, and upon those in the tomb, bestowing life.” We’ll say it over and over, shouting it out, rejoicing at what Christ has freed us from, and what he’s freed us to.

LAWTON: Some Protestants also gather in darkness, in a pre-dawn Easter sunrise service. Others gather later Sunday morning, with joyous pageantry and celebration.

MR. WANGERIN: Easter should be for us a genuine joy, not just in our minds, but also in our physical experience — that for awhile, death was all that existed, but coming with Easter is the remarkable, surprising grace that death is overcome. Christians say to one another, “He is risen,” and the answer is, “He is risen indeed.”

LAWTON: And despite differing traditions and rituals and even days of celebration, church leaders say that is the ultimate — and unifying — Easter message.

FATHER ROBERSON: We celebrate a single reality of Jesus coming into the world, the son of God becoming incarnate and entering into our lives. And we celebrate the central reality of his death for our sins — that he suffered and died for us, and on the third day, he rose from the dead.

Easter is not easy for most poets and writers, the difficult mystery of resurrection being more intractable than incarnation.

One of the best examples of the problem is perhaps the most famous Easter poem of the second half of the 20th century, John Updike’s “Seven Stanzas at Easter.”  Updike identifies the difficulty in the opening line:

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

The crucial word in the center of the first line—if—starkly states what might be called “the Easter problem” and Updike’s insistence on the orthodox doctrine of the physical, bodily reality of the resurrection, even when hedged with the doubting if, provides a succinct but apt statement of one of the key themes of his work—the terror of death and the search for some sense, some promise, of overcoming, and he will not brook any evasions:

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The tension between belief and doubt in the face of death, between faith and its opposite—certainty, and the need for resurrection run through all of Updike’s vast body of writing, from his early novels, stories, and poetry (“Seven Stanzas at Easter” was written in 1960, just a year after his first novel was published, and the poem was the winning entry in a religious arts festival sponsored by a Lutheran church on Boston’s North Shore) to his later work, including Due Considerations, his final collection of essays and criticism, and Endpoint, a posthumous book of poems published this month.

“Endpoint” does not directly address Easter, but its many meditations on Updike’s impending death—he died January 27 at the age of 76 and was battling cancer as he wrote many of the poems, specifically addressing his illness in a number of them—underscore the tension he wrestled with throughout his career between the fear of death and the hope for some kind of afterlife. In a poem entitled “Death of a Computer,” he writes of an old computer’s final crash and the “hopeful garble” on the monitor’s screen: “I in a spurt of mercy shut it down. / May I, too, have a stern and kindly hand / bestow upon my failing circuits peace.” In “Fine Point 12/22/08,” the last of the seventeen poems in the title sequence, he asks, “Why go to Sunday school, though surlily, / and not believe a bit of what was taught?” He praises Jews who “kept faith / and passed the prayers, the crabbed rites / from table to table as Christians mocked”:

We mocked but took. The timbrel creed of praise
gives spirit to the daily; blood tinges lips.
The tongue reposes in papyrus pleas,
saying, Surely—magnificent, that “surely”—
goodness and mercy shall follow me all
the days of my life, my life, forever.

Updike wrote in an early autobiographical essay, “The Dogwood Tree,” of his fascination with what he called “the three great secret things”—art, sex, and religion and how they combined and interacted in his artistic mission to “transcribe middleness with all its grits, bumps, and anonymities, in its fullness of satisfaction and mystery.” While the appreciations and obituaries that poured forth at his death duly noted how art, and especially sex, wove themselves into his work, few noted what British novelist Ian McEwan called Updike’s “religious seriousness,” his being “constitutionally unable to ‘make the leap of unfaith.’”

The final piece in “Due Considerations” is a contribution to National Public Radio’s “This I Believe” series. Written at the age of 73, Updike acknowledged, “Cosmically, I seem to be of two minds.” While affirming the power of science to explain much of the universe, he also noted that “subjective sensations, desires, and, may we even say, illusions compose the substance of our daily existence, and religion alone, in its many forms, attempts to address and placate these. We are part of nature,” he continued, “and natural necessity compels and in the end dissolves us; yet to renounce all and any supernature, any appeal or judgment beyond the claims of matter and private appetite, leaves in the dust too much of our humanity.”

“Due Considerations” also includes Updike’s 1999 essay for The New Yorker, “The Future of Faith,” a combination of personal and journalistic observations that seems a prescient anticipation of the recently released American Religious Identification Survey’s finding that the percentage of Americans who claim to be Christian is declining, especially among mainline Protestants. “As the year 2000 draws to a close, faith in America hangs on,” he wrote, describing the state of belief in signature Updike style that is instantly recognizable: “A Protestant Christian on the eve of the third millennium must struggle with the sensation that his sect is, like the universe itself in the latest cosmological news, winding down, growing thinner and thinner as entropy works an inevitable dimming upon the outspreading stars.”

Updike wrote that The New Yorker assignment was given to him because he was the magazine’s “token Christian,” and he undertook it only reluctantly: “The attempt felt dangerous; I feared it might empty out of me the last drops of what feeble faith had got me thus far.” Finding himself fearful and sleepless in a hotel room in Florence, Italy overlooking the city’s stolid Santa Maria del Fiore, the fourth-largest church in Christendom, Updike reports an epiphany in the midst of a thunderstorm: “Lightning. Hectic gusts. The rain was furious. I was not alone in the universe. … I was filled with a glad sense of exterior activity. My burden of being was being shared. God was at work—at ease, even, in this nocturnal Florentine commotion, this heavenly wrath and architectural defiance, this Jacobean wrestle…. All this felt like a transaction, a rescue, an answered prayer.” It is, in a sense, the mature, aging Updike’s personal encounter with one aspect of the Easter problem—abandonment, the solitariness of being alone in the universe, and the need for transcendence.

The passage echoes the famous closing of his short story “Pigeon Feathers,” written almost 40 years earlier, in which a young boy is plagued by doubt, the fear of death, and questions about the afterlife. The fourteen-year-old protagonist, David Kern, has a series of unsatisfying encounters with adults, including the Reverend Dobson, a Lutheran pastor who tells him the afterlife is like Lincoln’s goodness living on after him. Despite the minister’s vacuous answer, Updike wrote of David: “The sight of clergymen cheered him; whatever they themselves thought, their collars were still a sign that somewhere, at some time, someone had recognized that we cannot, cannot, submit to death.”

As David goes about the farm-boy business of burying six pigeons he has killed as pests, he loses himself in studying the intricate designs on the birds’ feathers: “As he fitted the last two, still pliant, on the top, and stood up, crusty coverings were lifted from him, and with a feminine, slipping sensation along his nerves that seemed to give the air hands, he was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever.”

In some senses, including what he called his “fragile” faith, Updike was the emblematic mainline Protestant. He was raised a Lutheran but, like many other Americans, held his denominational affiliation somewhat loosely. After marrying his first wife, a Unitarian, the couple attended a Congregational church as a sort of mixed-marriage compromise, and in the mid-1980s, after divorce and remarriage, Updike identified himself as “a card carrying Episcopalian.” He could even, as he said in a brief note he wrote about his 1988 novel S., the third book in his trilogy based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, write of becoming “an increasingly enthusiastic disciple of Indian religions.” That appears to have been more a literary and linguistic enthusiasm than a discipleship, yet his poem “Religious Consolation” seems to acknowledge a need for the varieties of religious experience:

Strange, the extravagance of it—who needs
Those eighteen-armed black Kalis, those musty saints
Whose bones and bleeding wounds appall good taste,
Those joss sticks, houris, gilded Buddhas, books
Moroni etched in tedious detail?
We do; we need more worlds. This one will fail.

Unlike most of his characters and many Americans, Updike was theologically sophisticated. He cut his teeth on Danish Lutheran theologian Soren Kierkegaard, Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth, and, to a lesser extent, existentialist German philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich. All three continued to engage him, and in “Midpoint,” a long autobiographical poem published in 1969, he paid tribute to Kierkegaard and Barth:

An easy Humanism plagues the land;
I choose to take an otherworldly stand.
—
Praise Kierkegaard, who splintered Hegel’s creed
Upon the rock of Existential need;
Praise Barth, who told how saving Faith can flow
From Terror’s oscillating Yes and No;

In his conclusion to a 1976 review of biographies of Barth and Tillich, Updike wrote that both men “confronted the apparent withdrawal of God from the world around them—Barth by claiming He was Wholly Other and thus immune to detection, Tillich by suggesting that He was present, weakly, in everything. Theology buttresses the faith that would hold off mortal fear, and these two theologians, a decade after the decade of their deaths, present a merged afterimage, positive and negative slants on the problem of Angst. What lingers of Barth, still ringing in the air of churches and seminaries, was his tone of fearlessness, his bold, encyclopedic, and hearty exposition of the word of God as over against the word of Man; whereas Tillich, unable to exclude anxiety and doubt, brought them into the sanctum, and called them holy emotions.”

More than any other contemporary novelist Updike also made clergy significant, even central characters in his work. It is hard to imagine another writer who has created such a range of clerics, from the dueling figures of orthodox Lutheran pastor Fritz Kruppenbach and liberal Episcopalian priest Jack Eccles in Rabbit, Run to the Reverend Thomas Marshfield, Updike’s version of Hawthorne’s Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, in A Month of Sundays, to his epic yet intimate In the Beauty of the Lilies, in which he richly described the loss of faith of Presbyterian clergyman Clarence Arthur Wilmot, to his last novel, The Widows of Eastwick, and its depiction of the Reverend Deborah Larcom, a Unitarian clergywoman. When she preached, one of the other characters observes, “it was with utter naturalness and clarity, taking Jesus and Buddha as equivalent embodiments of goodness, citing Doctor Schweitzer and Mohandas Gandhi and Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King as manifestations of the divine in human form.” Drawn from across a range of denominations and theological perspectives, Updike’s clergy are never cardboard or stick figures, but fully realized and embodied characters. As he said in a 1978 interview, “The practicing minister is in a terribly difficult position in our pretty well de-Christianized, inconsolable age. But they keep going, don’t they … and I admire them.”

Still, it must be noted that despite Updike’s insistence that if Jesus rose it was a bodily rather than metaphorical resurrection, Jesus himself and the events surrounding the crucifixion and resurrection are largely absent from his poetry and fiction. His hope, the unstated Easter hope for eternal life that runs through his work, is dependent on what he called in one story “supernatural mail” with its “decisive but illegible” signatures, those very immanent things and events that contain within them the promise of more. In “Pigeon Feathers” he provided a telling example: “The sermon topics posted outside churches, the flip, hurried pieties of disc jockeys, the cartoons in magazines showing angels or devils—on such scraps he kept alive the possibility of hope.”

Or as Updike affirmed in the last line of the first poem in his final book: “Birthday, death day—what day is not both?”

–David E. Anderson, senior editor at Religion News Service, has also written for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on novelists Marilynne Robinson and Alice McDermott.

Q: How important is Easter on the Christian calendar?

A: Easter is the pivotal feast day. It is the most important day of the year for a Christian. The awesome thing about Easter is the way in which it takes what would have been a tremendous tragedy, the death of Jesus on Good Friday, and turns it into the great triumph of God over death, and that changes everything for us. We wouldn’t be Christian if it wasn’t for that … It was what turned the disciples into Christians, when they realized that Jesus was raised from the dead, that he really was the Messiah that they were waiting for and that somehow the world changed in that magnificent sacrifice. That was what gave them the energy, the joy to go out and to preach the Gospel to all people, and many of them were martyred because of it. So that deep, profound faith in themselves and the deepness of who they were was what sustained them in times of their struggles and their trials. A theology or a philosophy that doesn’t deal with death is not going to be helpful to you when you’re in times of suffering and trial. I often find that people talk very nonchalantly about God and religion, and I sometimes think to myself, well, wait until you have difficulties. What will sustain you? The power of the crucifixion is the fact that it was a horrible way to die. That Jesus allowed himself to be killed that way — he could have avoided it if he wanted to. There are other times in the Bible where it talks about the leaders and authorities and people trying to stone him, but he went back to Jerusalem knowing that he had so stirred up the people and the authorities that they were so angry at him that they wanted to crucify him, and he knew that was what he needed to do, so he did it out of his own free will. The pain of that, the sorrow, the struggle, the conflict of that horrible day all turn into joy with the knowledge that he was resurrected from the dead. So suddenly what had been a great failure — the greatest tragedy, the worst thing that could have happened — became the greatest joy, the most wondrous thing, the great triumph of God over death.

Q: How important is music to this season?

A: We know that Jesus, when he met with his disciples on what we call Maundy Thursday — it comes from the Latin mandatum, a mandate, and the mandate actually was to wash each other’s feet. The mandate was to serve each other, to love each other as Christ loves us. At this Passover meal that Jesus was sharing with his disciples, he picked up the bread that he had and broke it and gave it to them and said, “This is my body,” and he picked up the cup of wine and thanked God and said, “This is my blood,” and passed it around. Little did they know that this was going to be the last meal with him. What they knew was that he was very emotional and that he seemed to be telling them things that they knew they needed to remember. One of the last things they did in this celebration of the Passover meal was to sing a hymn. We don’t know what hymn it was, but it would have been a Hebrew chant that would have been sung at the Passover table, and knowing that Jesus was a singer and that he sang with his disciples makes you realize how ancient this form is and how deeply it is engrained in the soul.

Hymns are one of the oldest things we human beings do together communally. What’s wonderful about singing is that you actually breathe together. You say it in the same tempo. It’s the difference between saying a creed together in church, where ir might not be exactly the same tempo, or actually singing it, where everyone has the same tempo. You’re breathing at the end of the phrase together. It is a wonderful moment where we become one. In Christianity we talk about being one body in Christ, and to be able to breathe together and sing together as one is one of the most profound ways to experience that.

The wonderful thing about hymns is that they are encoded with different memories of singing them in different places. I imagine that the disciples remembered that hymn hauntingly the next two days, that they remembered him singing with them, and it probably made them cry as they remembered. And then, when Jesus was resurrected from the dead, then that singing with him became something else. Probably for the rest of their lives they could always see him and hear him singing with them whenever they sang that hymn. That’s the power of music.

The other thing that happened at this Passover meal is that Jesus surprised them by getting down on his knees in front of them, by taking a towel and actually washing their feet. Peter, one of the disciples, immediately said, “No, No, you shouldn’t be washing my feet.” And Jesus said, “If I don’t wash you then you are not part of this whole thing,” and then he said, of course, “Well, then wash everything.” And Jesus said, “No, only the feet.” But this simple, very powerful act of not being the kind of leader one would expect, not being the kind of person who would lord it over them — “Yes, I am God” — Jesus never did that, and that was the most amazing thing, that he of his own free will gave up his life, knowing that was the only way to break the power of death, to be the one who did not deserve to die, but who died in our stead.

Q: What does knowing that Jesus sang with the disciples do for you, and how does that make the importance of music central to this season in the church year?

A: Knowing that Jesus sang meant that he was like me, that I sing, he sang, that he was a fully human being, and that he enjoyed being with people and singing together. One of the greatest things about singing is the way in which it immediately creates community. If you’re breathing together with each other, if you’re singing the same words, you’re experiencing the same feeling. There’s a way in which different hymns give us a different sense of emotion. So, for example, with “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” it is a very personal piety: “Sometimes it causes me to tremble.” Well, if you’ve been in profound grief, you know what that is. That hymn may sound silly to you when you’re in a good mood, and everything’s going fine. But when someone close to you dies suddenly, lingering on the words “Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble” will be exactly where you are. So the hymn picks up an emotion and carries it to a place where we can share it with others in a way we don’t do otherwise. Some of the great moments of hymn singing have been at the funeral of some great, tragic figure. When we sing together “O God Our Help in Ages Past,” there’s something comforting about singing a hymn that has gone through many, many, many different tragedies and carries us together at that moment … We seek to be in community with each other, and singing is one of the greatest ways to allow us to do that, where we can feel the same emotion, and we can say the same words at the same time, and we can truly be one body.

Q: There is special music for this season that most Christians don’t usually sing at other times of the year.

A: One of the great hymns, “Jesus Christ is Risen Today,” was actually a Latin hymn. I believe it dates back to the 14th century. It started in Bohemia. It became very popular, and there’s version of it that came in 1708 in English translation, and we’re still using that hymn and that melody. It is ecstatic in the way that you have “Alleluia,” which is “praise to God,” and that alleluia repeats after every phrase, so it gets the sense of total joy. If you’ve ever been with somebody you thought was dying, and then they make it through the night, and the doctors refer to it as a miracle, that’s the kind of joy which was, “We thought he was dead, but now he is alive. Hallelujah!”

Q: Much Easter music uses alleluia or hallelujah. Why is that?

A: “Alleluia” is the Latin form of “praise to God.” “Hallelujah” is the Hebrew form of “praise to God.” They’re both ecstatic, and I think the sound of it is why we haven’t translated them, because “Alleluia,” the way it falls off the ear, and “Hallelujah” — just that sense of almost moving into the non-verbal, not a translation of “praise to God” but “Hallelujah,” that sheer joy, sheer ecstasy.

Q: And why are those words used especially at Easter?

A: Not only do we use them especially at Easter, but we don’t say them in the Christian Church during Lent. We bury the alleluias and return them on Easter Sunday because we are walking with Jesus through this Lenten period. One of the earliest services in the Christian Church is the Easter Vigil, waiting through the night, being reminded of the great story and waiting for dawn to come, waiting for that moment when Christ is risen. And the early church then began to precede that with two fast days, so you’re having a Paschal fast before the Paschal feast, and eventually, within a number of centuries it became a whole week, what we now term Holy Week … During Lent we work on our relationship with God and prepare ourselves to get to the point each year so that we can walk with Jesus during these final three days. The gift of the Triduum Sacrum, these three holy days, is that we walk in real time with Jesus, and we meditate on everything that happened to him during those times.

Q: How does the music of the season reflect that journey, those moods?

A: The songs and the hymns, especially for Good Friday, reflect the pain, the conflict, the torture, the incredible sadness and mourning around the death of someone you love. Any of us who have had that kind of experience know that it’s like having the rug pulled out from underneath you. You can’t imagine the world without this person. You can’t imagine going on. Your life has totally changed.

In “O Sacred Head Now Wounded” we have a wonderful hymn. It started as a Latin hymn. It got translated into German and then into English. One of the early English translations was “O head so full of bruises,” which I don’t think we’d still be singing today. But the translation, the music, the harmonization — what’s so wonderful about it is the way it holds complex theological issues together. There are moments in major keys, moments in minor keys, there are dissonances and consonances, there is tension that gets resolved. It takes you on a journey, takes you on a long journey through the text. It’s a meditation on Christ and on his body, specifically his head and on the gift of his sacrifice, so encoded in the music, in the sonorities, in the choice of chords, in the way in which the melody moves, in the way in which the harmony flows. We hear the anguish and that suffering, and we linger with it. “O Sacred Head Now Wounded,” if you sing all the verses, takes a long time, and in general the songs we sing on Good Friday are longer. They are slow, they may be in a minor key, they have a sense of suffering, of sorrow, of mourning, and that is a great gift. To be able to stand together in that emotion and do it together as a body is the gift to us. If you’ve been to a funeral, where suddenly everyone is singing together, there’s something very comforting about that, that you’re not alone. Death happens to all of us. That is one of the great tragedies of being human.

Q: And then there is a big contrast from the emotion of Good Friday to Easter.

A: I don’t think anyone can tell you that you must believe Jesus rose from the dead. I think that we all struggle with that in our own time … I’ve been through all the doubt, so I understand why people can’t just say, “Yes, this is for me.” But I also know in my heart that my Redeemer lives, that I’ve seen miracles surrounding the deaths of good friends of mine, and I know that there’s something more than what we see. I know somehow that the invisible is louder than the visible, that there are saints and angels that sing their praises. So on the Sunday morning of Easter, the cathedral is totally changed from Good Friday. On Good Friday, it’s been stark. We’ve cleared off the altar; there is little there. We have the cross, the starkness of the cross, and the sadness — no flowers, no incense. And then on Easter Sunday the church is filled with lilies and spring flowers. The smells are overwhelming, the incense comes back, the lights are up high and bright, the music is loud and joyous and fast and fills us with such happiness to know that our God lives, that love has triumphed over evil.

Q: How does the music convey the Easter message?

A: The theology of Easter is one of joy, triumph, resurrection, rebirth, surprise. The joy of Easter is in the triumph of the resurrection. It’s an incredible and profound joy knowing that God has broken through and that love has triumphed, and so the music tends to be more straightforward, less lingering on harmonies and dissonance, very straightforward, a joyous, faster tempo … One of the things people love about Easter hymns is the incredible joy and happiness of singing them. The tempi are faster. The organ plays loud. We can let ourselves sing at the top of our lungs, and no one is going to yell at us for singing loudly. We have ecstatic moments and hallelujahs. We have just the sheer joy of knowing that love has triumphed. The message of Easter is encoded in the music. We hear the joy, we hear the triumph. We sing fast music, we sing it joyously, it’s in a major key, and it helps us to feel that this is the day the Lord has made.

Q: How is the message expressed differently in different cultural and theological traditions?

A: Every hymn is the result of someone’s spirituality. What’s so interesting about hymn writing and hymn composing is that we take together a text, sometimes it’s a Latin text from the 12th, 13th century, it’s connected with a translation, it might be translated into German and then into English. We have the piety of all those people who are working on that. We have a tune. We have someone else who might harmonize it. All of these pieces fall into place. It is always a miracle as to which hymn people decide is the one they want to sing. “Jesus Christ Is Risen Today” was a hit tune the moment it appeared in 1708 in its current form, and we have been singing it every Easter since. This wonderful hymn “Because He Lives I Can Face Tomorrow”: Being able to have that as your core theology, singing it so that you remember it, so that it’s in your mind the rest of the week, waiting to sing it until Easter Sunday, and that is a profound theology. That’s absolutely helpful to you, and so as you have that tune going through your head the rest of the week, you’re thinking about the Easter message, the core message, which is Jesus lives, Jesus was resurrected, therefore my life has a new meaning. Death is not the end of me.

Q: At Easter time, there are traditional hymns that are sung pretty universally, but there are lots of new songs as well, much more so than Christmas. What does this say theologically?

A: It actually is terribly theologically important that we keep composing and writing new music. If we stick with all the old music, then somehow there lingers this idea that God is dead. The Holy Spirit in my theology is still moving in the world and is still encouraging us to write new songs, to write new texts, to write new poetry, and the gift of a living faith is rediscovering again what that means for you … What we love about something new is that we see an old idea or an old truth with new eyes, and that’s a great gift to the world. So we absolutely need new Easter hymns, new Easter songs, and it’s lovely that these different traditions all have their own hymns that pop up.

Q: So many of the Easter songs have the image of Jesus as a lamb.

A: Jesus and his disciples had that Passover meal, and at that they would have had lamb. The sacrificial lamb is deep in Jewish theology — the idea of one sacrifice representing the sins of all. And so that was an obvious thing for the early church to come to, the idea of Jesus being the paschal lamb, being the lamb of Pesach, of Passover, and because of him our sins are passed over. In the early church, the idea of crucifixion was so horrendous; it was such a horrible way to die that they couldn’t imagine using that as a symbol. Constantine saw a vision of the cross in the sky before he overcame his enemies, and two years after that he decided crucifixions should be banned. There is no symbolism of crucifixions or crosses in the fourth century or the fifth, and it’s only later that people began to portray that, when it’s not a form of death, a form of execution that’s being used all the time.

Q: And the Hallelujah Chorus. Why is that such a common staple of Easter music?

A: I think the Hallelujah Chorus, which comes from Handel’s Messiah, somehow represents the sheer ecstasy of the joy of knowing that our life has meaning, of knowing that love has triumphed, of knowing that God is and that there is more to life than just the dreariness of the day — that Christ has triumphed over death, that we can hope for greater things, that there is life after death. There are some hymns and songs that seem fine on paper, but when you sing them they don’t resonate, and then there are other hymns and songs that the first time they are sung, somehow everybody knows this speaks an eternal truth. “Jesus Christ is Risen Today” is one of those hymns.

Q: Many of the Good Friday and Easter songs emphasize blood.

A: The truth of the reality is that we are dealing with life and death issues. The idea of blood, which is so horrifying — when you bleed you are terrified that you are going to die — but to use that as a symbol, then, of new life is the gift of it as symbol. There is much poetry that is written that seems sort of gory, but the best of it transcends that and calls us to a different place. It reminds us that yes, we are human and that we die: Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. And yet it reminds us that there is another side to that, that the story doesn’t end there, that we end in resurrection.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Now, as we mentioned earlier, Western Christians are celebrating Holy Week and Easter, their most sacred time of the year. In the many special services and observances that take place during Holy Week, music plays a crucial role in setting the mood of the worship and in helping to convey the Easter message. Kim Lawton has our report.

CHOIR #1 (singing): Alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia.

KIM LAWTON: Easter is the most important day on the church calendar, and for Christians, the music of the season is central to the celebration.

Canon VICTORIA SIROTA (Author, “Preaching to the Choir” and Pastor, The Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, New York): The awesome thing about Easter is the way in which it takes what would have been a tremendous tragedy — the death of Jesus on Good Friday — and turns it into the great triumph of God over death.

CHOIR #1 (singing): And He shall reign forever and ever.

Canon SIROTA: The message is encoded in the music.

CHOIR #1 (singing): And He shall reign forever and ever.

THOMAS TYLER (Special Assistant to the Pastor for Worship, Shiloh Baptist Church): If there’s anything that’s going to connect to people across any line, any sector, it will be its music.

LAWTON: The importance of music stretches back to the first Holy Week, on Thursday, when Jesus celebrated Passover with his disciples at the Last Supper. According to the Gospel story, they sang a hymn together before they parted.

Canon SIROTA: We don’t know what hymn it was, but it would have been a Hebrew chant that would have been sung at the Passover table. Knowing that Jesus was a singer and that he sang with his disciples makes you realize how ancient this form is.

LAWTON: At Maundy Thursday services, music helps set the mood as Christians begin their annual time of mourning the arrest, prosecution and crucifixion of Jesus.

Thomas Tyler is in charge of worship and music at Shiloh Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. He says it’s spiritually important to sing the songs of grief before celebrating Christ’s resurrection.

Mr. TYLER: We want to skip over the sorrow. We want to skip over the abandonment and go get our praise on. But, if you don’t remember what he went through, then I feel your appreciation for the significance of that resurrection is marginalized.

LAWTON: The most somber practices take place on Good Friday, and the music reflects this.

Canon SIROTA: In general, the songs that we sing on Good Friday are longer. They’re slow. They may be in a minor key. They have a sense of suffering, of sorrow, of mourning.

LAWTON: At the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, Canon Sirota works with organist Tim Brumfield. They say one of the most common Good Friday hymns, “O Sacred Head Now Wounded,” holds complex theological truths.

Canon SIROTA: What’s amazing about it is the way the music goes between major and minor, uses dissonance notes, resolves them, there’s this underlying sense of conflict that still needs to be resolved. We Christians are thankful to God for the crucifixion. but on Good Friday we spend the time lamenting the fact that Jesus had to die on our behalf.

LAWTON: Another widely sung hymn is “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” — an old African-American spiritual.

FEMALE PERFORMER (on stage singing): Sometimes it causes me to tremble.

Canon SIROTA: It’s a very personal piety: “Sometimes it causes me to tremble.” Well, if you’ve been in profound grief, you know what that is.

LAWTON: Although some Easter season music has become universal among Christians, many traditions put the basic theological concepts into their own cultural settings as well.

Mr. TYLER: That culture helps to shape who you are and it’s reflected through how you do what you do, how you go through your — in this case — your spiritual practices.

LAWTON: Many of the crucifixion songs focus on the blood of Christ, which Christians believe atoned for the sins of the world.

Canon SIROTA: The truth of the reality that we are dealing with life and death issues; the idea of blood, which is so horrifying. And when you bleed you are terrified that you are going to die. But to use that as a symbol then of new life, it reminds us that the story doesn’t end there, that we end in resurrection.

LAWTON: And so comes the great transition to Easter Sunday, from mourning to resurrection.

Canon SIROTA: We hear the joy, we hear the triumph. We sing fast music. We sing it joyously. It’s in a major key and it helps us to feel that this is “the day the Lord has made.”

LAWTON: Many Easter songs incorporate the words, “Alleluia” or “Hallelujah.”

CHOIR #2 (singing): Alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia.

Canon SIROTA: Alleluia is the Latin form of “praise to God.” Hallelujah is the Hebrew form of “praise to God.” So they’re both ecstatic. And I think the sound of it is why we haven’t translated them. Hallelujah — just that sense of almost moving into the non-verbal. Not a translation of praise to God, but “Hallelujah” — that sheer joy, sheer ecstasy. Not only do we use them especially at Easter, but we don’t say them in the Christian Church during Lent. We bury the Alleluias and return them on Easter Sunday.

Mr. TYLER: Because it’s the highest praise. It’s the highest praise. And on this day, of all days, he deserves what: the highest praise.

LAWTON: There are Easter old standards that are sung with great meaning. One of them is, “Because He Lives.”

CHOIR #3 (singing): Because He lives I can face tomorrow.

Canon SIROTA: Because He lives, I can face tomorrow”. And that is a profound theology.

LAWTON: But there are often new Easter songs too.

YOUTH CHOIR (on stage singing): Our Redeemer lives…

Canon SIROTA: If we stick with all the old music, then somehow there lingers this idea that God is dead. The Holy Spirit in my theology is still moving in the world and is still encouraging us to write new songs.

LAWTON: Perhaps the single most popular Easter song across the Christian spectrum is “Christ the Lord is Risen Today,” also called, “Jesus Christ is Risen Today.”

Canon SIROTA: “Jesus Christ is Risen Today” is one of the great Easter hymns. And one of the wonderful features of it is this Alleluia that comes as the refrain of every single line so it has this ecstatic quality of singing with great joy all these notes.

Mr. TYLER: We celebrate the “now”-ness of the event, even though the event happened over 2,000 years ago. Each time it occurs it’s a fresh experience — a fresh observation.

Canon SIROTA: The core message, which is: “Jesus lives. Jesus was resurrected. Therefore my life has a new meaning. Death is not the end of me.”

CHOIR #4 (singing): Alleluia. Alleluia.

LAWTON: And the music, they say, is key to conveying that message. I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

KIM LAWTON, guest anchor: For Western Christians, Sunday (March 16) is Palm Sunday, which begins Holy Week, leading up to Easter (March 23). But Eastern Orthodox Christians have just begun observing their time of Lent. Because of differing church calendars, Western and Eastern Christians usually celebrate the resurrection of Jesus on different dates. This year, the celebrations are especially far apart — five weeks. Over the centuries, distinct Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Holy Week practices have developed, but theologians say those different practices all reflect shared beliefs about the Christian faith.

During Holy Week, churches around the world echo the familiar refrain that proclaims a central tenet of Christianity: Jesus Christ was crucified, died, and was buried, but three days later he rose from the dead. Eastern Orthodox and Western Christians alike say celebration of the Resurrection is the most important event on the church calendar.

MS. FREDERICA MATHEWES-GREEN (Holy Cross Antiochian Orthodox Church): This is the victory of Jesus Christ over sin, over death. It’s what sets us free. In comparison, Christmas is not that important. We like Christmas. Everybody does. But the whole point of our salvation is embodied on Pascha.

WALT WANGERIN, JR. (author, “Paul: A Novel”): This is the very center of what we believe, of who we are, of what our identity is, of why we continue to return to the Lord in joy. Without Easter, there is no church.

LAWTON: More often than not, Eastern Orthodox and Western Christians celebrate the Resurrection on different days. But a growing number of American church leaders say this should change.

FATHER RON ROBERSON (National Conference of Catholic Bishops): The credibility of the Christian message really gets compromised when people on the outside see that we can’t even agree on when to celebrate the central mystery of our faith.

LAWTON: Conflicts over the celebration of the Resurrection stretch back to the beginning days of Christianity. Early church leaders wanted all Christians to celebrate the Resurrection on the same day, after the Jewish Passover. To that end, a council of bishops in the fourth century decreed that Easter would fall on the first Sunday after the first full moon, after the spring equinox. But as the Roman Empire divided between the Greek-speaking East and the Latin-speaking West, the church world also split. When Westerners adopted the new Gregorian calendar in the 16th century, the East kept the Julian calendar. Since the two calendars have differing dates for the equinox and full moon, in most years Easter falls on different Sundays.

LAWTON: During Holy Week, churches mark their beliefs with special services. In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, these services are especially numerous and lengthy. One unique observance is the service of holy unction on Wednesday night.

MS. MATHEWES-GREEN: At the conclusion of this service, the members of the church line up and come forward for anointing, for healing. In the Orthodox Church, we still have a lively belief that Jesus heal, that we need healing of our souls and our bodies.

LAWTON: On Holy or Good Friday, Christians remember the Crucifixion. According to many theologians, of all the traditions Roman Catholics tend to give special emphasis on the suffering and death of Jesus. Through the Stations of the Cross, or in dramatic productions, Catholics often reenact the journey to the Crucifixion.

Some Protestants gather Friday evening in a solemn worship service that remembers the Crucifixion through the taking of Communion.

Catholics and many Protestants traditionally strip their altars bare. Statues and crosses are covered in purple or black cloths, the shrouds of death.

In Eastern Orthodox churches, a shroud showing Christ’s body is actually carried in a funeral procession around the church and then laid in a tomb adorned with flowers.

MR. WANGERIN: What should be experienced on that day by these very specific traditions is the sense that the Lord died. There is, and there ought to be, a sense of mourning at this point, the mourning that the disciples felt when Jesus gave up the ghost and breathed his last.

LAWTON: Eastern Orthodox and growing numbers of Catholics and Protestants begin celebrating the triumph of the Resurrection Saturday night, before midnight.

FATHER ROBERSON: It is the celebration of darkness and light. The church starts in the darkness, and there is that light of a single candle, which then is spread out all through the congregation. It is a real celebration of the hope and the meaning that the Resurrection of Christ brings to our lives.

LAWTON: In many Orthodox traditions, the service spills out into the street, processing outside the church.

MS. MATHEWES-GREEN: We sing over and over “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling death by death, and upon those in the tomb, bestowing life.” We’ll say it over and over, shouting it out, rejoicing at what Christ has freed us from, and what he’s freed us to.

LAWTON: Some Protestants also gather in darkness, in a pre-dawn Easter sunrise service. Others gather later Sunday morning, with joyous pageantry and celebration.

MR. WANGERIN: Easter should be for us a genuine joy, not just in our minds, but also in our physical experience — that for awhile, death was all that existed, but coming with Easter is the remarkable, surprising grace that death is overcome. Christians say to one another, “He is risen,” and the answer is, “He is risen indeed.”

LAWTON: And despite differing traditions and rituals and even days of celebration, church leaders say that is the ultimate — and unifying — Easter message.

FATHER ROBERSON: We celebrate a single reality of Jesus coming into the world, the son of God becoming incarnate and entering into our lives. And we celebrate the central reality of his death for our sins — that he suffered and died for us, and on the third day, he rose from the dead.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Now, a special Easter report. Last year at this time, we profiled two pastors in New Orleans. Both were in their first years at their churches when Katrina hit. They were working hard to comfort their congregations and help rebuild their communities, all while dealing with their own losses. Given the lack of progress in so many areas of New Orleans, we wanted to check back with those same pastors. Kim Lawton asked them how they are reflecting on the themes of the Easter season this year.

KIM LAWTON: Palm Sunday in the Broodmoor neighborhood of New Orleans. Members of the Episcopal Church of the Annunciation are remembering Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem just before the crucifixion, and they are praying for the renewal of their own city. Rector Jerry Kramer says it’s a bittersweet time here.

Reverend JERRY KRAMER (Rector, Church of the Annunciation): Good things are happening, and we need to dwell on those things, but we still have an incredible road in front of us. And I just — there’s no way people around the country have any clue what we’re dealing with here, and the uphill fight that we’re enduring right now.

LAWTON: Across town at First Street United Methodist Church, Pastor Lance Eden says day to day his people still feel stuck between the suffering of Good Friday and the hope of Easter Sunday.

Reverend LANCE EDEN (Pastor, First Street United Methodist Church): Saturday where you’re just waiting and waiting and waiting, and it doesn’t seem like there’s any movement, anything happening. When will Sunday come?

LAWTON: Nineteen months after Hurricane Katrina, recovery in New Orleans remains painfully slow. Residents are more frustrated than ever by the official response at the city, state and federal levels. In that context, Eden and Kramer say, themes of the Easter season resonate in new and poignant ways.

Last year, Church of the Annunciation was worshipping in a doublewide trailer. Only about half of the congregation members had returned. Their church had been ruined by the waters that had flooded it for weeks after Katrina. They had planned replace it with a new modular building. But then they realized it would be cheaper to try and salvage the old church. So they’ve begun worshipping there again, even though there’s still no electricity or heat, and the cross on the roof still hasn’t been repaired.

Rev. KRAMER: You know, it is home even without power and flooring and walls and things like that. We’re home.

LAWTON: The congregation now has more people worshipping with them than there were before the storm. Many new members were drawn by Annunciation’s active role in relief efforts and community rebuilding. They’ve started renovating part of the old building in order to house the faith-based volunteers who still come in steady streams. They’re calling the project Resurrection House.

Rev. KRAMER: God didn’t cause this storm. Where God comes in is in the redemption of it, and in the resurrection, which again doesn’t mean resuscitation. It means something new. It’s a new environment here, and you have to adapt to be relevant to bring the Gospel forward in this environment. 

(speaking to volunteers): This is where you saw people on the rooftops being pulled off and “Help us, help us.” All in here. Every patch of green that you see had a house on it pre-Katrina.

(to young woman): Where did you live?

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: My mother was right around the corner here.

Rev. KRAMER: Okay.

LAWTON: In addition to working in the Broadmoor neighborhood, Annunciation and its teams of volunteers have been active in the devastated predominantly African-American Lower Ninth Ward, where many churches were destroyed. They have a new mission church there called All Souls. It was started to meet the spiritual needs of the few who’ve come back.

Rev. KRAMER: You know, pre-Katrina I would have had no business going down to the Lower Ninth Ward. I didn’t know where it was. Now I have friends there. I mean, that’s grace, and that’s something God is up to in this mess.

Rev. EDEN (preaching): You may be sick, busted, and disgusted. Produce anyway.

LAWTON: First Street United Methodist Church, which suffered little damage during the storm, has also grown. The congregation has almost tripled, in part because of nearby church closings, and in part because of the church’s increasingly visible role as a community organizer.

Rev. EDEN: But we’ve had a large influx of persons who are of other denominations, who are not United Methodists, who have become a part of our church and are looking for a church that’s really doing something.

LAWTON: Last year the church partnered with a secular non-profit group, the Hands-On Network, to host and organize volunteers. Temporary housing was put up in the church’s multipurpose room. A year later the bunk beds, now well-worn, are still there, while the network looks for a more permanent home. The volunteers have gutted and repaired thousands of homes and helped clean up the community. But rising crime in their neighborhood is placing new pressure on ministry.

Rev. EDEN: From that corner to this corner is where a lot of the shootings happen, and as the church and the Hands-On organization, we’ve had to pay $6,000 a month to continue to keep a police officer on guard to protect the volunteers and the people in the community.

LAWTON: Eden had been out of seminary only a couple of months when Katrina hit. He says he’s learned a lot about being a leader.

Rev. EDEN: As a pastor, learning how not to take the mess of church folk and put my foot down — being 28 years old and some of them are twice my age — and say no, it’s not happening that way; that’s not what God has called us to do.

(speaking at conference): But we are in transition, and transition means that we’re going somewhere.

LAWTON: He has also become a prominent voice calling for more grassroots action to fight for social justice in the city.

Rev. EDEN (speaking at conference): I’m crazy enough and radical enough to believe that we do have hope here today. I’m not counting it out. It’s not over ’til God says it’s over.

LAWTON: Both ministers have faced new personal challenges over the past year. It wasn’t until the end of this past February that Kramer and his family were finally able to move back into their home.

(to Stacy Kramer): Wow, looks good.

STACY KRAMER: Thanks. We pretty much sealed this room. It was leaking like a sieve.

LAWTON: How much water did you have in here?

Rev. KRAMER: 7.9 –

LAWTON: Feet?

Rev. and Mrs. KRAMER (simultaneously): Feet! Yes, feet.

LAWTON: It took more than a year to sort everything out with the contractors and the insurance company.

Rev. KRAMER: The big problem with insurance companies is, you know, they want you to take the quick settlement, and we were just blessed, you know, to be in a position where we could fight it for a good year, year and a half.

LAWTON: Kramer gets frustrated when people suggest that New Orleans shouldn’t be rebuilt.

Rev. KRAMER: Are we really going to fail here? As the American nation, are we going to let this fail? Are we going to admit defeat?

LAWTON: Still, he acknowledges the victories here are all hard fought, and the battles take a toll.

Rev. KRAMER: It’s still really hard and we don’t really — I was sharing with the congregation Sunday — don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel yet. I’m tired. We’ve been doing this for a long time, and I’m tired.

LAWTON: He says last month his morale reached its lowest point since Katrina.

Rev. KRAMER: You have to absorb a lot of people’s pain and hurt constantly, and then you look at issues on sort of the macro level, with the total collapse of government here, absolutely, and the incredibly slow pace of something resembling progress. It wears you down.

LAWTON: Even the Episcopal bishop, Charles Jenkins of the Diocese of Louisiana, recently acknowledged that he has post-traumatic stress disorder.

Rev. KRAMER: Well, I mean we have about 200,000 people in the city right now, and we probably all have post-traumatic stress disorder. Just some are brave enough to admit it. But we’re all wounded in some way.

LAWTON: Do you ever feel like, “Okay, I did my duty. Now it’s time for someone else to step up”?

Rev. KRAMER: Never. And, boy, do I get that. But I am not leaving my people. I’m not leaving my flock. And I would be a bad pastor if I did.

LAWTON: The challenges, he says, are teaching important spiritual lessons.

Rev. KRAMER: You know faith is being out in the storm in the boat and the waves rocking you and not being able to see the light, not being able to see the shoreline and still going forward. That’s faith, and that’s what we’re learning.

LAWTON: Last year, Lance Eden told us his 84-year-old grandmother helped center him spiritually. We followed along as he took her to see the damage Katrina had done to the family cemetery. She passed away days before we returned this year. Eden took me back to the cemetery to show me where she would be buried.

Rev. EDEN: This is home, this is home. And I think it’s okay, because she’s going to be home. She wasn’t just a grandmother, but she was a teacher, she was a counselor, a person I could tell anything, and I mean anything, to and as a pastor you don’t have a lot of friends like that. And who becomes that root, that grounding? Definitely the Lord above. But on earth who becomes that, that can fill that void? I don’t know yet.

LAWTON: Eden had been living in his grandmother’s home prior to the storm. Katrina destroyed almost everything, except the outer walls. He now owns that house and hopes to begin rebuilding in the next few months. In the meantime, he still sleeps in his church office. He says he and his people deeply feel the Good Friday theme of being abandoned.

Rev. EDEN: A lot abandoned, a lot abandoned by their city government, a lot abandoned by our state government and our national government.

LAWTON: He says that has changed their understanding of Easter hope.

Rev. EDEN: The hope now, I think, is much different. I think that the hope now is that we’re going to have to do it ourselves, and looking at the power of being able to come up out of a grave through the help of the Lord, and nobody else but the Lord.

LAWTON: Despite the ongoing struggles, both pastors say resurrection is very present in the lives and work of ordinary people.

Rev. EDEN: Every time a volunteer crosses our door, or you see a charter bus of volunteers coming, I see the hope and the resurrection. Neighborhoods that are pulling together, people in the community who are from New Orleans who are pulling together to make a difference, we see hope there.

Rev. KRAMER: Absolutely, if you have eyes of faith and eyes to see, God is moving here powerfully in people’s lives and in the community. You have to look for it. But, you know, we see little mustard seeds blossoming here and there, and heck, yeah, that’ll preach on Easter Sunday.

LAWTON: Easter Sunday, and likely long beyond it.

I’m Kim Lawton in New Orleans.

From the fourth century until today, Christians have created things to do together, rituals, in order to experience for themselves the great simplicity of redemption. These rituals are meant to recur, they are the stones of an archway which, once built, is there to use, to go in and out by prayer and so to find pasture. We do not want to be rebuilding a different-shaped arch, however entrancing, but to use what we have, what we are used to, in order to enter into the real business of prayer. So the ceremonies of Holy Week, beginning with Palm Sunday, are there to be used, and this is a physical matter, a use of the body, so that all of ourselves will know. Intellectual apprehension of truth is all very well, and indeed for some it is enough; but for most of us, we live in a half-light, neither awake nor asleep, wanting to understand but not quite able to think it through; we need to be there to act it out, to participate. This is in no way an alternative or lesser kind of theologizing; by both ways we come to the central theme of redemption, the flesh-taking of Christ in which he returns to the Father and takes us unto the dynamic life of the Trinity which is the ultimate procession, and it is by physical processions that we can learn to become part of that reality.

The last days of Holy Week provide a simple way of allowing the body, the flesh, to learn theological truth by doing and being in earthly processions. Palm Sunday’s procession is about how to do the basic human thing — to walk, to take one step, just to be able to do the next step, and to remain with that doing, not seeing a much quicker way to get there by a bus, a train, a ship, a plane, which are quicker than our feet; we are always dashing through in order to be somewhere else, and when we are there then we think we will begin. But the procession is a slow, corporate event, the pace set by the weakest and slowest. Like growing, a procession is something done for its own sake, and in doing it we are becoming what we are not, going by a way we do not understand, for a purpose that is God’s, not ours, in ways that are too simple for our sight. We will never of course be ready on earth for the full “procession” which is the dynamism of the life of love which is the Trinity, since we are broken human beings, with limited sight; but given our consent, God can lead us by the flesh he created, to understand and apprehend the image of God which he placed within us. All that is needed is to give a minute assent, however impatient and grudging, and then just to do it. A procession can be seen as a sacrament, “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.” In the same way that we read through the letter of the Scriptures to the inner truth, so we understand more by walking than we know; it is the work and gift of God.

Meditation upon the processions of Holy Week is rightly undertaken at its commencement. In the early church, for the first three days of Holy Week, on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, the custom was to have only plain readings from Scripture; later, what was read each day were the separate accounts of the Passion. Then as now, these were days of stillness and silence when all were to be prepared, emptied, turned towards the Saviour’s great work. After the signs we gave ourselves during Lent of being ready to become empty by giving things up and therefore more free, now that desire will be put to the test. There is nothing now to be done or thought. It is the end of Lent, the pause before the great mystery of Redemption. In this pause, it is possible to reflect on these three processions, on Palm Sunday, Good Friday and Easter night, as ways into the great procession which is the life of Trinity, and this is not just for ourselves here and now. First we walk with so many others from the past, joined with them by our present actions. We receive life from the hands of the dead to live it out ourselves and pass it on to others, and that is true tradition. We are walking with our friends. And second, we do not do this for ourselves only, but for the whole of creation; insofar as one small portion of humanity which is us assents to the love of God, so the whole of creation becomes part of redeeming work.