After Pascha

By Natalie Pryor, From OCF Headliner, April 2010

During the past four years, many of my student friends and I have had conversations bemoaning the fact that Lent seems to pass us by. We're busy with midterms and papers. Church is an hour away. We don't make it to a lot of services. Then, when we go home for Pascha, the service is beautiful, but we feel like we missed out. We weren't prepared. 

This is obviously a less-than-ideal situation, and this year especially I made a greater effort not to let it happen. But it seems to me that, after Pascha, we experience the same problem without even realizing it. When I get back to campus after Pascha, I forget to greet my Orthodox friends with "Christ is Risen!" This year I even caught myself asking one guy, "How was your time in New Hampshire?" I could have at least said, "How was your Pascha?"

This is especially abhorrent behavior when I think about how I have experienced Pascha over the last few years. I've spent most of my time during the Paschal vigils fighting the urge to sit down and close my eyes. It's not that I don't want to focus, but I am exhausted from traveling and exams. I make the situation worse by telling myself to focus and be joyful because it's the most important night of the year-this is something I've learned that you can't force. In the brilliant book Wounded by Love, Elder Porphyrios teaches that love must be spontaneous. What happens to me when I try to "force" Pascha is that I fail. The highlight of the night is not singing "Christ is Risen," or kissing the Resurrectional icon. It's breaking the fast with tsoureki and cheese. "Obviously," I've told myself more than once, "you don't love Christ. This is the best day of the year and you're apathetic. You're ruining it." 

Thankfully, the Church understands my problem and has put something in place to help people like me. It's called the time between Easter and Pentecost. This year, the first Sunday after Pascha, St. Thomas Sunday, helped me to realize something I'd missed out on my whole life. I've heard the story of St. Thomas since I was a little girl. Like Peter, who didn't understand why he found only linens lying in Christ's tomb, and like Mary Magdalene, who went to the tomb weeping, St. Thomas didn't "get" that Christ had risen. I remember sitting in Church and feeling that I could never identify with Thomas, because, unlike him, I did believe Christ had risen. That is, after all, the point of Christianity. I couldn't be a Christian and be in St. Thomas' shoes.

But really, understanding and believing are very closely connected. 'Belief' can be the product of the intellect, but real belief, deep belief, believing 'in' Christ, is something much deeper than that. When I'm standing in Paschal vigil apathetically, I'm essentially not 'getting it', not believing deeply enough-which is, I think, close to Thomas' experience after all. If he had been more in tune with Christ, realization wouldn't have been so hard for him.

The season between Bright Week and Pentecost is our opportunity to enter more deeply in the Resurrection. As my priest said this morning, "it's not over with." Just like we need all of Lent to prepare for Pascha, we need this time to acclimate to Pascha. To 'get it'. That's why it's so sad that I'm missing out on this season as much or more as I miss out on Lent. I would like to take this opportunity to encourage other students who might have the same problem to do something about it. Maybe we need to make resolutions for this 'bright season' in the same way that we give things up for Lent. I'm going to start really simply and make more of an effort to say over and over, "Christ is risen!"