“Bring us safe through Jordan”

Holidays are such family memory factories: we re-create and re-vivify latent habits, rituals and practices all the while designing pages in our family scrapbooks. When one is 6,000+ miles away from home, those pages turn all the more effortlessly in your mind, and new experiences juxtapose themselves to the stalwart traditions. As I have found all year, doing and remembering in Jordan often renders my old habits and memories even sharper and more precious. Two weeks ago, as the commemoration of Easter approached in the western church, I thumbed through some of those Easter memories of yore.

Like most families, holidays follow a similar annual groove and rhythm. In our family a typical Easter began before Dawn, up earlier than any day in the year, readying ourselves for the Sunrise Service. In our new Easter clothes, Easter flowers pinned on my mother and sister, we drove over to Mount Echo, a site with a commanding view above the Ohio River, and soaring panorama of Cincinnati. Our parents’ Sunday School class was in charge of the service, a time meant to remind everyone of the first moments when several women discovered the empty tomb of Jesus near Golgotha. After the Sunrise Service everyone headed to our church Fellowship Hall for a bountiful breakfast, organized year after year by our family friend Charlie, a man my father acknowledged (conceded?) as one of the best eaters he ever knew. Breakfast was the time to compare people’s Easter outfits (and for my mother to cast silent, scornful looks on those who skipped the Mt. Echo service and headed straight for the feast) and look forward to our musical performances that morning in the big church service. Easter Sunday was such a big day that our modest size church needed two services to accommodate the regulars and the visitors. That meant we got to perform twice in the same morning!

The sanctuary overflowed with Easter lilies and tulips and worshippers, and once in awhile our church choir attempted something ambitious like Handel’s “Hallelujah.” While I saw my mother’s mother every Sunday in church anyway, on special days like Easter, it did have a have a special energy sitting with my grandmother. If we had thought ahead, we had reservations at an especially nice place for lunch, but sometimes we had to settle for a place not so crowded with customers with foresight. And then after lunch, we went to my father’s mother’s house for the Easter Basket hunt. After the baskets had all been discovered (one year it took my sister Elizabeth an especially long time—her basket had been hidden in a great place, in the old falcon out back in which she “drove” my grandmother every week during our Sunday visits. She never thought to look in the falcon! Oh, it must have been hard being the youngest grandchild on both sides of the family, and being just a tiny bit slower in those youthful, quasi-competitive activities) we sat down as our grandmother cut pieces from the coconut lamb cake she had made. It was a tradition dating back to the early 1930s, as she used the same cake-mold pan I think, making a Lamb Cake every Easter, and hiding a dime in the batter. Obviously, whoever got the dime in his or her piece of cake was the winner! Even into the 1980s, the dime was much sought-after. Our family hews to tradition.

Thus was the traditional scenario of Easter for my family for at least 20 years. There is one Easter that stands out in even greater relief, however, maybe from around 1977 or 1978. That particular Easter might remain so memorable because if I saw the pictures I would gasp at my horrendous white and powder blue polyester leisure suit, the kind of heinous outfit that perpetrated themselves on American society in the late 1970s. But I remember it more sharply because of the Sunrise Service. As I said, my parents’ Sunday School class, the Co-Weds, a group of what had once been young marrieds in the early 1960s, organized the service. This particular year they presented a play about Jesus’ followers and their reactions on Easter morn. But it wasn’t a typical play that had that certain “presentational” style. As families gathered in the chilly pre-dawn air in the makeshift outdoor chapel at Mt. Echo, the play just seemed to unfold. It caught us off-guard actually. My mother hadn’t told us there was a play, and as we arrived and sat down, the actions and reactions began so organically. There was my mother, all of a sudden crying and wondering what happened to her Lord. Another family friend, Earl, trying to make sense of her sadness, comforting her, looking for answers. It did take a minute or so to realize that this was a purposeful presentation, and the honesty of it, the lack of stage-y drama added to the power of seeing these real people reacting to the empty tomb, and slowly realizing the majesty and triumph of the Resurrection. I knew my mother had acted in college (essaying the roles of Emily in Our Town and Linda in Death of a Salesman), and certainly every day of her life she infused with drama, but this performance on this Easter morning is so magically etched in my brain as the most heartfelt recreation of the original Easter. I can’t shake the memory of it.

I also can’t shake the memory of the next Easter or so—but for totally different reasons.
Since the Sunrise Service required that our family get up so early on Easter, my mother figured that we young ones needed a good night’s sleep. By the teen-age years one did not willingly go off to bed at 8:00 p.m. the night before Easter. So by the end of the 1970s, when I was a bit more stained with teen-age defiance, I refused to go to bed when my mother requested. I had a movie to watch! I would go to bed when the movie was over, and she would just have to live with that. I have no idea what movie was so important, but I remember vividly what I saw when I went to bed that night…at the time I had chosen. Pinned to my pillow was a note that read, “Here sleeps a disobedient son.” Yup. She made sure I understood the magnitude of my actions. In a fit of I’ll-show-her-she-can’t-accuse-me-of-that, I slept on the floor that night.

Anyway, two weeks ago, as Easter approached I knew it would be a different pattern this year. For one thing, in a 94% Muslim country, I am now in the minority of Christian worshippers; and in Jordan, Christians celebrate Easter by the Orthodox calendar, so in April this year, during the time I will be in the US for Spring Break in a couple weeks. Originally I had hoped to go to Jerusalem on the date of western Easter, walking along the very paths of that real Easter. But, but, but it was a school day, so there would be no historical recreation in Jerusalem. However, since western Easter fell during the time of the important G20 conference at KA of important heads of school from around the world, Tessa decided we needed to have some sort of Easter service here on campus.

We have a Spiritual Center on campus, in honor of His Majesty, and up until Easter I don’t think I had been inside of it. It is a beautiful building, its ambiguous design hoping to be non-descript enough to fill anyone’s needs as a quiet place of worship and reflection. Inside the unusually shaped building sits a burbling fountain, prayer rugs, and a nice open space for gatherings. Tessa had invited a priest from Madaba to hold a service for any interested in joining an Easter service. She hired a flutist to provide music, and as we entered the space, the calm sound provided an excellent preparation for a sermon and communion.

The service was low-key, to be sure, but still quite touching—especially as I compared these new sensations to old, treasured memories. We sang “Christ the Lord is Ris’n Today,” one of the hymns you look forward to every year, but I missed our friend Howard’s trumpet stylings that I have enjoyed so many Easters. As the service drew to a close we sang a hymn, “Thine is the Glory,” that had a vague familiarity to it. The words had that stirring Easter majesty: “Thine is the Glory, Risen conqu’ring Son, Endless is the vict’ry, Thou o’er death hast won.” When we got to the last line of the hymn, we sang “Bring us safe through Jordan to Thy home above.” I looked over to my friends there for this first-time-for-us-Easter-in-Jordan, and Tessa and Rehema and Elizabeth and I all smiled to each other. We were actually in this area of the hymn, the prayer of the lyricist our constant prayer.

My mother always made sure we understood that Easter was far more than chocolate and Peeps. In her inimitable way, she reminded us that Easter is about transformation, blessings, and triumph. We needed to look around us for what blessings we enjoyed, and we should always seek to transform ourselves.

Easter week was also when my guests Anne and Martha were in town, along with many other guests enjoying spring breaks in the United States. One of my dearest friends here, Rehema, had a BFF visiting from medical school in New York, and they joined us for some of the famed dinners with Anne and Martha. Last week, after his departure from Jordan, her friend Chris wrote me an email, thanking all of us for our hospitality, but also reminding me how very blessed we are to have this group of friends at KA. “You all clearly have a very special bond that no doubt transcends all of the ups and downs of this dynamic experience that you all are having,” Chris wrote. It is wonderful to be reminded of these blessings.

Later that week, a day or two after Easter, a father of one of our students came by to see Eric, our headmaster. Eric told the faculty the story this week, that the father knocked politely at his office door, and asked to come in, and notified Eric that he would like to make a gift to the school. He wanted to give the school a million dollars. The father said to Eric that he is so moved by how his son has been “transformed” at KA, he felt compelled to make this gift.

Not exactly a dime in a piece of Lamb cake, but certainly another variation on the theme of transformation, blessings, and triumph.