Today is the day before Easter Sunday, Easter Sunday-eve perhaps. This meant that it was time for the first of my two visits to church per year. The reason for my attendance was the Easter vigil, designed for people who deem their Sundays too valuable to spend in church - even on the most important Sunday in the church year.
The Easter vigil is also known as Candle-Mass, this means that a symbolic flame is carried into the church upon the Easter candle. The Easter candle is around 3 feet high and the priest pushes five objects into the decal of a cross that is applied to the lower part of the candle, one upon each point and one where the two lines intersect. The main candle is to be lit from a fire outside, the Lord's flock relocate to the alley outside the church - the glowing '36' of a nearby casino looming overhead. The priest performs his rituals using the unaided power of his own voice, he has to overcome the repetitive thudding bass-notes emanating from the walls of a local club and also the music projecting from a pub jukebox, through an open back door.
Just as the candle is being lit, a woman in the pub smoking garden phones home and requests that a pair of shoes and a see-thru top are fetched for her, they are in the third draw down. Many minds ponder if she has left her house without a top and shoes or if she has simply had a change of heart halfway through a night out. The candles wick is ignited and the candle itself carried into the church by the deacon. From this flame, the congregation light their own candles. In times passed, the congregations candles were accompanied by a circular cardboard cut-out to protect the holders from hot wax, now the candle is contained within a structure that could just as well hold popcorn.
The audience's candles remain lit until the first reading - a condensed version of the creation story from Genesis which only references mans creation on the sixth day. The first five days are omitted, I assume the omission is not for brevitys sake - the service clocks in at over two hours long. Before each reading a helpful man comes to the lectern and summarises the following reading in a couple of sentences, this leaves your mind to wander as the speaker ignores punctuation and places stresses and pauses in strange places. The candles are re-lit when two individuals are baptised and confirmed, welcoming them into the church. I had to attend a class for 12 weeks each for my first communion and then for my confirmation, I could have saved time by doing the whole thing at once later in life - maybe I wouldn't have chosen such a daft confirmation name either.
Depending upon how old Jesus was when he died, the Easter of 2009 would be twinned with the Christmas of a year in the late 1970s; I don't think many people think of it this way though. The message from the gospel is that Jesus - the son of God, died and in doing so, he ended death forever. All that follow him will live eternally in happiness, partaking in angelic choirs and merrily strumming harps.
The priests homily is about the deaths of over two-hundred Italians in an earthquake that struck around 60 miles outside the Vatican. The Pope felt the tremors and shares the locals pain and anguish, this lead to talk about tsunamis and hurricanes. This segues into talk about the global financial crisis, the speech isn't very concise and my attention once again wanders, I pick at a scab on my right index-finger - the result of mishandling a pan whilst cooking an omelet.
The folk band are featured heavily in the service, they consist of an acoustic guitar, a violin, a flute and another wind instrument I failed to spot or identify. There are two dedicated singers and the musicians also lend their vocal talents throughout proceedings. Attempts to use all eight notes of a musical scale when leading either the priests or the congregation, fall flat - much like the amplified vocalists do at regular intervals. Several times the singer is focused so hard on achieving a note that the words lose definition and the hymn becomes a scat session.
When the final hymn has been sung and the many priests and alter servers are back in the vestry, the crush for the exit begins - a stampede of the old, tired, downtrodden and mostly middle-class. The rush of frail bodies continues down the alley at the side of the church, the quickest path to the carpark. People pile into cars and maneuver impatiently as they struggle to escape the bottlenecks that sturdy gates have created - installed in an effort to stop people parking upon church property on Saturdays, due to its proximity to the town and lack of Pay'n'Display system.
