Celebrating Holy Week: The Risen Lamb

We clumsily arranged the plates:

a plate of hard-boiled eggs,
speaking new life,

meatball soup,
our Passover Lamb,

chopped apples, mashed with walnuts, honey and cinnamon,
reminder of mortar and bricks made in slavery

horseradish as our bitter herbs piled on a saucer,
eaten with the sweet apple and honey - bitterness coupled with hope,

a pile of butter lettuce leaves, bright and green,
recalling the hyssop dipped for sprinkling on Hebrew doorposts at Exodus,

dipped in salt water - tears,
matzah crackers stacked straight, our unleavened bread,
a bread baked quickly with no time for rising now.

My husband started the readings, word traversing space and time.
A gathering together of our family
for this Special Meal,
Passover feast,
like so many families have shared over the years, centuries,
yet different too for we are a
Christian family embracing the Passover.
We long to teach our children that Easter
is not just bunnies and chocolate and egg hunts,
not just new life,
but His death and our new life.
We endeavor to create new traditions, rhythms,
that speak of a Risen Savior,
our own Passover Lamb.



My parents, Nana and Papa sat down at the table
with grandgirls, Meilani and Giada,
Ericlee and me, a mama with child.
We were surrounded by special foods,
sacred ceremony.

We forgot the wine, the grape juice
so Papa pours the Paradise Blend,
how appropriate for our
adapted tradition.

We lit candles, remembered the
Light of the World.
Daddy kneeled to gird himself with towel,
bathe little-girl feet.
We remembered how our Lord washed feet
that night
humbled
himself
after the Last Supper.

We traded our traditional
Easter bunny cake
for a tomb,
a hole in the earth created by
sticky little hands,
decorated with love.
Meilani named it
"Christ has Risen" cake.

No one could keep our

Savior

in the grave.