Personal reflections during holy season

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/04/2022 (1290 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Church bells clanged throughout Winnipeg Sunday morning, welcoming parishioners to the first in-person Easter services held in the city since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic more than two years ago.

While some churches chose to keep their doors shuttered and stream their services online, others welcomed the faithful back inside, inviting them to gather together once more on the holiest day of the Christian liturgical calendar.

Earlier in the week, the possibility of in-person Easter services seemed threatened for a third consecutive year. This time, however, the culprit wasn’t pandemic public health restrictions, but an early spring snowstorm Environment Canada warned could be historic in its devastation.

Snow did indeed descend upon Winnipeg, but not in the quantity predicted by the meteorologists, clearing the way for in-person Easter services to go ahead as planned.

In Osborne Village, the parishioners of Holy Rosary Catholic Church on River Avenue streamed through the doors for Easter Mass during the morning and early afternoon, with some stopping to drop flowers at a bronze statue in the parish courtyard.

The statue is of Padre Pio, an Italian saint famous for the stigmata on his hands — circular wounds through his palms resembling the injuries Jesus Christ sustained during his crucifixion.

But this April is not only a holy time for Christians in Winnipeg, but for members of other faith communities, too.

The Jewish festival of Passover, commemorating the Israelites’ freedom from slavery in Egypt, began Friday and continues until April 23. And Muslims are currently observing Ramadan, a month devoted to fasting, prayer, reflection and community.

In a twist of fate, the calendar fell in 2022 — a year in which people of all faiths (or no faith at all) are struggling to return to normal as the COVID-19 pandemic stubbornly marches on — so that members of the Abrahamic religions are all observing holy days at the same time.

When I was a child, Easter meant little more to me than an obligatory appearance at church, followed by all the chocolate I could stomach. But as I’ve grown older, particularly as family and friends and people I love have died, it has taken on new significance and symbolism.

Easter Sunday — at least in the church I was baptized in — brings to a close an annual cycle that begins on Ash Wednesday, when priests smudge the foreheads of parishioners with the sign of the cross and whisper a reminder that they too will one day die.

It carries on through the 40 days and nights of Lent, representing Christ’s temptation in the desert, and through Palm Sunday — the beginning of Holy Week — which celebrates his arrival in Jerusalem.

And it all leads to Calvary, where three crosses stood on a hill, and to a resurrection three days later, marking a vicarious victory over sin and death for all of mankind.

It is a time when Christians of all stripes are called to reflect upon the Last Things: death, judgment, heaven, hell.

This Easter, I am thinking of all those Manitobans lost to the pandemic — the 1,759 who succumbed to COVID-19 itself, and the countless others who are not captured in their ranks — who will never get to see our society make these stumbling attempts towards a return to normalcy.

The ones who heard no church bells clanging on their final Easter Sunday on this earth.

Wherever one falls on questions of theology, and whatever one thinks awaits us when we cross over to the other side, hopefully we can all spare a prayer — or a warm thought — for them this holy season, in the hopes that wherever they may be, they are at peace.

ryan.thorpe@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @rk_thorpe