Bear Paw Meanderings

How different it is at Easter in the Van Orsdel Methodist Church in Havre than it used to be.

On Easter Sunday I will go in clean clothes, maybe even jeans, and a white shirt and a sport coat. I will go to a church that will not be half full of people. I will go to a church where I will hear a good Easter sermon but will be short on music this year. Can you imagine a Methodist church short on music?

I will have cooked my Easter ham on Saturday as it is so much easier to do it that way so on Easter Sunday I will eat leftovers after church.

Even going to church at all is not a big deal like it used to be. If someone suggested trying to find the old Jim Kipp Lookout that Sunday, I just might be doing that.

Contrast that with Easter Sunday when I was in high school. Maybe around 1957. First of all, for better or worse, that was a time for new Easter clothes for men and women, boys and girls. For many years my father and I both got a new suit for Easter. That is probably why I have a closet full of suits.

The church would be packed for Easter. Even more would attend Easter services than Christmas Services. Come early or be put in the fellowship hall to hear the services but not be in the room with them.

The church would be decorated to the nines. There would be hundreds of Easter lilies, cages of canaries, bright colored eggs everywhere. I can remember when the organ stopped playing a hymn and the choir and people stopped singing, those canaries would continue on in high gear just singing their tiny hearts out on the altar.

Maybe Pearl Ann Houtz would sing “Jerusalem” and it would be as awesome Easter music as anywhere or maybe the choir would be singing from Handel’s “Messiah”. The service alone would make you know that Christ had indeed risen from the grave and that all of our lives are filled with grace because of it.

We would march around giving a special Easter offering to maybe pay off some debt that the church owed. After all we not only had a church to take care of but we had the Kennedy Deaconess Hospital to keep in the black. As we marched around putting our coins in the basket, Ella Anderson at the pipe organ would be playing “Just as I am”.

I don’t know. Isn’t it something that Easter of my youth was so much more meaningful than Easter now? Maybe that says more about me than what happens in the church now as opposed to years ago.

While I muddle about that, you all have a great Easter. Go to your church. It needs you!