A blog is for life, not just for Easter

I found myself awake and outdoors at 5:30 this morning standing in the pitch darkness by a bonfire at the entrance to Pilsdon’s church. No, I hadn’t discovered my inner arsonist; I was participating with others in an Easter Sunday sunrise service which also included setting a firework rocket off, playing with sparklers, and then lighting our candles and moving inside the beautiful Norman church for a more conventional sort of worship.

Easter is a big deal here and is celebrated in a myriad of different ways, which I was to get my first glimpse of on my trial week back on Shrove Tuesday (the start of Lent, the 40 days leading up to Easter) when I discovered that not only do pancakes get eaten in vast quantities here, they also form a vital component of the annual pancake-flipping-whilst-being-pushed-in-a-wheelbarrow race around the central paddock, swiftly followed by the competition to see who can throw their pancake from a frying pan over the top of the manor house (needless to say, no one has ever achieved this).

This Easter weekend has been a roller-coaster of Anglican worship services, each designed to cause us to reflect on a different aspect of the story of the last few days of Jesus’ life, in real time as it were. So on Thursday evening we had a Passover meal as Jesus and his friends did on the same day, and washed each others feet (really) as Jesus did for his friends as a lesson in self-sacrifice and humility. On Friday we slowly followed Jesus on his route to the cross and thence to his tomb, which in our case was around the paddock to the huge compost heap (Golgotha) and onwards to the grave outside the church, pausing at 14 ‘stations of the cross’ along the way. Saturday morning we had a Tomb service, in which Mary Magdalene (the first person to discover the empty tomb) shared some of her thoughts, and Saturday evening a candle-lit vigil.  And today of course, both the ludicrously early one and a more sensible 6:30pm service, but both striking a jubilant note to mark the moment of triumph over death. 

But unlike every other Easter weekend I’ve experienced, here it isn't a holiday. The community working life carries on. Inbetween all these organised moments of creative communal meditation I have been planting carrots, cauliflower and cherry tomatoes, milking the cows and finishing off painting the bathroom.  

At Pilsdon the sacred and secular are continuously interwoven. Even when it’s not Easter there are four (optional) short services a day - 7:30am, 12:45pm, 6:30pm and 9:15pm - which lend a kind of semi-monastic rhythm to the place, which I’ve never experienced before but am actually quite enjoying. And thankfully no one has yet given me a hairshirt to try on for size.