This is Monumental

Talking on the phone with Megan this past Tuesday, Megan said to me, "This is monumental. It's not often I get to use that word, and I'm going to use it." I'm sitting with this word - thinking about the monumentalness of Easter weekend and the current tide of my life.

There are many pieces to Easter weekend, and I'll begin with the end of the weekend, with church because it's a little easier. For a few weeks before Easter, I had known that our church was going to close. The dear church that could has finally had to give up the ghost due to finances. A small church plant that began five years ago and has been through hiccups and fissures and a false closing has loyally lived out and preached the gospel and supported a congregation of people who could be open about their wounds, brokenness, deaths and life disasters along with celebrations, joys, births and happiness.

Our church held its last service on Easter Sunday with our pastor barely able to stand due to injuring his back two days before and with many tears from congregants and our pastor's family. My tears were dry until I saw Ardis, the pastor's wife and my close friend, and her daughter, Hannah, crying while lining up for the last communion. This is the church we moved to Colorado to work with, the church in which both my children were baptized and I imagined them growing up in, the church that has held me up spiritually, emotionally and even financially over the last year and a half. I have, for the first time through this church's health and demise, a sense, a feeling of a church family.

As in the aftermath of a death, there is confusion and rearranging - the church's property dispersed, the congregants dispersed and searching for a new church home, some realized, some unrealized dreams and ideas about the future in the midst of rearranging, my close friends wondering what their future will hold as our pastor looks for a new position, possibly in another state.

Saturday was a day of preparing for Easter and running errands with Michael and the kids. A trip to Boulder to return some shoes landed us in the middle of a mad house of an Easter egg hunt at Grand Rabbit's toy store.

Stepping back to Friday, Good Friday, Michael and I went to court for the final hearing on our legal separation. We learned during the proceedings that we would not be able to make any changes to our marital status for six months, and decided in a five minute conference together, to change the proceeding from legal separation to dissolution of marriage (in Colorado, the paperwork is identical). Less than thirty minutes after entering the courtroom, I was no longer married and my maiden name was reinstated. I cried. Michael cried. We hugged. We walked down Pearl Street mall and had coffee. I had such a strange desire to still express my love for the man I was married to for over 10 years even as our relationship as husband and wife had ended.

And I felt a profound sense of relief. What had been lying in hospice for so long, at one point making a valiant attempt to walk around, had taken it's last gasp. I felt the relief of losing someone with a terminal illness and the great relief of honestly naming something - our marriage was no more. And I felt the relief of having an answer to the nagging question of whether or not we would stay married.

I can't quite piece out the meaning behind the coincidence of events and holidays - Good Friday (death), Easter (rebirth), a closing of a church, the end of my marriage. But it all somehow makes sense, underlies St. Benedict's "Always we begin again." And sometimes on a monumental level.

Note: Tree pictures is "Red Autumn, Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Arizona, 2007" by Phil Douglis.