#thatmomentwhen

The celebration of Crash's birthday had Math Man and I comparing notes all day on what we'd been doing at that time 20 years previously. Walking, laboring, eating a chili dog (Math Man, not me).  When did we decide on a name for the Crash Kid? When did I get to hold Crash?  I could relate to the conversation Keith Maczkiewicz SJ recounts in his piece at the Jesuit Post about deciding upon the time of resurrection.

And this Easter - the 56th anniversary of my baptism, the 27th anniversary of Tom's funeral - when did I first catch the scent of resurrection, push aside  the veil to peer out of the Lenten tomb?   I intoned the incipit to the Gloria, acapella in the dark church, my voice clinging to the last threads of the Vigil's darkness, holding the last note until it was caught into a shimmering cascade of light and music as piano, organ, flute, trumpet, strings, choir and assembly took up the major doxology.  Was that this Easter's "moment when"?

Or was it when I walked past the 2nd grader at Mass this weekend, his face buried in his hands after receiving the Eucharist for the first time? And for some reason, it all made me think of John Updike's poem

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

Perhaps each year we must painfully let the bones of this Body of Christ reknit, the amino acids fall back into their places, the cellular machinery creak and groan its way back to life.