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| "He Is Not Here," by Walter Rane |
As I do most years, I celebrate more than just Easter day; I celebrate the Easter season, and particularly Holy Week, from Palm Sunday through Resurrection Sunday.
Celebration can take a lot of forms, as it does for other
holidays (holy days) as well. For me, that involves home decorations, food,
family traditions, music, study, and anything that helps me focus on the reason
for the celebration. Easter is particularly rich in meaning, so it’s full of
opportunities.
At Christmas I’ve been filling my decorations with nativity
scenes my entire adult life, so I have a pretty sizable collection of small ornaments
and table decorations. For Easter there are beginning to be decoration items
related to the actual meaning of Easter, little scenes, maybe with moving
parts, to tell the story. But I haven’t acquired any yet. I have a couple of
small art pieces, and I painted one last year, of the moment of resurrection.
This year I have plans to do one of the empty tomb. It’s still in planning
stages, but I’m hoping to get time this weekend to make it a reality.
Music celebration is something I fully embrace. This year on
actual Easter Sunday, the twice-a-year Worldwide General Conference of The
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will be taking place (it’s always
the first Saturday and Sunday of April and October). So we’ll be listening to
the Tabernacle Choir and hearing messages from general church leaders,
including our prophet and apostles, as well as a few others. So music locally was
done this year on Palm Sunday. Our ward (congregation) did a very nice program,
mostly music, for our sacrament meeting (worship service) this past Sunday. I
was assigned the organ that day, and I play for the choir and the Primary
(children 3-11). And I sang a solo, accompanied on organ.
I did that solo again in the evening for our stake concert
(a stake is a geographically combined group of congregations, like a diocese;
ours has eight wards). I also sang in the choir.
The piece I sang was “He Was Despised,” an alto aria from
Handel’s Messiah, not one of the more well known ones, but one I really
like to sing. Handel knows how to write for the different voice parts, and all
of the alto solos are a good fit for my voice; they feel good to sing. This one
is mournful. It uses the words from Isaiah 53: “He is despised and rejected of
men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief,” written some 700 years before
they happened.
To read the full article (which includes a video I made), FOLLOW LINK TO SUBSTACK.