This weekend, thousands of people will flock to Easter Sunday Masses at Catholic Churches throughout the Chicago area. Many of these congregants have not walked into the darkened portals of a church since Christmas. These twice-a-year worshippers have been given the classical sobriquet “Chreasters:" those who attend Mass on Christmas and Easter.
Some clergy will be welcoming. However, some officiating Catholic priests will take the opportunity to shame and demean these “Chreasters” by saying something like: “Good to have the church full again. Please know we are here every Sunday for your worshiping pleasure.”
Or they will deliver a full-on harangue and guilt the packed to the choir loft congregation with some diatribe about a Catholic’s obligation to attend Mass every Sunday and not doing so is a mortal sin.
Guilt. Shame. Demean. Not a very good welcome.
For 17 years, I served as a priest in the Archdiocese of Chicago. I hatched, matched and dispatched many city and suburban Catholics. That translates to baptized, married and buried. And I celebrated many Easter Masses at standing-room-only churches with these Chreasters. Something was energizing about a full church with people dressed to the nines and generations of families filling up whole pews.
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I’m not quite sure why they were there. However, it may be the same reason that thousands of onlookers stand in the square in front of Buckingham Palace for the “Trooping of the Color” ceremony or to watch the royal family wave from the balcony. After all, no one does pomp and ceremony better than the British monarchy or the Catholic Church.
At Easter Masses, parishes typically go “all out.” There are spectacular floral displays and additional instrumentation for the joyful musical selections. The pageantry transports those gathered to a different world, one apart from the mundane and repetitive daily routines of their lives.
After leaving the priesthood 25 years ago and having lived a “normal life” like those of the Chreasters, I have a different perspective on spirituality and participation in ceremonies, religious or civic. And I wholeheartedly agree with one of my gurus, Joseph Campbell, the late comparative mythology and religion expert, when he said that what we are all seeking is “an experience of being alive.”
The Easter rituals offer such an experience of life. There are beautiful sounds, smells and sights. There is the bond we feel with so many others gathered in one special place. Many of us already know the experience of the birth of a child, the embrace of sexual intimacy or the relief and exhilaration of finishing a marathon race. Too many of us, sadly, are also too familiar with the heartbreaking experience of holding our dead loved ones, the emptiness of being fired and the failure of a relationship.
Those are some experiences of being alive that Campbell spoke about. And that is what the Easter message should be about — experiencing the fullness of life in all its joy and pain, in its ecstasy and agony.
Some priests and preachers fail to convey that message when they limit the Easter story as history and fact, rather than poetry and metaphor. That approach borders on spiritual malpractice.
The biblical story of “The Fall and Original Sin” was written in a far-off time and a tiny place. Many people around the world haven’t heard of it, and many others don’t believe it is true.
Without that story, the focus on Jesus dying for our sins lessens. There should be more of an emphasis to see Jesus as an example of a human being who lived a life of authenticity and spoke to others about that same experience. Jesus’ first words were, “Repent, the kingdom of heaven is within you — among you.” Repent means to “wake up.” And we are to do the same, to “wake up” to who we really are. Live authentically — without labels, programmed rules and false beliefs. We rise, along with Jesus, to the fullness of life available within us and among us.
Chreasters deserve more than just pomp and ceremony. They deserve a message that validates the experiences of their lives as living out the heaven, the nirvana, the peace they seek here and now. Now that is an Easter message worth celebrating.
Charles Edward Schutt is a former senior executive recruiter for Lucas Group in Chicago. He is also the author of the book, “A True Story of a Catholic Priest: Why I Got In — Why I Got Out — And What I Learned Through It All.”
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