This past weekend I celebrated Easter for the second time this year. I started off Good Friday (Juma’a Azzima) by sleeping in until noon after a late night out and decided to skip breakfast once I smelled what was coming out of the kitchen. Or rather, the garden; my host mother had prepared meat for grilling and my host brothers (Farah and Ihab who came for lunch with his wife, Wafa) were outside setting up the charcoal grill. I probably could have managed to eat breakfast since we didn’t have lunch for another three hours, but at least I had a good appetite for the meal that was laid out before us: a pan lined with flatbread, filled with three kinds of grilled meats, as well as grilled onions, tomatoes and keem (a local kind of mushroom ?), with fresh greens, onions and spices for toppings and on the side, tabbouleh scooped in fresh lettuce leaves, with beer and wine to top it off. The flatbread was soft, having soaked up the drippings from the cooked meat, and made an excellent base for a wrap. We ate outside in the garden for the first time since I arrived, enjoying the summer weather, and afterwards I quickly fell back asleep (the only downside about all this sleeping was that I missed out on the cooking in the morning).
When I woke up the rest of the family were also arising from their own afternoon naps and started getting ready for church. I was invited to join them for the special GF service and since I hadn’t visited their church yet, I decided that a holiday was a good reason to make the trip. The special event of the evening was a singer/pastor from Jordan and another guest pastor, so I figured at the very least I could practice my listening skills in Arabic.
We arrived about 30 minutes early (I went with Ihab and Wafa, Leila was already there, Philip and Farah also came separately) and Ihab went to work helping to seat and organize the overflowing church. The musical guest was accompanied by a keyboardist who loved the synthesizer and the music was, in a word, painful. At first it was somewhat intellectually stimulating to figure out what they were saying (the words were projected on a screen which helped a lot) but an hour and a half later I didn’t care anymore I just wanted the music to stop. And once I could figure out what they were singing it began to drive me crazy even more, as did the pictures of God’s Wonders projected behind the lyrics: sunsets, roses and mountainscapes, a blonde-haired boy staring out the window at Jesus sitting with children under a tree, stills from cinematic recreations of Jesus’s life… Sometimes the audience would sing with the pastor, sometimes he solo-ed, sometimes he took a break to pray and preach for a while… Finally he took a seat and the other guest pastor took the stand and preached for about half an hour about our fears from watching the news and getting a new heart from God (that’s about all I understood), then more group prayers, then I was really starting to lose my mind (this is about two hours into it) and debated how much I would insult my hostfamily if I just walked out, then the prayers stopped and the singer-man got up again and sang SIX more songs and then there were closing prayers and church announcements. And then I wondered what I had done to deserve this kind of punishment and figured it must have had something to do with going out on Holy Thursday.
THREE HOURS after we entered, we left the church and I walked back with my host parents. The streets were blocked off to cars and instead filled with young people and families (mostly young people) converging on one street in particular, where people were hanging out on their balconies and watching the streets below. We rounded the corner and there was an arch covered in flowers being paraded through the crowd, followed by rows of torches (carried by youths in uniform), followed by a massive float of Jesus on a rock, followed by a cross covered in flowers and lit up in the night, followed by a crowd of Sunday School-ers in uniform carrying flags, followed by marching band (teens in uniform)… It was a parade for the Orthodox Church and the ceremony and ritual of it all stood in stark contrast with the scene we just came out of. Then we continued on to the next block where even more people were gathered and came upon a stage set-up for a street concert for the Syrian Church and my host mom asked if I wanted to stay to see the music (I asked if it was the same kind of music that we just saw, she said yes, I said no thank you, its not necessary) and we continued walking home, only to stop again to buy sweets: dates stuffed with almonds and also kenafe, for dinner.
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