The Significance of Seder

It’s Holy Week. I love this time of year, maybe because of its ability to make me feel so full – with ritual, question, religious wonder, personal reflection – I am breathing it all this week, and I am full.

Added to a head already brimming with thoughts is the fact that it is April. April is a hard month for me, knowing that at the end of it will be the never avoidable and all too painful anniversary of my father’s death. As our little midwestern city wakes up to the rejuvenation, relief and wonder that is spring, a little part of me dies inside in April. And isn’t that just the dichotomy of life.

So on Monday our beloved small group, our Madison family of sorts, gathered for our weekly evening. We decided that this week we’d try to do our own version of the Seder. The words, stories and ritualistic behaviors took me right back to the Seder Suppers of my past.

Thus there I was, body in Madison in the year 2009, and mind in the blue grey, early 90s décor of the Lutheran Student Center basement in Lincoln. My brother and I were practicing reading the children’s part and saying herbs with a silent “h,” my mom was lighting the candles, my dad laughing heartily at the college students who couldn’t handle their wine (since a good Lutheran would never would have considered using grape juice). It is about the practice of the Seder Supper for me, but it’s also about the place where I learned about the world and took religion in through my skin. Where my whole schema for understanding the world was built - the root it now continues to evolve from.

The seemingly insignificant pieces of the ritualistic dinner matter because they cause us to take time out to remember why we’re really there. It’s so very much more than the horseradish and the matza and the boiled eggs – it’s about coming out of darkness into light, the ultimate sacrifice, faith that supersedes any circumstance, about a sense of peace that truly surpasses all understanding (almost unbelievably at times). It’s about a way of wrapping your head around what it means to live in this world. And so bringing my mind and body back in today, the words I used to lightly contemplate during Seder meals of old now floor me with the truth and implications in their meaning. This happened especially on Monday as we joined the ancient with the present and read about Carpas – The Green Herb.

“As we dip the carpas in the salt water, which represents both the tears of our ancestors and the waters of the Red Sea, we join the bitter with sweet, sorrow with joy…a taste of what life in this world is like.”

And so it’s Holy Week, and it’s April, and I’m taking in the experience of joining of the bitter and the sweet…

Next year we’ll meet again.