Hardly anything I had wished for around this year's Easter, or during the days of the Lord's Resurrection, happened... During Holy Week, one of my little boys was sick. He got a throat infection again, from which he had just recovered two weeks prior. With great difficulty, I managed to do the minimal cleaning, which I didn't even finish anyway, to bake our cozonac and dye a few eggs... Going to Church, to the Matins, to the Lamentations, to the Resurrection service – no way! Leaving somewhere? Out of the question! I couldn't even attend Sunday service after Easter. But I asked God to count it as if we had all been at church, because that's what we had wished for!
And yet, despite the absence of all these things I would have liked to do, I experienced an intense feeling starting from Good Friday and lasting until Easter Sunday. On the evening of Good Friday, stepping out onto the balcony for some chore, I lingered a few moments longer than usual to admire the beauty outside through the window. There was a silence... like I had never felt in my life! It was part of that silence I experienced once in childhood, on a winter evening, which was revealed to me to be the Sunday evening silence, which I now feel and live every Sunday evening. But the silence now was much deeper than that. Then, on Easter Sunday, wishing to go to church for a short while to attend the service (without succeeding, however, as it was scheduled to start later, and I had to return home to the children as soon as possible), the experience of the Resurrection feast was the most intense I had ever felt. It seemed to me that all of nature was singing 'Christ is Risen!' and everything around me seemed full of an indescribable beauty and joy! Even the raindrops felt like a great blessing on that somewhat cloudy and chilly day!
Looking happily around me, I said to myself: 'This is the most beautiful Resurrection!' Almost without any external preparations around Easter, without needing to be at any party or gathering, in this simplicity I felt the experience of the Lord's Resurrection much more intensely. I had no other worries, other thoughts, other plans, or other distractions. My attention was more on Christ! And I understood that I don't need anything special to be happy. My happiness shouldn't be conditioned by anything. The joy of Christ's Resurrection can be experienced simply without any external condition or any strict rule that must always be observed.
Or maybe there's just one... Love for Him!
Iulia Enache
Photograph by Andreea Stanciu