This blog’s for the die hards who are still reading their e-mail or RSS feed, or are surfing the Web for a final, desperate something for Easter. I wanted to give you one impression of an Easter that I cannot forget. Buried deep beneath the winter soil of memory, it surfaces again each spring with the greening of the grass.

A lifetime ago I lived in a small Colorado mountain town where the churches were as sparse as the population, and the most well-attended worship service was probably the one held at the top of the ski lift.

We attended a small Baptist church—that is unless we happened to be running late. Then, since the Baptists shared the building with a Pentecostal group, we were instantly charismatic if tardy. Anyway, one Easter Sunday we decided to join the community group that was scheduled to meet in the town park for a sunrise observance.

The sun had risen somewhere on the other side of the valley. But since the town was capped at one end by rock walls and a waterfall still crusted over in ice from the long winter, we shivered in the gray dawn with a slowly growing crowd of others in down parkas and snow boots. One woman wore a backpack from which a plastic spout poured out hot chocolate.

Finally, the Episcopal priest I think it was, (who, incidentally, shared a building with the Catholic parish) opened the service with some lamenting about how he had misjudged the time the sun would come up. I remember the steam of his breath in the cold morning. Then, midway through his talk that the sun burst over the mountain and shone into the horseshoe valley and upon those of us who had gathered in the park.

That’s all I remember. The gray morning. The cold. The hot chocolate backpack. The sun eventually flashing brilliantly over the lip of the frozen waterfall.

I have no recollection of what was said, but I do remember the picture. And I remember the love, which may have been nothing more than community welcome. That’s my simple hope for you this Resurrection Sunday. May your churches be filled with people seeking that and finding it in whatever way you show the sun rising, or the son rising, and in whatever way you offer the hot chocolate, or the bread of life and blood of our risen Christ.

Peace be with you.