Here's an Easter quiz from the Guardian, so you know it'll be multi-culti and sprinkled with obscure jokes designed to keep the grad students chuckling knowingly well into the wee hours.
How did I do? Well, not bad for a person who has only been to church once this millennium. Then again, it was for Easter last year and we did the "wait till dawn" thing, whatchamacallit, it's got some obscure Latinish name like everything they do in church. I should adopt that trick; it makes everything sound vastly more impressive. How nifty to say you are "Abluting" instead of going to take a shower.
Anyway. I went to church, as I was saying. Once this millennium. In a vast stone church that does get a little hard on the feet and back, I must say. Not to mention the old fellow in the robes that Carinthia told me to copy was disabled and couldn't do any standing up most of the time, leaving me sitting there like a lump until I realized I looked like I was protesting or sumthin and jumped up. Why couldn't she have told me to copy the bustling lesbian, or the perky Filipino who quite obviously lived for what he could do with his voice, and man-o-man was this ever his day, for lo, main preacherguy was sick and dude had to do most of the reading and all of the singing which I do not remember from my small-town Anglican upbringing.
My mother was Buddhist and my father was agnostic; he'd have been athiest but he always believed in hedging your bets. So I don't know why I ended up at Anglican churches except maybe my mother was socially ambitious for me? I was baptized in a Presbytirian church (sp? who knows?) because that was the only one on the base and my mother would NOT allow me to be baptized in the village Catholic church. Idolators, she called them. But I think that really, she just wanted to be sure she understood the ceremony, and they were French who spoke Latin.
Once she did, ie once the ceremony was actually underway, she was horrified to find herself and my dad promising to raise me in the "fear of God" etc etc. I'm not exactly sure what else she expected from the only Protestant clergy in a hundred miles, and a Scotsman at that, but oh well, she promised, horrified though she was, and I got to go to Sunday School as long as I wanted.
In typical Canadian fashion, I went to whatever was handy: Baptist, United, Methodist (that was fun, if strange), Anglican, Baptist again, Presbytirian again although obviously that didn't go so well or I'd know how to spell it, eh? and finally Anglican again. I think I finally settled on Anglican because when I went to boarding school I stayed in the house of an Anglican minister (don't tell me to call them priests; he wasn't all up on the priest thing any more than me) and he didn't mind answering my questions. Instead of doing it by spouting off bible verses, he actually thought about the answers and discussed them like a rational person would do. Because if religion is, in fact, true, then it's rational. Was it Chesterton who said God doesn't break his own laws? He probably said it better, but you know what I mean.
Anyway, I do not recall, from the distant mists of my childhood memories, any 4th century gold icons, incense, or singing at the Anglican church, which was usually just the Baptist church borrowed for a couple of hours on Sunday or something. So this here big-city Anglican church is quite the eye-opener, I must say.
Quiz. It's a blog post about a quiz. Here's the quiz. And here's a sample of the questions:
Why is Orthodox Easter celebrated at a different time from Easter in the western Christian churches?
It is based on the Gregorian calendar
It is based on the date of Passover
It is based on the Julian calendar
Following the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, a new socialist calendar was introduced to fit better with the spring harvest
And here are my results, which aren't bad considering that Polish fertility customs were not taught in any of my Sunday Schools, including the Ukranian one in Winnipeg:
Easter quiz
You scored 5 out of a possible 10
Not bad, but perhaps you should have paid a little more attention in Sunday school