Easter meditation

By Angela Pancella

The copper glint catches my eye as I step out of Vicki's car. "Ooh, lucky penny," I say, stooping to pick it up.

Seems a strange place and time for it--the wasteland of broken glass and assorted debris on the side of Highway 70, Maundy Thursday, the morning a tire on my mom's car blew on my way to work.

Had it not been potentially life-threatening the near-accident would have been funny: the only reason I was driving Mom's car was because I'd just taken mine to the shop. I was trundling happily down the highway, not a quarter of a mile from my exit, when I heard the pop and the sigh of escaping air and felt the car's insistent pull to the right.

I find the penny back where I'd abandoned the little blue Metro. I'd talked my co-worker into driving me here to wait for the tow truck. The truck has arrived. I slip my penny in my pocket and open the cab door to sign the paperwork. I see another copper glint as I hop back out. "Ooh, lucky penny."

Soon the tow truck driver is kneeling by the Metro, lug wrench in hand. I've sent Vicki back to work. I wonder how I should keep myself amused. Shall I stare into space? Nah. I look down. Yes, there's another penny, and another. I walk the strip of wasteland casually; without the slightest effort I'm up to nine pennies. Nine will never do, of course. The fee for the inconvenience of this morning is at least ten cents. The tenth is in a spot I had passed over earlier; the eleventh shows up immediately afterward. By the time the man straightens up and puts the old tire in my mom's trunk, there are seventeen pennies in my pocket, all found within about a 25-foot stretch. "Hope the rest of your day goes better," he says before driving off, and I almost laugh out loud. How could it? I'm rich!

But I find four more pennies just outside the door of the tire shop that night.

Good Friday. An interminable morning at work. We're off at noon, but most of the time is spent checking watches.

"Okay, let's pack up."

"It's only ten till twelve."

"My watch says five till."

"But the clock says ten till. Hey, Angela, what does your watch say?"

"Anything you like. I don't wear one."

"Angela's watch says it's noon."

We leave at last and troop en masse to the chapel to say a few quick prayers. (That's a job perk of working at a convent--at least a nice quiet place is always handy.) The sidewalk's spotty with rain. This makes Vicki smile. Earlier in the day she'd said, "Every year for as long as I remember, it's rained on Good Friday around three o'clock. Except the last couple of years; they've been bright and sunny. And that made me so upset. I was thinking, "What? Don't You love us anymore?"

"Maybe it means, after two thousand years, He's finally starting to get over it," I had suggested.

As it turns out there is no cause for worry or deep theological debate this year. Throughout the morning Vicki and I would glance at the windows. "Getting darker and darker out there," we'd say. And we'd grin.

It isn't raining at three o'clock. But that's good, because my church (whose congregation is part third-generation European immigrants and first-generation Vietnamese immigrants) is doing the Stations of the Cross outside. The older Vietnamese men are dressed in white cassock-like outfits and white headbands. I recognize the one who beat the drum at the Maundy Thursday service. He headed the procession last night when the communion hosts were transferred to a side altar. He walked in front of the canopy in front of the servers with candles and incense and chrysanthemums, and we sang "Down in Adoration Falling" in Latin and Vietnamese. Now this same man is carrying the cross.

The cross is made of two tree limbs, perfectly straight, as thick around or thicker than my upper arms. It is as tall as my big brother Thom and made from some white, smooth-barked tree. It's a heavy cross; another man is helping to carry it. We follow them out of church in procession, singing in Vietnamese, passing the requisite camcorder on our way to the first station. There is enough of a crowd that my family--me, Mom, Thom and his wife Peggy, and their little ones Theresa and Dominic--are standing in the street. We have to genuflect in the street too, when the time comes.

We say the prayers at one station in English, the next in Vietnamese. We stop at white markers with Roman numerals by the side of the church, by the chain link fence, or in the alley. As we travel from one to the next different people carry the cross. I'm poked by Father Potts late in the proceedings. "Will you read the next prayers?" They like to give plenty of advance notice at my church. So I read the parts marked "The priest says:" in the old brown booklet. I have to raise my voice--we're in the alley beside the church now, the wind is blowing stronger, and neighbors are leaning over their porch looking at us. "The Twelfth Station. Jesus is stripped of his garments."

Another tap. The Vietnamese man is indicating by gestures that I'm to take a turn carrying the cross. There's that advance notice again. He guides me forward. My Simon of Cyrene lays the wood down on my right shoulder. I hadn't guessed it would be this heavy.

We turn the corner and are in front of the church again. Simon of Cyrene and I position the cross so it is upright at the next station. I am behind it, holding it steady with one hand. Out of the corner of my eye I can see the camcorder. The crowd is arrayed in a semicircle in front of me, but I am not looking at them. They chant long lines of prayers in Vietnamese, the tone rising or falling on almost every staccato word, but my eyes are fixed on the white bark and on my hand wrapped around it. I look away once. A man is passing on a bicycle and I stare at him from behind my cross, wondering what sort of effect I'm having. But he doesn't see me.

Afterward Mom and I walk home. In the block between the church and my house I find a nickel, two dimes, and more pennies. My total for the two days is now 51 cents.

Hours later is the evening service. We read the Passion. Peggy coaches three-year-old Theresa so she can shout with the rest of us: "Crucify him! Crucify him!" She does this with such innocent gusto my skin crawls. I get a sudden image of how there might have been children in that crowd two millennia ago, all of them eagerly and eerily mimicking their parents. They listen to everything, they learn so well...

After the Passion we venerate the same cross I carried in the afternoon. I can watch this for hours. Old men, old women, teenagers, mothers, fathers, the middle-aged, children step forward one at a time and give the wood a kiss. Every kiss is different. Here is a quick, obligatory peck; here one more reverent and slow; here a touch with overtones of friendship, familiarity. Some people tentatively brush their lips against the smooth surface and snap their heads away; some stay with their foreheads pressed to it. Several old women kiss twice, as if not sure the first one will take. Most everyone bends down so his face is where the condemned man's feet would be.

Holy Saturday. I spend the morning frantically cleaning. I find pennies when I take the trash out. I linger in the alley digging coins from where they hide, pressed in the gravel. Soon my three-day total is 65 cents. I should try for a dollar, I think. Yesterday Mom told me, "There was this man who spent all his life searching for coins on the street. He bragged about how much money he collected, but someone told him, 'You've never seen a sunset or the stars. You've never looked at the faces of passersby.'" So I want to balance the thrill of these strange discoveries with the need to keep my head up. I've found the most when I haven't really been looking. I decide that if I make it to a dollar, fine, but I won't go out of my way to do it.

Joe, a family friend, comes over. I tell him and assorted family members the story of the pennies, mentioning I'm up to 65 cents but not that I have a goal in mind. Joe reaches into his pocket. "Here," he says, handing me a dime and a quarter. "Buy yourself a lottery ticket."

I've reached my goal without even trying. It's all gift, these three days.

Like the afternoon, when I find myself, through a friend's invitation, in a private chapel in a South St. Louis backyard, chanting an ancient hymn to Mary in front of hand-painted-and-rhinestoned folk art icons. "I sing this prayer in Slavonic before we begin," our host tells us, bowing thrice before the icon of the Trinity he "wrote" himself. And then my friend Chris and I join him in chanting the hymn, each of us in turn, in English, happily, but we still have to sing the lines on our own, making up the melody but nevertheless following a set pattern. It requires all of one's concentration, but at times I'm distracted by thoughts of how our host started us out with the lyrical prayer in his native language. That's three languages in three days--Latin, Vietnamese, Slavonic.

The fourth is Physics. My brother Paul is in town, he who is a nuclear physicist. I drive him to the Easter Vigil at St. Francis Xavier Saturday night. On the way, to make conversation, I ask, "So what's new in the world of hard science?" This leads into his excited exposition of the latest cold fusion experiments. Generally, conversations with Paul are fascinating and clear at the time, but impossible to recount afterward. He gives me a good soundbite tonight, though. I ask him, "What's so great about cold fusion, anyway? Why are we so interested in achieving it?"

"That's easy. E=mc squared, right? We like e. We want e." He pauses half a beat for effect. "We've got a lot of m."

We go from there to talk about stars. Small, long-lived stars, and how Paul recently found out there are still stars around that have been burning since the beginning of the universe--15 billion years. Large, quick-dying stars. The Sun, and how it has five billion years left. We're talking about this as we get out of the car and walk by the massive stone wall of the Gothic church. The incongruity strikes me suddenly--the first reading tonight will be the creation story from Genesis. We'll hear about the six days it took for God to make the firmament of earth, fix lights in the heavens, and populate waters and land with creatures. How will this man, who knows the lifeline of stars, affirm at the end with all assembled, "This is the word of the Lord"? Indeed, how does he reconcile the idea of resurrection with the seemingly inexorable fact of entropy? "I am depressed, and maybe it's ridiculous to be, by the idea of the sun dying," I tell Paul.

"It's more depressing than that," he answers. Cosmologists now theorize the universe will keep on expanding and expanding. Eventually everything will reach a state they call "heat death," which is just like it sounds--nothing will happen anymore, there will be no energy, no motion.

"But what's incredible is that there is something in the universe that can learn about all this," I say, and Paul agrees: "It's as if the universe wanted something to be able to contemplate it."

So, imagine--we have learned how stars work. We can split atoms. We may soon be able to create energy by fusing atoms together. And we are not an old species. Could it be that our destiny is to find out how to keep the universe from dying someday? When I ask Paul this last question, he tells me to read more Isaac Asimov.

And then we go inside. The complex gifts the last three days have imparted--copper pennies of luck or maybe grace, languages ancient and modern, moments of humor and profundity--give way to ones more fundamental. Here a single candle is carried aloft in darkness, songs praise the mystery of planets in motion, all is water and fire. We leave our pew at the close of worship while the choir is still singing the Hallelujah Chorus, but Paul and I linger in the vestibule until the end, softly harmonizing.

Angela Pancella was host of the radio show "The Eclectic Mix" for seven years, exposing unwary listeners to Spanish cover versions of Kraftwerk songs and counterpoetry opera. She is the author of Voice and Style: Marc Connors of The Nylons, the biography of a legendary a cappella singer. She writes regularly for @U2 (www.atu2.com), one of the top internet U2 fan sites. She is also one of the few people in this world who can list "beatnik" on her resume under "Past Employment Experience."