A no-frills Easter celebration

Anita is the poster girl for the risen Lord.

I first heard about Anita several years ago when I attended Easter Sunrise services at City Mission in Cleveland. Anita wasn’t there. She now lived in a retirement village in California. But almost everybody at the City Mission remembered her.

Nearly 40 years before, having hit the depths of sin — prostitution, the whole bit — Anita and a girlfriend made a suicide pact. They were on their way to the East 9th St. pier in Cleveland to carry it out. They would jump into Lake Erie and end it all.

But on the way they passed the City Mission and decided to stop in. They never made it to the pier. Their lives were reclaimed, and, for many years after, Anita was one of those who gave testimony at City Mission on Easter morning.

She wasn’t there on this Easter morning. But there were others who had been Easter regulars for many years. One was a middle-aged woman who got up at 4 a.m. and walked two miles to the bus in the rain and early-morning darkness to get to the 6:30 sunrise service — and apologized for being late. Her name was Hilda.

All told, about 100 of us made it to the sunrise service at City Mission on a wet Easter morning when there was no sunrise — to worship in a place that had none of the usual Easter trappings.

There was no choir, no processional and no lilies in the chancel. Actually, there was no chancel. In this plainest of rooms at City Mission, you could see the heating pipes running across the ceiling.

Not only were there no stained-glass windows, there were no windows at all. Somehow, though — and maybe this is the real miracle of Easter — the risen Lord has made an appearance here for 68 years — ever since some businessmen decided that the Cleveland churches needed an “arm” in the area of the city known inelegantly as “Skid Row.”

For generations, City Mission has been radiating kindness and hope to men and women down on their luck through their personal machinations or through no fault of their own. (No distinction was ever made.)

The service was plain — no frills or flourishes but probably just what was called for here. It was low key, unemotional, dignified, caring. The highlights for me were Martha’s violin solo, “The Holy City,” and Helen’s soprano solo, “Because He Lives.”

It was my most memorable Easter service. Celebrating Easter on Skid Row without any embellishments of the day was a reminder it is the gift that is important, not the wrapping.

As I left City Mission that morning, it also occurred to me that we miss the real significance of Easter by trying too hard to associate it with the rebirth of life in the spring.

If a modern novelist were to write a life of Jesus, the story would probably end with the crucifixion. Happy endings don’t appeal to us today. We consider them unrealistic.

So a modern story of Jesus would leave out the resurrection as too romantic. There would be no Easter lilies on the dust jacket of the book — only a cross on a hill far away.

The trouble with that kind of realism is, it is unreal. Happy endings still abound in life. They come into all our lives, like Easter, when we least expect them.

Nobody expected Easter — least of all Jesus’ disciples and friends whose world and whose hopes seemed to come to an end on Good Friday.

But Easter came, out of the blue. It was God’s great happy ending.

Easter – a happy surprise ending to our afflictions – is more real than all the crosses.

George Plagenz is an ordained minister and veteran newsman based in Columbus, Ohio.