Happy Easter!

This Easter season marks many new beginnings. As ARI celebrates the Resurrection and the beginning of new spiritual life, we also greet the beginning of the next growing season and the arrival of the new 2010 participants. The happy concurrence of all these events reminds me of one of my favorite Easter hymns:

"Now the green blade riseth from the buried grain,
Wheat that in dark earth many days has lain;
Love lives again, that with the dead has been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green."
- Hymn 204

I celebrated this Easter in the typical way by going to church and then eating too much sugar. In Japan, I usually attend the nearby United Church of Christ church for weekly services, but today I wanted more "smells and bells" (or High Church ceremony) than the UCC church offers, so I joined the Catholics for mass. The Catholic church turned out to be a wonderful, lively mix of cultures - Japanese, Brazilian, Indian, American, and Philippino! The mass was conducted by two priests (American and Brazilian) in Japanese and Portuguese, with smatterings of English; hymns were sung in Filipino and Hindi; the Gospel was read in Japanese by an American and in English by an Indian. It was a striking example of the original sense of "catholic," which means "universal" in Greek.

After church, we came back to ARI for an American-style Easter egg hunt! The volunteers had hard boiled and decorated over 60 eggs from our ducks the day before - now the participants had to find the eggs hidden around the farm (in the pig pen, the chicken house, the green house...). None of the participants had ever heard of an Easter egg hunt before, so I enjoyed introducing them to one of my favorite Easter traditions.

Sumathi (Sri Lanka)

Reina (Japan)

Ellie (Japan) and Nami (Japan) with the post-hunt cookies (the delicious cause of my aforementioned sugar overdose...)

Happy Easter!