Empty

I remember back in my "theatre days" of directing how the week following the opening of a show always felt so empty.  Up to opening night the pace slowly built for weeks as each piece of a production was added and rehearsed. Then came the final, often frantic, week of technical and dress rehearsals.  There were even times when the curtain opened and lights when up on wet scene paint while costumers made final adjustments in the wings.

There is also another memory, a recurring dream I would usually have sometime during those final hectic days.  It was recurring in the sense of theme, but always with new content of the particular production.  In this dream, on opening night everything that could possibly go wrong with the production happened. Scenery fell. Actors forgot lines, came on stage in wrong costumes, props were misplaced, or just didn't show up at all.  I would be in the audience frozen with horror, or worse yet begin shouting at the cast and crew and jump up on the stage myself.  Complete chaos!

The morning following "the dream" I would announce to Peg, "I had the dream last night. Everything is going to be fine."

In many ways this is one way to reflect on the week following Easter and the preceding days of Lent and Holy Week.  The lenten journey begins quietly on Ash Wednesday and steadily builds to the drama and eventual chaotic horror of Holy Week.  Then the curtain, or in Easter's case, the tomb opens.

In the theatre, the empty week following opening night was always the empty place where creativity began to stir and the seeds of the next production began to grow.  The emptiness of Easter's tomb is a place of potential and possibility, resurrection and new life. It is a time to take a deep breath, breathe in the Spirit and begin new things.