Let Us Rise Up and Build Was Spring Break even a thing when I was a kid? Maybe it was, but that should tell you how little emphasis was placed on it in my circles. I think maybe Easter break was a bigger deal, but I suppose a movable feast becomes a moving target for year-over-year planning. So possibly there came a point where the emphasis shifted. Or perhaps, like Chinese food, it was always there and just made very little impression on me as a youth. Either way, by the time I became a teenager, Spring Break was really only a thing we shouldn’t be curious about, which happened on MTV, a channel we didn’t even have. (And I had it on good authority that it would probably melt my soul out of my eyeballs if I tried to watch it at a friend’s house).
So, the fact that I now live in a world where virtually one quarter of the year is built around this week is astounding to me. Who even knows how government people make decisions? This is not to say I’m not grateful that most of the local school boards have finally coordinated their Spring Breaks. It’s now far easier for the church to organize our calendar around our people, a large portion of whom organize their lives around their schools. For a few years there, we had three weekends each semester hit with cascading breaks, which made it impossible to schedule anything for the months of March or October! And it seems to be the right week, since it also softens the blow of Daylight Savings (another governmental decision I can’t wrap my head around).
Yet, by far the most piteous casualty to our having anchored Spring Break to the 3rd week of March is that the entire community is shut down on March 17th, of all days. Of course, I will take this misfortune personally, considering that my maternal clan’s name is Patrick. But I am also a pastor at a feasting church named St. Patrick. This should be a massive blowout day for us all! We should be glorying at the center of festivities to rival the town's fireworks display! There should be a festooned parade down a river of green beer, ending at 710 West White Road!!! But instead… it’s not really on our radar at all. Our own namesake feast day came and went yesterday without much ado, like Harry Potter wishing himself a happy birthday in the cupboard under the stairs. Tragic.
Still, we believe grace is everything in this complicated world. Even though my dreams of tater cookoffs and various lepre-chauntests will probably never come to pass, we are still a people who feast well and often, and who honor our namesake’s passion for gospel ministry by making sure there’s a place at the table for those who need to hear a better story. And looking ahead, Easter falls on March 25 in 2035, so Spring Break and Holy Week would be back-to-back. Maybe the school board will swap it for Shark Week and we can finally have our corned beef and eat it too! Until then, I hope to see you and yours at next weekend’s Crawfish Boil. We’ll have shrimp and hot dogs too, for the less adventurous among us, and you might even see me in a shamrock t-shirt, pretending it’s still St. Patrick’s Day.