By John Kass

May 5, 2024

The season of Lent began for me by editing a wonderful commentary “Lent’s Bright Sorrow,” beautifully written by an Orthodox priest, Father Paul Siewers.

Lent begins with forgiveness, as does Father Paul’s brilliant essay.

“That’s what Adam and Eve never did, ask forgiveness in the Garden,” he wrote at johnkassnews.com. “Giving forgiveness while seeking it becomes the first step of repentance in preparation for experiencing again the cosmic drama of the Crucifixion and Resurrection, to regain Paradise.”

Years before, in another life, we were reporters in Chicago. He was Alfred Siewers then, Urban Affairs writer at the Chicago Sun Times. Now he’s Father Paul, a priest at an Appalachian mission parish, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia which is locatedd in central Pennsylvania. He he is also a professor of literature at Bucknell University.

Our Lenten season ended at midnight on Holy Saturday, with the churches in total darkness, before the light is brought forth and the  candles are lit and the faithful sing the ancient hymn in every Orthodox church, Greek and Serbian, Russian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Romanian and many others.

Christos Anesti! Christ has risen from the dead!

It is a time of faith and friends and family. It is the time of hope. Christmas gets more media buzz because that holiday is also about the selling of merchandise, and even then media can’t help but show its distaste for Christianity. Mindless TV personalities sell Easter as a season for clothes, shoes and fancy hotel brunches. But Easter isn’t about that idiocy.

Easter also is not about chocolate bunnies and some creepy senile old man on the White House lawn selling himself. Easter is the celebration of the Resurrection of the Lord.

Some of celebrate by roasting whole lambs on spits, as my two sons and I plan to do on Sunday for our guests. They’ll do the work.

I’ve promised them that I’ll just sit quietly–offering meek advice and only if they really, really ask for it–and since readers demand it, a few paragraphs on the ancient rite of fire and lamb that is as old as civilization itself. But I will not wave my cane in anger, by cracky! My dear wife reminds me of what St. Clint (Eastwood) says: Don’t let the old man in!

So I will just sit there, a quiet, kindly, gentle man not butting in, not telling people what to do, unless they’re really screwing it up…Really…OK maybe I’ll butt in sometime, maybe offer a recipe or two. I promise to publish these recipes, with photographs of the lamb roasted, with mystical garlicy Muthawama from Lebanon, also known as Toum. I am rather ecumenical am I not?

We pick up a large tray of the Muthawama at Al Bawadi grill in Bridgeview. A few generous dollops are perfect with braised rice, with grilled pita, and spit roast lamb, drizzled with grilled lemons. And Betty’s Spanakopita, and also some araka (peas and artichokes). And for dessert we’ll have Galaktobouriko, and my favorite sweet that is absolutely perfect with strong coffee, the moist walnut cake known as Garithopita (THAT IS, IF ANYONE IN THIS HOUSE THAT I PAY FOR WILL ALLOW ME BUT A TINY SLICE!!!)

Sorry. That was that old old man yelling, not me.

For the tender lamb that we always get at Casey’s Market in Western Springs: insert rosemary, thyme, oregano, salt and fresh cracked pepper into the cavity of the lamb, and plenty of lemon. Insert slivers of garlic into the legs and breast. Do not use heaps of charcoal coal. Low and slow is the best. Do not put the lamb too close to the coals. A guy on youtube, The Real Greek Chef, does lamb the way we do it with my sons–although that’s what people call me, the real Greek Manga (Badass) Chef.

A small pile of live coals below the hindquarters, another small pile under the forequarters. Low and slow. I plan on a six or seven hour cook. Use rosemary sprigs to mop the roast. Drink ouzo. As you’re waiting, you might as well grill some sausage.

Not just any sausage. I grew up walking on sawdust in a family butcher shop. And so we don’t mind driving an hour and a half for sausage at Joseph’s Finest Meats on the Northwest Side of Chicago on Addison. Yes it’s a drive, but their sausage is as good as what my father made at our butcher shop in Gage Park. They make the best Italian sausage anywhere–and Greek sausage too.  And I married a Sicilian. When you know, you know.

As I’m sure you know  that I am a river to my people!!

At the end of this column, you’ll see a photo of a Sunday like this one from a few years ago. The boys are handsome. Betty is beautiful as always. The lamb is also quite beautiful. But not that fat soot-smudged guy in the chef’s jacket. He’s lost 65 pounds since then. We’ll post pictures and recipes later, when I recover from this cook.

It’s been a long, difficult year. But now it’s Easter, Anastasi, Christ’s Resurrection. Christos Anesti!

Western Christianity calls the Holiest day of the year Easter, a word of Germanic origin and from Eastre, the name of a forgotten pagan goddess associated with spring.

But we Greek Orthodox call it Pascha, after the Hebrew word Pesach, for Passover. Our Anastasi must wait until after He enters Jerusalem, and the people welcomed Him by waving palm fronds and laying them before him. He is the Redeemer, the Son of God known to many of us as Jesus Christ.

Jesus was all about love and forgiveness. He loved us so much that He came to be crucified for us, to redeem us of sin, to offer us a chance at eternal life if we believe in Him. He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, rising  on the third day according to the scriptures. And for the next 40 days we will greet each other with Christos Anesti! and the response is Alithos Anesti! (Truly He is Risen).

Forgive me but Lent is difficult. Our Orthodox church fathers designed it to be difficult. And the 40 days of Great Lent are always difficult, always a slog, and this year especially so, with so much hatred and antisemitic hatred directed at the Jewish people, with all the pro-terrorist, pro-Hamas activists controlling the Democrat Party and leftists disrupting commencement ceremonies at universities.

Our president, so weak and senile, is so afraid of losing votes in Michigan that he has equivocated time and time again, which only stokes the anger of Marxist pro-Hamas leftists to even greater frenzy. It all makes me so very angry. Perhaps it makes you angry as their political masters stoke and unleash rage based on racial identity for the upcoming November elections. They are like Marxist demons in a medieval story. But they all around us now, at our towns, on college campuses, everywhere. We feel the despair. Our anger and frustration walls us off from the joy and bliss of this Holiest of days.

Close your eyes and you can hear the Evil One laughing at us.

But please, open your eyes to see clearly. Turn away from the anger. Take a deep breath, look up and think of God and say my favorite of all prayers. It is simple but it works: Kyrie Elaison, Lord have mercy upon me, a sinner.

In Orthodox churches there are many icons but I think the most important is the one at the center of the dome looking down upon the worshipers. He is stern. He is resolute. He is not so very forgiving. This is the Jesus who will come to judge each and every one of us, the Jesus who will judge the living and the dead.

And all this stuff we think is so important will eventually burn away, the precious things and the precious people too, what we love, what we despise. All the Marxist rage and race hatred, all our ambitions, all our great buildings dedicated to what we think our ever-lasting governments, all our books and ideas, all our music, all the statues of political leaders whom we’ve deified as all-seeing gods, our churches, our temples, our perennial gardens, our landscapes and gardens. Our barns and mangers.

Our fishing boats. Our nets. Even our fig trees.

Everything will eventually be abandoned and burn away. It will all turn to dust. We know this. What will remains everlasting is the Holy Trinity. God the Father, God the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

But we pray that the end won’t come any time soon.

There is so much life around us. Weddings taking place, and babies being christened. Look around you now. New life. Everything is growing. In our backyard, the garden is ready, the shrubs have blossomed, the lilacs and so on. We’re waiting for the roses to pop along the fence.

We’re so lucky and blessed. Aren’t we all? And for all our differences, and competitions and strife, we are all connected. By blood, by nation, by the fact that we share this life together. These threads could be so thin as to be invisible. They could be thick and braided like a cable.

And that brings me back to Father Paul Siewers and his elegant Lenten column about forgiveness. Years ago, we’d lost touch, but then in 2007 there bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis that collapsed during rush hour, killing 13 people.

He wrote me with a column idea in a recommendation for a book. The book was Thornton Wilder’s 1927 Pulitzer novel “The Bridge of San Luis Rey.”

Wilder’s novel was about another bridge, and strangers who fell to their deaths in a bridge collapse in Peru in the 1700s. A Franciscan–Brother Juniper–was sent to chronicle the events. I suppose we could call Brother Juniper a Disaster Expert, the way we reporters would become experts in disaster, and seek meaning in them, wondering about the connections of lives lost in catastrophe, wondering about meaning, if any.

“I was just catching up with the news of the Minneapolis bridge collapse,” Siewers wrote to me years ago, “and was struck by a line that’s always haunted me from the end of Thornton Wilder’s ‘The Bridge of San Luis Rey.’ You may know it. The book is about a priest trying to find out why a bridge collapsed and killed several people.”

It is a great novel, but sadly as is true for most great novels they are often warped into bad movies.

In his note to me, Siewers, not yet an Orthodox priest but a professor of medieval literature, quoted a passage containing the thoughts of a character, an abbess who knew three of the strangers who perished:

“But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

As I wrote back then: I know I can’t possibly do justice to Wilder, or to you, by tossing that out in a newspaper column like this, abruptly, throwing it off my shoulder with a clumsy thunk into your Sunday morning.

But newspapers have destroyed themselves. And this is no longer a newspaper column, and newspapers too, have faded away, haven’t they? Who reads them?

What remains eventually when what we thought important is turned to dust is God eternal.

But on Sunday, on what I hope will be a peaceful and holy day, as the lamb turns silently, as I stare at it and lose myself in thought, as my family and our guests sit around talking, I’d like to remember that last line from Wilder’s novel:

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning

With love to all of you who’ve joined us on this journey.

Christos Anesti!!

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About the author: John Kass spent decades as a political writer and news columnist in Chicago working at a major metropolitan newspaper. He is co-host of The Chicago Way podcast. And he just loves his “No Chumbolone” hat, because johnkassnews.com is a “No Chumbolone” Zone where you can always get a cup of common sense.