I have a confession.

I've confessed it before, but I keep doing it so maybe I need to confess again.

At Christmas, I go high church. Smells and bells. Gold vestments and beeswax candles. Chant that has been climbing cathedral walls since the ninth century. Iconostasis. Incense. Silence that weighs something. Give me the Eastern Orthodox liturgy in all its ancient, unhurried, unfurled glory. At Christmas, I want to cerebrate — to think, to adore, to ponder, to stand at the edge of the Incarnation and feel its cold-starlight weight.

But come Easter — give me the Pentecostals.

Hands up. Feet moving. Maybe not a tambourine that means it., but at least a choir that doesn't wait for permission. The kind of singing that makes the walls sweat and the skeptics in the back row start tapping a foot they can't quite keep still. At Easter, I don't want to think about the Resurrection — I want to celebrate it. I want it in my body before it gets to my brain.

I first confessed this paradox in my 2000 book Postmodern Pilgrims. Twenty-six years later, I've only gotten more liturgically schizophrenic.

And I've stopped apologizing for it.

Because maybe the faith itself is paradoxical. Christmas asks us to be still and know. To kneel in the dark and receive a mystery we cannot manufacture. Its proper register is awe — hushed, kneeling, Magi-humbled. The Word made flesh enters the world in silence, in a borrowed room, while the empire sleeps.

But Easter? Easter is not a mystery to be received. It is an earthquake to be survived. The tomb doesn't quietly unlock — it ruptures. The grave doesn't gently release — it loses. Death doesn't gracefully concede — it is routed, humiliated, stripped of its last argument.

In my mind, you don't meet the Risen Christ with folded hands and a measured homily. You meet the Risen, Rising, Reigning, Returning Christ running, weeping, disbelieving your own eyes, shouting his name into the morning like a question that just became an answer.

The women at the tomb weren't solemn. They were terrified and overjoyed simultaneously — a combination the human nervous system isn't built for. The disciples on the Emmaus road didn't feel their hearts "slightly warmed." They burned. Peter didn't wade quietly ashore at Galilee. He jumped.

So yes. I'll take my Christmas with incense and my Easter with noise. I'll genuflect in December and shout in April. I'll cerebrate the Nativity and celebrate the Resurrection. And if that makes me a liturgical contradiction — good. The faith has always been wider than any single tradition's wingspan.

Happy Easter.