Easter before Easter
March 29th, 2026 by G.
On the sweetness.
Though it is Palm Sunday, your congregation sings all the easter hymns with enthusiasm–He is Risen! The chapel is full. Two sets of children join to sing Gethsemane. Expiation, crucifixion, the Garden, the Cross, the Tomb, the Risen Lord, it is all one, and you are one. A half hour after the service, the chapel is still full of people talking.
E. C.
March 29, 2026
We had our Easter program today. I accompanied a young man whom I’d requested specifically to sing ‘Behold and See’, a short tenor solo from the Messiah.
We sang one of the new hymns — “Long Ago, Within a Garden’, and ‘Our Savior, Thou Who Wearest a Crown’.
It was really more of a Lenten service than Palm Sunday, except that each of the hymns and songs people had chosen somehow ended with victory and praise and an upward note.
Our community prepared a three night free performance of Lamb of God, by Rob Gardner. We went Friday, and almost didn’t get in — it was so packed that they opened every possible room with a TV in the Tabernacle so people could hear it! The hunger for the Good News is great.
John Mansfield
March 30, 2026
I have been calling it Mormon Easter. It is all the more explicit this year by doing the one-hour church, which it was announced last year would be done every year on Easter. We have added emphasis to Easter, but General Conference the first weekend of April holds precedence, and I like that.
In Maryland, the state where I live, Good Friday was a state holiday up until 1996, and Good Friday through Easter Monday remain public school holidays. That public emphasis actually makes it harder to do Easter stuff as a ward as the schools’ spring break is always the week leading up to Easter. Many families use the time for a vacation elsewhere, so choirs are thinned out. I am used to Mormon Easter with choirs singing anthems two weeks before Easter while they can still be pulled together. All the Church gets some of that this year.