At last there seems to be a shift in the national mood. We are being ‘unlocked’ and the sun has been shining. For the first time this week I met with a small group of friends in a garden. We drank tea, ate Danish pastries and chatted. For one friend, who has been shielding for a year, it was her first real venture out beyond her own house and garden. And today is Good Friday, followed on Sunday by Easter Day. I know that for many people Easter doesn’t have any huge significance beyond chocolate and an extended holiday so in some ways I hesitate to write about it in case I end up preaching a sermon! But hey ho, after last week’s dive into liminality perhaps you will accept a few thoughts about Easter as my own attempts to capture its meaning for me. I suspect I write this blog for me anyway!
I was born into a Methodist family. But when I was six years old my father decided that Methodism did not offer the spirituality for which he hungered and he effectively ‘converted’ to the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England. So this was the tradition in which I was raised. ‘More catholic than the Catholics’ was the phrase some used to describe this particular branch of the Church. It was rich in ritual and on Sunday Mass the incense would rise and the angelus bell ring, the priest would chant the Gospel, we would bow and kneel, confess our sins and sing to the glorious sound of the organ. I was steeped in it and it was full of meaning. More than Christmas, Easter was the highlight of the year. It would begin on Maundy Thursday with the creation of the Easter garden in front of one of the side altars. Good Friday saw the stations of the cross at mid-day followed by a silent three hour vigil. Statues were covered with cloths and the church was stark. Saturday night was a further vigil followed then by the glory of the celebration of the risen Christ on Easter Day. It was wonderful theatre in which we all engaged.
But when I left home at eighteen and dived into Psychology I began to question this tradition. With all its ritual it could be very dogmatic with strict rules about the keeping of holy days, the need for confession and quite a heavy focus on sin. Marrying a declared atheist did not make faith any easier and in my twenties, like so many others, I left it all behind with a sigh of relief. It really did not make sense any more. I could not say the creed. I doubted these historic events had actually happened and questioned much of what I had been taught. But the strangest thing is that whilst I might have left it, it never left me, and much of my life has been a quest to try and make sense of ‘it’.
I feel I am getting there! I think that perhaps the teachings of the original Jesus became lost, maybe buried, as the Church became an institution of power associated with rulers and governors down the ages. I suspect this was also the case with other religions. But I have discovered some modern day Christian teachers in what might be described as the ‘contemplative tradition’ who present in a way which sits so comfortably with all my explorations in transpersonal psychology and it is good to find the various ‘strands’ of my life pulling together to make a new kind of sense.
https://www.contemplativeoutreach.org/fr-thomas-keating/
So for me the Easter message is not about a body coming back to life but rather that suffering can be transformed and that sometimes it is the suffering which leads to new and deeper understandings, not from the head, but from the heart. It is not about life after death or hope in some future salvation but about being able to engage with all the colours of this life her and now, of the possibility of being born into a different way of being here. It is about the idea that there is a loving presence which pervades all creation which can be known now, in this life, and the knowing of which gives life meaning and purpose. Perhaps resurrection is the great ‘unlocking’. Happy Easter!
(Perhaps I should have been a priest!! )
PS. Dad I am thinking of you.
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