“At Eastertime the exploration of the extraordinary in the ordinary, of the boundless in the limited, of freedom in apparent regulation, of the personal in the midst of the commercial, of the quirky in the uniform, all disclose the value of each human life in the face of the persistent efforts to homogenise and cheapen it,” writes ANDY HAMILTON SJ in his reflection this Easter.
This year Easter comes at a good time. We have seen the incapacity of human beings to choose peace over war, the good of the whole community over private gain, the conditions of a liveable and beautiful world over a charred relic, and courage to change over the indolence of doing nothing. Although few Australians may believe the Christian claim that Jesus rose from the dead, the celebration of Easter both in its religious and its secular forms speaks to our current discontents. It offers hope.
The most notable feature of the Easter stories in the Christian Gospels is the contrast between the ordinariness of their setting and the richness of the humanity and of the world that they reveal. A dark burial place with the grief associated it becomes at sunrise a garden and a place of exuberant joy. Rooms in which people huddle silently, haunted by absence and living in fear of arrest and torture, become places of presence, of community, and launching places for leaving and engaging with the world. A barren night’s fishing at sea becomes a massive haul and breakfast around a fire, leading to a commissioning. The ordinary situations and relationships are not changed but are illuminated in a way that sparks hope and engagement with the world.
This pattern is also embodied in the history of the Christian celebration of Easter and in the secular rituals that survive in our own society. From its initial focus in Lent on individual selfishness and its large, disastrous communal consequences, the Christian liturgy turns to the rejection and execution of Jesus that seemed to destroy hope. It concludes at Easter with the joy of Christ’s rising and the revelation of a love that overcame death and opened to hope.
The high hope of Easter found expression in the ordinary rituals of life. In Europe it drew on the change from winter to the green growth of spring. It also included special Easter treats of food and drink, gifts from squires to the leasehold farmers and poor tenants, lively songs, and music, Easter plays of celebration, dancing and leisure. This creative human space enacted the high value of each human life that was under threat by conflicts, injustice, and the pressures of daily living. It represented a hope beyond all the forces that ate away at it and an invitation to build a better world.
Moralists sometimes deplored the anarchic aspects of fairs and celebration which parodied the rulers of church and state, and the social discrimination based on wealth and class, and which encouraged financial and sexual recklessness. Even the excess, however, expressed a human aspiration for life beyond its regulated limits. It encouraged hope.
The Australian secular celebration of Easter also opens out to a hope in the face of all the threats to humanity embodied in recent national and international actions and trends. The ordinariness of special Easter foods and meals, of the extended family gatherings that accompany it and of the travel involved in them, not to mention the hope associated with the new football season, all emphasise values higher than the economic and the corporate forces that try to colonise the festival. It makes intolerable the new serfdom imposed by debt, by wages inadequate to provide security, by the uncertain employment needed to pay off debt, and by the refusal of governments to shape a more just society.
At Eastertime the exploration of the extraordinary in the ordinary, of the boundless in the limited, of freedom in apparent regulation, of the personal in the midst of the commercial, of the quirky in the uniform, all disclose the value of each human life in the face of the persistent efforts to homogenise and cheapen it. No matter how effectively reductive versions of humanity dominate and destroy human possibilities, the experience that human life is fascinating in its spontaneity and diversity grounds hope that our shared humanity is worth celebrating.
The story which Christians tell of Easter is of people filled with hope who have faced total loss and have found life that flows into the simple gestures of humanity and respect for all human beings. It is not confined to Christians.
