April 7, 2012

Glynn Cardy

The Great Vigil of Easter

Easter doesn’t all piece together. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle but with extra and missing bits that don’t match to provide a clear picture. There are superfluous pieces, and there are gaping holes. 

It’s what you get when you take ancient fertility rites marking the start of spring, merge them with the execution of a political-religious rebel and its aftermath, then transplant both to these Southern Isles. The Goddess Eostre, Jesus, and the end of summer are mixed together. The occasion is marked with cards, choirs, chocolate, crosses, church-going, and bunnies. 

It’s an intriguing complicated puzzle. There are holes, like that tomb, which defy ready explanation. There are traditions, like the bunny, that ridicule the somber and serious. There are customs, like egg painting, that can produce intricate beauty. There is the sobering torture and death commemoration, with thorns, nails, and crosses. There is the hopeful affirmation of life renewed, with flowers, eggs, and feasting. 

Then there is the music. I met this musician at a party. “At Easter,” he said, “I need to sing. So I look for a church where I can join the choir and sing”. That was the alpha and omega of his Easter theology and his church-going. There wasn’t anything more to be said. Words got in the way of his faith.

Biblical scholars often make the mistake of thinking that the puzzle of Easter is about something that happened around 33 C.E. Did the dead Jesus come back to life? And if so what was that ‘life’? Easter for them is making sense of a historical event.

Easter however is both biblical and beyond biblical. It is multi-dimensional. It touches on how we relate to one another. It touches on how we walk with suffering and seek to transform it. It touches on sacred mystical experiences beyond the power of words and exactitude and dogma.

One Easter I was standing on an English tump. The tump being Neolithic was a very old piece of ‘earthitecture’. Awaiting the dawn in the freezing cold, this rural scene was very beautiful.

The local parish had this tradition of traipsing across a field, climbing the tump in the dark, celebrating the first Mass of Easter, then going to a parishioner’s home for a ripper of a breakfast. 

The local witches also joined in, as did a number of curious heathens. The pivotal part of the liturgy was not the raising of the communion, the chanting, or the readings. It was the dawn. The dawn trumped everything. The dawn swept all up into her embrace: priests, parishioners, liturgy, witches, and wonderers.

It felt like we were part of something that was before but embraced Jesus, that was ancient but current, that was simple and yet profound. Kind of like God.

The Easter puzzle is about God. That’s why there are holes and bits that don’t fit. Of course some people’s God all neatly fits together and there’s no place for extras. For others though the Easter God is in the discomfit of the relationship between death and life, between what is passing away and what is coming into being, between letting go and holding on. 

This puzzle unfortunately doesn’t come closer to being understood let alone solved by talking about it. Like with music, to rationalize it is to risk losing it. Like with the dawn, one can’t explain its sacredness. Similarly with love. Similarly with God. Maybe we lost something of God when the first theological treatise was written?

For isn’t faith really seven verbs: Feel, love, include, be, do, listen, and laugh. The puzzle made simple. Of course the holes and the extras still remain. There’s plenty of room in God for all the misfits, mislaid ideas, and mad notions not yet thought.